Chanel turns Villa d’Este into a mental space and cinematic vision: a place where elegance floats, the body dissolves into the landscape, and luxury becomes the phenomenology of presence
There is a point, on Lake Como, where time does not flow: it floats. The new CHANEL Cruise 2025/26 collection inhabits this rarefied space, between the elegant silence of magnolias and the golden reflections of a sunset on the water’s surface. Villa d’Este, a place of Renaissance dreams and auteur cinema, becomes the ideal stage for a narrative that is not just fashion, but the aesthetics of appearance. A refuge for the soul, where matter takes the form of a luxurious memory.
Here, dressing is not a function but an evocation: garments as apparitions, as memories of a summer that perhaps never existed, except in the light of a film by Sofia Coppola. The director – muse among muses – signs the visual atmosphere of the preview, capturing that same “insouciance” that lingers in the rooms and gardens of the villa. A light elegance, barely whispered, between fluttering taffetas, ethereal tweeds, and disco-like reflections that evoke a private party by the lake, with light filtered through closed shutters and notes bouncing off ancient walls.
This is not a collection; it is a theory in clothes. Here, elegance is not “style” but a political act: the economy of detail, the articulation of silence, the choice to not shout in a world that screams. Luxury is not ostentation, but subtraction: slowing down, choosing, touching. It is this radical simplicity that gives value. The striped cardigan becomes a liquid surface, the tied scarves a gesture of autonomy, the white trousers a form of resistance to haste.
Each silhouette evokes not so much a character, but a condition: the icon who dances barefoot, the postmodern flâneuse, the diva who chooses transparency as a power strategy. There is no nostalgia, but reconfiguration. The damask suits, the deconstructed lamé, the embroidery alluding to the Italian garden are not adornment, but mnemonic architectures. They move between Visconti and Blade Runner, between Villa d’Este and a utopian nightclub where time is just a backdrop to be crossed.
In this space, CHANEL performs an almost curatorial operation: it takes heritage and deconstructs it, refracting it into new codes. Tweed is no longer a material, but a grammar. White is not a color, but an attitude. Long gloves, dark glasses, monumental bags are elements of a visual language that suggests rather than declares. They do not communicate “fashion,” but a world.
On a systemic level, the show raises fundamental questions about the role of the maison in the 21st century. In a context where fashion grapples with AI, excess, and the climate crisis, CHANEL responds not with a manifesto, but with an image that resists wear and tear: slowness as an aesthetic algorithm, femininity as a shifting field of possibilities, desire as a form of thought. The body is no longer a showcase, but a threshold.
