The Chanel Cruise 2024/25 collection offered scuba shoes instead of ballet flats

The Chanel Cruise 2024/25 recently landed in New Delhi at Stir Gallery, Chattarpur. There were cocktails, champagne, coin-sized canapes, live music, and around 20 mannequins displaying looks from the collection that was originally showcased earlier this year in the French seaside city of Marseille.

Like everything the brand does, there were multiple layers of meaning hidden amongst the clothes. For starters, the original location of the presentation, which would have delighted architecture buffs. The Cruise show this year took place on the concrete rooftops of Cité Radieuse, a 337-apartment ‘vertical community’ that was built between 1947 and 1952. Looking runway images, you might mistake the venue for another masterpiece of modernist architecture, the High Court of Chandigarh, with its similarly distinctive emphasis on bare concrete, colour-blocked façade, and curved edges. Both sites are the brainchild of one man, the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, or Charles-Edouard Jeanneret; a towering figure in architecture and city planning whose radical vision of urban life can be viewed across France but also in cities like Tokyo, Moscow, Ahmedabad, and the Punjabi capital. As the mayor of Marseille, Benoît Payan, told The Guardian about the choice of venue, “Gabrielle Chanel revolutionised the way women dressed, and Le Corbusier the way people live. So it fits completely.”

Apart from the choice of venue there were other elements of Le Corbusier’s work that trickled into the French house’s water sports-themed collection. Look 34, a tweed twin set of a cropped jacket and a slim mid-length pencil skirt, was embroidered with a circuit board-like pattern in primary colours that echoed the building’s windows. Multiple looks featured playful, childlike doodles of fish that were based on Le Corbusier’s sketches. The same prints were also rendered as embroideries, each fish stamped with the house’s signature double C. Both the mod-style dresses, with their high collars and short hemlines, as well as the longline jackets, with their dropped waists and rows of big buttons, echoed the fashions of the late 1950s that favoured a streamlined, more structured style—similar to the architecture of that period.

Beyond all the architecture, former Chanel creative director Virginie Viard was inspired by the city of Marseille itself. “The sun, architecture, music, and dance, and Marseille also has a very strong sense of freedom. I was inspired by the codes of lifestyle, of everyday life and all the things that invite movement. The sea and the wind made me want to play with wetsuits,” she said in a press note. That mood is evident in the campaign imagery by photographer Jamie Hawkesworth and also in the clothes. There was a sportiness throughout that made sense because although the collection is in stores now, in time for vacation season, the show was held a few months before the start of the Paris Olympics, in March 2024 and the Olympic flame was due to pass through the coastal city. The athleticism came through in the use of neoprene-like jersey, the scuba shoe-like ballet flats (already a must-buy for when warmer weather comes around), in silhouettes like cycling shorts, one-piece swimsuits, and the ribbed, round-neck t-shirts and hoodies that were layered under beach-ready crochet knits and jackets, the pockets embroidered with squares that looked like swimming pool tiles.

It was a collection about freedom—to wear your classic tweed jacket with micro-mini shorts, to swap heavy winter layers for lightweight cotton poplin skirts, or perhaps even freedom for Chanel. As the brand tackles the question of who will take the lead at the house post the exit of Viard, maybe it is allowing itself the liberty to rethink what it might look like in the future.