Ben Mendelsohn and Juliette Binoche shine in Todd A. Kessler’s haute drama (Apple TV+) that revisits Coco Chanel’s Nazi ties, and rivalry with Christian Dior
Apple TV’s excellent new drama, Todd A. Kessler’s The New Look, begins with a searing exchange at the Sorbonne circa 1955, where young and idealistic students are about to grill Christian Dior (Ben Mendelsohn), the first-ever fashion designer invited at the elite Paris university. After the obligatory softball question is over, Dior faces his first curveball, when a student asks him bluntly, “Is it true that during the war, Coco Chanel closed down her atelier and refused to design dresses for the wives of Nazis, while you kept designing and making money?”
Dior knows that the question is coming from a place of deep hurt and moral outrage and he answers diplomatically, pointing out that Chanel (Juliette Binoche) had her own business and could therefore unilaterally decide to shut shop. Dior himself, on the other hand, was “a nobody” working for couturier Lucien Lelong and, therefore, had no choice but to do as the boss said. He follows it up with these wistful lines: “For those who lived through the chaos of war, four years of Nazi occupation, darkest days of our lives… And yes, we did sell our designs to Nazi wives and girlfriends. There is the truth, but there is always another truth that lives behind it.”
Pitch-perfect performances, top-notch design
The admirable thing about The New Look is that it takes that last line (“another truth that lives behind it”) and makes it a kind of leitmotif for the first 3-4 episodes. We learn that when it came to the war, nobody was doing what it looked like they were doing during the Nazi occupation of France — not Dior and not Chanel.
It is, therefore, unadvisable to judge wartime actions without context, in a post-facto peacetime judgment. We see Chanel entering into a relationship with a Nazi officer who helps to get her beloved nephew freed from the Gestapo’s clutches. Meanwhile, Dior, designing ball gowns and other frivolities for Nazi wives, is taking that income and handing it over to his revolutionary sister Catherine (Maisie Williams), who’s part of the French Resistance. Nobody, not even Lucien Lelong (who Dior casually threw under the bus at Sorbonne), is doing things strictly out of greed —there is always a kernel of either survivalism or dissent in these choices.
The New Look’s biggest strength is easily its enviable cast and the performances they have put in (although the show’s super-strong design and impeccable production values come a close second). Ben Mendelsohn is pitch-perfect as the soft-hearted, naïve Christian Dior, a man of such delicate artistic sensibilities that even self-preservation has to take a backseat to whimsy.
During a darkly funny scene, Christian’s sister and her lover are talking about her childhood. She recalls that right after his birth a fortune-teller had said that this boy will bring great pleasure to women, prompting the boy’s parents to have a giggle-fit. Mendelsohn’s eyes, his body language, his accent and mannerisms are all on point. He is a kind man, but also someone who is very aware of his genius and the fact that in all likelihood, a regular, 9-5 life would bore the hell out of him. There’s no false humility on display and yet, his innate goodness makes him vulnerable in a way the ‘troubled genius’ character rarely is onscreen.
A nod to Dior’s first fashion line
The New Look is very much ‘prestige TV’ to the extent that the production and the image-crafting are significantly more ambitious than your average series. It is also a slow-burn story that demands total immersion from the viewer, unlike the ‘second screen content’ that streaming executives insist upon these days (named so because they’re supposed to be stuff on your second screen — things that play in the background while you scroll through Instagram). And like many prestige TV products, the show has a solid grounding in literature, in this case a string of acclaimed history books detailing the Dior vs Chanel pow-wow in some detail — and delving into what these two individuals did during the Nazi occupation of France. Two books by Justin Picardie are especially relevant here — Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life (2010) and Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture (2021).
The latter, especially, informs the second and third episode of the show in a big way, including the depictions of torture carried out by the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. Picardie wrote, in the same book, about how historians had mysteriously neglected this important chapter in World War II history. “As for the other writers who had previously chronicled the life of Christian Dior, few were particularly interested in Catherine, or even aware of her deportation to Ravensbrück. It was as if the hermetic world of haute couture had no concern for a woman such as Catherine Dior, or for the suffering that she had endured; nor even as to whether her experiences had played a part in her brother’s legendary vision of fashion and femininity.”
Incredibly, Mendelsohn’s isn’t even the strongest performance in this show: that honour belongs to the ageless Juliette Binoche, one of the most recognizable French actors on the planet. Watch Binoche during the first episode here, as she delivers zinger after zinger in a bid to humiliate her arch-rival, Christian Dior. “The woman should wear the dress, the dress should not wear the woman”, she tells a gaggle of devoted reporters to whom she is announcing her post-war comeback at the age of 70. The show’s title refers to the first fashion line created by Dior after the conclusion of World War II, unofficially dubbed the ‘New Look’ on account of its freshness and flamboyance. But if elaboration, innovation and flamboyance were Dior’s signatures, Chanel prided herself on simplicity, clean-lines aesthetics and elemental designs.
If there’s one weakness in this show, it’s that it doesn’t really spend much time on explaining the professional rivalry between Dior and Chanel —why did these two people choose the artistic styles that they did? What did their choices say about the zeitgeist? How did their respective styles come to define the new era in both French and world fashion? So far, The New Look has been a little too preoccupied with its World War II flashback sequences to focus on questions like these. But there are still four episodes remaining in the season and one hopes that this gap is duly filled.
