Take a timeless palace – the Villa d’Este, an outdated pearl of globalised luxury, frozen in the cliché of Italian refinement. Add a few well-trimmed hydrangeas, golden light falling on the tranquil waters of Lake Como, and a handful of fashion journalists already fed up with corporate prose. Bring in the tutelary shadow of Visconti, summon the graceful ghost of Romy Schneider draped in Gabrielle-era Chanel, and inject a pinch of cinematic nostalgia. Shake it all up with a bit of pre-digested storytelling, and you get… the Chanel Croisière 2026 fashion show.
Yes, Chanel without a designer. A house that has become an empty tweed hull, whose engine now runs on heritage inertia and penny notes. Artistic direction? A studio team. Genius? Shared. The vision? PowerPoint. It’s no longer a brand, it’s an administration of good taste, managed by Bruno Pavlova – whose name alone evokes an overly sweet pastry – all smiles in front of the cameras, explaining docently that Villa d’Este is ‘the link between Chanel and the cinema’. It was a daring move.
Nature was splendid, the sun benevolent, and the models glided across the marble like holograms of automatic elegance. Fashion here is self-celebrating in a closed loop, between floating jet-setters and influencers on Lexomil. Meanwhile, the clothes themselves continue to be mass-produced, flown out, consumed in an Instagram story, then forgotten – their carbon footprint hidden under a veil of muslin.
A cruise fashion show, then: the name alone is enough to make a climatologist cringe. A cruise, as if we were still sailing guilt-free through a world of fire and plastic. A cruise, as if travel had not become obscene. Cruising, but with no destination except that of freewheeling luxury marketing.
There are still dresses. Pretty, no doubt. Harmless, certainly. And completely devoid of soul, as if Chanel had emptied its bottles and kept only the label.
So, Chanel at Lake Como? It’s a marketing operation, nicely wrapped up in heritage and cinema, that smells of mothballs and algorithms. Fashion should be an avant-garde, not a postcard. But by dint of parading in circles in dreamy places, it has ended up becoming an elegant sleepwalker, but without a conscience.
FM