Blake Lively may be an American princess — but at the Chanel cruise show today, everyone was a bit of a princess. Guests lounged on fine patio furniture sipping champagne and nibbling almonds on the French Riviera as models strode by in Marlene Dietricht-inspired clothes. According to the AFP, no one seemed to mind here — under the glorious foreign (for many of them) sunshine — to have to wait an hour past schedule for the show to start. If nothing else, they could contemplate if Blake Lively's skirt was a skort. For Chanel could pull off that kind of thing — skorts — or other hybrid items like the "knee-high boots that looked as if they'd mated with a pair of flip flops," as AFP describes them, shown today.

Skirt suits were lean and came with bedazzled buttons; dresses were long, silk, and muted, with a flavor of forties tennis skirts. "It's about dressing down these very sumptuous looks, about easy elegance," Karl Lagerfeld told reporters after the show.

"This is about the women of Cannes, women who mix bathing suits with real pearls and diamonds," Lagerfeld said. "After all, you can't wear fakes into the water."

Because, in the south of France, competition to be the prettiest princess is high. Sometimes, the prettiest buttons of the bunch have to do things they don't usually have to do, like swim in their diamonds, or wait for certain people to pay attention to them.

As Lively, wearing a black sequin-covered blazer and thigh-grazing skirt, waited for an audience with Lagerfeld, she snapped photos of sun setting over the Mediterranean. A tight crowd formed about the "Gossip Girl" star, snapping incessant photos of her.

They were trying to collect photographic evidence of the engineering phenomenon that was her skirt, because they knew when they told everyone they didn't leave without knowing what color her undergarment was, no one would believe them.

Chanel jump-starts Cannes with Cruise collection [AFP]