Chanel Restages Matthieu Blazy's Biarritz Cruise Collection in Sydney, Its First Runway Show in Australia

Chanel staged its first runway show in Australia on Thursday, November 5. The house brought Matthieu Blazy's Cruise 2026/27 collection, his first Cruise for Chanel, to Sydney six months after it opened in Biarritz on April 28, and posted 15 photos from the Sydney show that evening. Chanel announced the trip in June; the French-Australian Chamber of Commerce, citing Chanel's press kit, called it the house's first runway show in Australia, and Marie Claire Australia said no French luxury house had staged a show of this kind there.

It's a restaging, not a new collection. Chanel ties it to Biarritz, the seaside town where, in the house's telling, Gabrielle Chanel set up her first couture house, and to clothes made to move between town and beach. The Sydney photos bear that out: swim caps with the interlocking Cs, a black jacket trimmed in red, yellow and white starfish, cream knits edged in red, nautical black-and-white stripes, crochet and sequins.

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Chanel hasn't named the venue or the guests on its own channels, so we're leaving those out until it does. In a teaser Chanel released the day before the show, Marie Claire Australia reports, the Australian models Latahlia Hickling, Julia Nobis and Josephen Akuei appear on a shoreline.

Why Sydney

The move fits a market Chanel has been building. Its biggest Australian boutique, on Sydney's Market Street in a building David Jones used to occupy, opened in 2025, and the chamber's summary of the press kit has Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel's president of fashion, saying it is time for the house to speed up its growth in Australia. Chanel's own posts this week, a series of photographs of the collection by Alec Soth, say it will be in boutiques soon.

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Our read

Taking a show on the road is how a house courts a market it wants to grow, and the timing says as much. Blazy's Cruise collection has already had its moment, Chanel's Alec Soth photos of it are out and the clothes are about to land in stores, so Sydney is less a fashion show than a launch event for Australian clients, a month before summer. It also keeps Blazy's first Cruise in front of clients a month after his Spring 2027 show at the Grand Palais moved the conversation on to next year.