The Curious Case of the Cruise Collection

Regardless of the weather, fashion has two guaranteed seasons: spring and fall. See one yearly cycle all the way through, and you’ve more or less seen them all — florals (groundbreaking!) and bright colors for spring/summer, structured jackets, and a dark color palette for fall/winter. So too, the backdrop of each season remains remarkably consistent when the industry’s most powerful and best-dressed flock to major cities around the world to see models walk the same stark runways. As any insider will tell you, Fashion Weeks can get monotonous. There is, however, one notable exception: cruise.

This mercurial annual collection drop (and the fashion events that come along with it) is deliciously unpredictable. Unlike the year’s two major reveals, not every brand does a cruise collection, and many skip the full-on show. Those that do are usually older, established luxury brands — Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Moschino, Gucci — and they go all-in.

The cornerstone of the cruise collection is a curious blend of wearable art and wild spectacle, designed to fill the gap between spring and summer with vacation-ready party wear. Launched in some of the world's most fantastical locations, brands rent out palaces, hire fire dancers, and dock fully functional ocean liners to serve as backdrops for their collections.

Debuting in May and usually shoppable in time for the holidays, cruise (also styled as "resort") has been escapism-adjacent since the beginning. The concept started with Gabrielle “Coco" Chanel, who, in 1919, presented a collection of lightweight womenswear suitable for sunny getaways to distant locales. The show, put on in Paris, shocked the industry with its seasonless-ness, but also delighted the jet-set crowd in Europe and the States. After all, what's not to love about a collection that's equal parts party and vacation? 

Designer imaginations run wild, and models walk runways specifically made for cruise collections shows. The lucky few editors, buyers, and influencers invited to watch the spectacle in person are flown to each far-flung location to do so. If there’s any magic left in the fashion industry, it lives in the cruise collection, and has for almost 100 years. 

The clothes themselves, unencumbered by practicality or the weather (remember, these collections cater to tropical, ski, and holiday party dressing), often show what happens when prestige fashion lets its hair down: Dresses explode with sequins, and heritage touchstones like Chanel’s eponymous tweed become cotton candy fever dream bikinis.

In the past decade, designers have started to take the idea of a getaway more literally, developing cruise collections that are vacations unto themselves. In 2014, Karl Lagerfeld had an island built in Dubai as a backdrop for Chanel’s show. In 2018, the cruise runway for Chanel was a 148-foot literal cruise ship built inside the Grand Palais in Paris. The year before that? Karl Lagerfeld couldn't find a venue in Greece he liked, so he reconstructed the Temple of Poseidon in Paris.

Each year, the ante is upped as designers compete — not necessarily with one another, but with the fantasies they’ve built in years past. Many fashion houses, Chanel notwithstanding, iterate on a particularly extravagant mood or theme. Louis Vuitton, somewhat new to the cruise collection game, held its first cruise runway show at the Palace Square in Monaco, followed by Palm Springs in 2016, before establishing a pattern of showing at modern art museums. Since then, they've debuted at the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as well as museums in Kyoto, Japan, and the South of France. 

Dior, for its part, favors palaces and grand arenas (Palais Bulles, Blenheim's Palace, the Piazza del Duomo, and the Panathenaic Stadium), while Gucci, under Alessandro Michele, opted for expansive spaces more readily available to the public: West 22nd Street in Manhattan, Westminster Abbey, Promenade Des Alyscamps. 

Against such magnificent backdrops, clothes have to shout to be heard, and most cruise collections are some of the loudest (or most experimental) expressions of their designers’ voices. Clothing that started as lightweight separates, suitable for poolside lounging, evolved into dramatically imaginative looks, from technicolor swimwear to jewel-encrusted mini skirts and hand-embroidered sheer jackets dripping in flowers. 

Cruise, at its best, can be pure fantasy. Neon signs served as the glittering backdrop for Moschino’s 2018 cruise collection, which sent dazzling showgirl costumes down the runway. Designer Jeremy Scott’s penchant for blending pop culture, kitsch, and Americana turned the volume all the way up to 11. And yet, for every swimsuit festooned with life-size doves, there was a simple high-cut one-piece with a single graphic print (worn by Hailey Bieber, of course). The moment encapsulated another curious element of cruise collections: surprisingly functional pieces, like swimwear, often pop up between and amidst other fanciful creations.

While these collections create space for designers to throw everything they’ve got into an escapist spectacle, the looks on the runway aren’t all just for show, so to speak. You can still spot tops, dresses, and skirts that are more ready to wear than what you’d see in an actual ready-to-wear collection. The reasoning is simple: Not all devoted shoppers live in places where the heavy outerwear and lush layers of fall/winter collection are viable options. The lighter-weight fabrics and ‘fits in cruise collections aren’t just playful. They’re profitable. In fact, Chanel's President of Fashion once reported that, in a single year, its cruise collection was responsible for 30% of its total revenue.

By 2019, cruise collections reached a fever pitch. Models in Dior wore ethereal gowns and walked backlit by massive bonfires outside the El Badi Palace in Marrakesh, Morocco. Louis Vuitton’s models strutted through JFK airport in glittering crop tops that looked like futuristic robot armor. During the Gucci show in Musei Capitolini, Rome, the vibe was ‘70s opulence, sequined, metallic, gender-bending, and adorned with the kinds of headdresses, crowns, and bangles you might see on gladiator royalty. The question on the mind of many folks in fashion was simply, how are they going to top this?

Then, a pandemic happened, and fashion came to a standstill. In 2021, as the world began slowly turning again, the landscape of the industry looked different. Chanel, Gucci, Armani, Prada, and Versace all canceled or postponed their cruise shows, with some fashion houses opting to shutter the concept altogether. Meanwhile, others are rethinking the very spectacle that made this entry on the fashion calendar so exciting.

With the climate crisis more front of mind than ever before, traveling for the sake of watching a runway show — the very heart of the modern cruise collection — has come under scrutiny. There may come a time when editors and influencers aren’t jetted off to see the spectacle of a cruise collection come to life.

This year at least, cruise collections have shown glimmers of their former grandeur. Outside of Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul, South Korea, models walked the runway for Gucci in gauzy dresses that would have been fully sheer in places were it not for the scuba suits worn underneath. On Isola Bella, an island on Italy’s Lake Maggiore, models at Louis Vuitton wore pastel gowns shaped with hoop skirts at the hems, giving them the look of decadent French pastries, with bejeweled jackets in the shape and gleam of carapaces. Collections presented in Mumbai, India, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Mexico City, Mexico, captured the escapism and daring imagination of years past.

The spectacle is never far off, but even so, the most recent iteration of cruise slipped in a few practical moments, too. At the Alberta Ferretti Resort 2024 show, you’d be forgiven for missing the very wearable slip dresses that went down the runway under hooded, full-length sequined capes. Similarly, Gucci’s gauzy, sheer dresses could easily be worn to a dinner party — even if the models were decked out in less-than-practical scuba suits underneath. But it’s this juxtaposition, marketable and magnificent, that makes cruise collections such a joy to watch.

At its core, cruise is fashion at its most decadent. While it does serve a practical purpose, its essential nature is to delight and transport us. How that journey and joy will look in years to come is still up for debate, but for now, it seems like collections will remain dreamily, passionately curious one-offs with dramatic styling and explosive showmanship.