A cruise collection is designed to travel, and Chanel's latest has now travelled about as far from home as it can. On Thursday 5 November the house staged its first runway presentation in Australia, a repeat of Matthieu Blazy's debut cruise collection, first shown in Biarritz in April, at The Cutaway, the cavernous space beneath Barangaroo Reserve on Sydney Harbour.
WWD counted 1,300 guests across two shows, at 2.30pm and 6pm, including 800 Chanel clients, a day before the collection was due in stores. House ambassadors Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie attended alongside Kylie Minogue, Baz Luhrmann and Joel Edgerton. Marie Claire Australia described the occasion as a watershed for the local industry, noting that no other luxury house had staged a show of this scale in the country.
A collection born in Biarritz
The collection's starting point is Biarritz, the resort town on France's Basque coast where Gabrielle Chanel established a couture house in 1915. Blazy first showed it there on 28 April at the Art Deco Casino Municipal, with a set inspired by that first maison de couture, WWD reports. Chanel describes the collection as "exploring the founding elements of the House": the little black dress, the double C and the striped sailor top, "along with other maritime inspirations".
Chanel chose not to reinvent the staging for Sydney. It recreated the Biarritz decor, with mirrored walls and ceilings, a plush beige carpet and gilded armchairs shipped from France, WWD notes. FashionNetwork describes five interconnected Art Deco-inspired rooms in black and beige, designed to evoke Gabrielle Chanel's apartment at 31 Rue Cambon in Paris. What changed was the setting around them: the site's raw sandstone walls, and ceramic vessels by Damion Fuller, a ceramicist and surfer from the north coast of New South Wales, according to Marie Claire Australia. Blazy himself was not expected to make the trip, The Australian Financial Review reported ahead of the show.
The clothes
Australian model Julia Nobis opened in a black drop-waist dress with a plunging V-neck. From there, as ELLE Australia put it, the collection "oscillated between practical and playful". On the practical side were knitted tops and skirts with the double C, silk shirts, pleated skirts, relaxed tailoring, striped cotton pullovers and a ribbed cotton workwear coat. The playful side was mostly about craft. An apparently simple double-denim look was in fact entirely embroidered with sequins. A classic skirt suit swapped tweed for cotton crochet trimmed with knitted flowers, and long pleated silk skirts were puffed out with underskirts of raffia.
The accessories carried the seaside theme furthest: shell-shaped earrings, knitted swim caps with fin-like crests, chilli pendants, a maxi Flap Bag in raffia embroidered with fish, and what WWD called "the viral barefoot heel caps and supersize beach tote". Marie Claire Australia suggests the finned caps may nod to Gabrielle Chanel's costumes for Le Train Bleu, the 1924 ballet about fashionable seaside leisure. The finale was a pair of mermaid-inspired looks. The last, worn by Nobis, had a fishtail hem and, by Marie Claire's count, more than 126,000 iridescent heart-shaped sequins in blues and greens.
An Australian cast
The local casting gave the restaging its own character. Alongside runway veterans including Gemma Ward, Catherine McNeil and Emma Balfour, WWD counted five Indigenous Australian models: Latahlia Hickling, Tatyana Perry, Tarlisa Gaykamangu, Cindy Rostron and Charlee Fraser. Blazy has a track record here. He cast Gaykamangu, a Yolngu model, in Bottega Veneta's fall 2023 show, and Hickling and Perry in his spring 2026 debut for Chanel. Hickling has since appeared in the spring 2026 campaign.
"I'm really impressed by how Chanel have shown up in Australia," Liandra Gaykamangu, a Yolngu designer, co-founder of the First Nations-led platform Lundu and Tarlisa's aunt, told WWD. "To be honest, it's actually a lot more than we see from many Australian brands."
Why Australia, and why now
The business case was set out by Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel's president of fashion. "We knew for the past two, three years that Sydney, Australia, became a priority for us," he told WWD on the eve of the shows. "We are in a kind of new step, where now we want to offer the best of the brand to our clients." The Biarritz collection, he said, felt right for "a promising market, like Australia, because that will help us to engage". The AFR put it more bluntly: the show was less about Blazy than about the many local Very Important Clients Chanel wants to impress. ELLE Australia reports that clients were invited from across the country and from Asia.
The retail footprint has been built up ahead of the visit. Chanel opened its first Australian boutique in Sydney in 1989, WWD notes. It now has eight stand-alone stores in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, plus 14 Fragrance & Beauty boutiques. These include a new two-storey flagship on Sydney's Market Street and a pop-up at the refurbished Chatswood Chase ahead of a permanent store due in 2028. Pavlovsky also pointed to the rebuilt Flinders Lane boutique in Melbourne, which has a new facade and an added floor, as "a big step".
The wider wealth picture helps explain the interest. WWD cites the UBS 2026 Global Wealth Report, which counts 1.6 million US-dollar millionaires in Australia and ranks the country third for median wealth, after Luxembourg and Belgium. By value, as ELLE Australia notes, the Australian luxury market is small next to its Asian and Middle Eastern counterparts. But its sun-and-sea style suits a cruise collection, and its clients can be won in person.
What it means
Replica shows are not new for Chanel. What made this one notable is the destination and the level of investment: two full shows, a shipped-in set, a largely local cast and an after-party with a performance by Kylie Minogue. It shows how seriously the house now takes Australia. "It's a real coming-of-age thing, I think," Luhrmann told WWD. For Chanel, the measure of success will be less the applause in Barangaroo than the orders that follow, and how its expanded boutiques perform over the next few seasons. The collection was due in stores the day after the show.
Featured image: Qwerty123M, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped for this page; the cropped version is shared under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
