Gabrielle had already established herself as a milliner in Paris and opened a boutique in Deauville, but it was Biarritz where she built her first full couture house. The timing didn’t make for a couture house to rise in glory — Europe was in the middle of the First World War — but Biarritz, as a resort town on the Atlantic coast of southwestern France, had drawn royalty, artists, and European elites who continued to gather on the Basque coast. Gabrielle understood exactly who her clients were and went to meet them there.

At its peak, the Villa de Larralde atelier employed up to 60 seamstresses, working in a building that Gabrielle owned  until 1923. What she made there was the first statement for what Chanel Cruise would become: that clothing could be about freedom and glamour, shaped entirely by where you were and the life you were living there, rather than by the rigid codes Paris insisted upon.

Her relationship with Paris versus Biarritz is, to me, a more interesting conversation about seasonality than the one Alessandro Michele was having when he abolished the fashion calendar at Gucci. Michele’s point was about irrelevance. Chanel’s relationship with the coast is about something different, about creative freedom and the nuance of what we wear, influenced entirely by location. Where Paris was social uniformity, class and meeting standards, Biarritz meant dressing for a life that felt vibrant and romantic

Karl Lagerfeld understood the brief. Over his 36 years at Chanel, he used the cruise format to take the house somewhere new each time, staging shows in Havana, Seoul, Dubai, along the Great Wall of China. They were celebrity-fuelled bonanzas that showed their audience Chanel belonged anywhere, no matter how far you travelled.