March in Hangzhou is cold and wet, around ten degrees, with rain blowing in off the lake. In March 2025, at Hubin in77, the open-air shopping streets on the eastern shore of West Lake, Chanel built a red stage under a sign that read Rouge Coco Playground. Eight times a day, Nishan's riders danced on it, rain or not.
They had rehearsed for five months.
Chanel's lipstick playground
Rouge Coco Playground was Chanel's spring 2025 campaign for its Rouge Coco lipsticks, built on one line: life is a playground, and every player has their own colour. It ran in London's Covent Garden, in Hong Kong, and at Hubin in77 in Hangzhou from March 8 to 23. In Chinese it was 可可小姐乐园, Miss Coco's Playground.
Visitors got a passbook, picked a lip colour and played three games. Put your lipstick on as fast as you can with no mirror. Walk a straight line under the double-C logo while you do it. Sit on a two-seat swing and do your friend's lipstick. Then came a class with Chanel's make-up artists, then the shop.
In London, Chanel booked professional skateboarders to perform every day. In Hangzhou, it booked Nishan.
Why Nishan
The call came in October 2024. Chanel wanted the event to feel free and adventurous, and it wanted boards on the stage.
Nishan had the record for it. It was one of Taobao's Top Ten Shopkeepers. It had run the Taobao × Olympics skate events. At the government's invitation it had hosted the first longboard competition recognised by the All-China Sports Federation. It had been on Zhejiang TV and in Xinhua.
Chanel still made the team earn it, with five months of vetting and rehearsals.
Five months, ten rewrites
The show combined Nishan's two kinds of riding.
In longboard dancing, the rider walks up and down a long deck while it rolls, crosses one foot over the other, spins a full turn and keeps rolling. It looks closer to ballet than to anything in a skate park.
Surfskating uses a short board with a front truck that swings. The rider pumps and carves through tight S-turns without ever pushing, the way a surfer rides a wave.
The job was to fuse the two into one routine that would stop shoppers in their tracks.
The team rehearsed all winter, at least three full run-throughs a week. They filmed every run, watched it back together and went again.
The routine went through more than ten versions. The costumes, styling and props changed with every one. Backup riders learned every part, in case anyone got hurt or sick.
By opening day it was a stage production, not a skate demo.
Sixteen days in the rain
Chanel also ran a campaign film with longboarding in it on in77's four synced street screens, around the clock, for 21 days.
The playground opened on March 8 in cold rain. The team showed up on time every day and did eight shows a day from opening to close. Over sixteen days that came to about 128 shows, many of them on a wet stage where one slip means a fall.
Shoppers stopped, watched and pulled out their phones.
Nishan also took part in the event's indoor programme, with the make-up studio, the limited-edition products, and the celebrities and fashion creators who came through.
Nishan's playground
Most people only see longboarding in parks and on the street. That March, crowds saw it on a red Chanel stage by West Lake, between a lipstick race and a make-up class, performed by a crew from Hangzhou.
Nishan says boarding can be an extreme sport, an easy afternoon and a beautiful thing to watch. In Hangzhou it was all three.
Chanel built the playground. For sixteen days, Nishan owned it.
