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A cruise show on a boardwalk snaking along the Venice Lido with the sun about to set, gentle waves rolling in, and a whisper of a breeze to make sinuous shapes flutter in movement…it couldn’t have been a more poetic or, given the times, more uniquely audacious Chanel moment. “I wanted to reinvent the mystique,” said Karl Lagerfeld, talking about locating the collection in one of Coco Chanel’s favorite summer haunts—she visited Venice for almost ten years beginning in 1919 and met Diaghilev here. But Lagerfeld might also have been speaking about reinstating the long-lost leisurely sensation of a fashion show as an exceptional one-off experience. The 350 guests reclining on sun beds in the famous white tented cabanas certainly felt privileged to be witnessing the extreme glamour of the designer’s learned-but-light invocation of an important part of Coco Chanel’s biography, one that was overlaid with passing allusions to Visconti, Fellini, the Venice carnival, and the city’s art treasures.