From Lake Como to the Little Red Dot: Chanel Cruise 2025/26 Brings Cinematic Ease to Singapore

How does a Chanel woman pack for a holiday escape? With airy tweed softened by sun, chiffon corsages pinned with effortless precision, and necklaces that move like wind chimes. Her version of lightness isn’t minimal it’s intentional. Boxy culottes that glide, lamé that captures the sun like a lens flare, and silhouettes that speak in quiet luxury. She travels the way she dresses: with ease, elegance, and a touch of nonchalant glamour.

That mood defined Chanel Cruise 2025/26, unveiled at the legendary Villa d’Este on the shores of Lake Como. The opening look Danish model Ida Heiner stepping through the hotel lobby in a white bathrobe-inspired tweed suit felt like a scene from her morning ritual. An intimate moment that set the tone for the show: refined, cinematic, and impossibly relaxed.

Sofia Coppola, a long-standing friend of the house, deepened the narrative with a short film that served as the collection’s emotional spine. Through her lens, Chanel’s world unfolded in quiet vignettes: sunlight drifting across curtains, lake reflections shimmering like liquid gold, windows framing the sky in soft gradients. Ida Heiner became the quintessential Coppola muse a woman suspended somewhere between dream and daybreak.

Chanel’s history with Lake Como runs deeper than a venue selection. Gabrielle Chanel frequented the region in the 1930s, often visiting her friend, filmmaker Luchino Visconti. Their creative dialogue led her to design costumes for Boccaccio ’70, weaving cinema and couture into the Maison’s DNA. Showing Cruise here felt like returning to a chapter already written, yet ready for reimagining.

The palette mirrored Villa d’Este’s lush surroundings: ochre, lilac, strawberry, peach, and lake-washed blues. Movement played a starring role a striped lamé cape that floated with the breeze, a gold lurex trouser suit that gleamed like sunlight on water, and a pink halter paired with wide-leg trousers traced with rhinestones and pearls. The finale a sweeping ivory gown styled with opera gloves was a love letter to Old Hollywood’s golden age.

Textures amplified the storytelling: luminous tweeds, crochet, raffia, and glistening lamé suggested days spent drifting between land and lake. Chanel’s timeless signatures pearls, chains, tweed returned with new softness, including fresh interpretations of the Chanel 25 bag, shaped for a warm-weather escape.

On 4 November, Chanel will bring this Cruise collection to Singapore, marking the house’s second major showcase in the city. The first Karl Lagerfeld’s iconic Cruise 2014 show transformed Dempsey’s Loewen Cluster into a cinematic dreamscape. Lagerfeld stayed at Raffles Hotel, turning its historic gardens into the film set for the collection. A memory still embedded in Singapore’s fashion folklore.

This time, what began in the stillness of an Italian lake will meet the vibrancy of the equatorial sun. The same silhouettes will shine differently in Singapore’s tropical light another chapter in a vacation story that keeps unfolding.

Chanel’s Cruise 2025/26 isn’t just a collection.
It’s a journey quietly glamorous, endlessly cinematic, and ready to travel.

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