THE NEW LOOK (Apple TV+)
For the four years that Paris was occupied by Nazi Germany, the elegant city – renowned for the craftsmen, ateliers and designers of high fashion – was reduced to curfews, food trucks and trigger-happy soldiers patrolling every street corner.
It’s against this nerve-jangling backdrop that The New Look, Apple TV+’s new blockbuster series, an ‘inspired by true stories’ drama, sets the lives of fashion legends Coco Chanel and Christian Dior.
Dior, a then unknown young designer with a sister secretly working for the French Resistance, is working in the atelier of Lucien Lelong, unwillingly creating gowns for fashionable Nazi wives and mistresses. Chanel, already famous, is holed up at Paris’s grandest hotel, the Ritz, with her Nazi lover. Both are surviving as best they can.
Juliette Binoche as Coco Chanel, left, and Emily Mortimer as her close friend Elsa Lombardi in Apple TV + series The New Look
Maisie Williams plays Catherine Dior, the sister of designer Christian who has been imprisoned in the infamous Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany
Fashion has always been difficult to bring to the screen: its particular alchemy of creativity, originality and hunger, overlaid with the need for commercial success, is hard to pin down. Here, it fits beautifully, seamlessly one might say, into a bigger story about the challenges and compromises of war.
The New Look is not the only on-screen portrayal of the febrile fashion industry around right now. You can take your pick of glamorous offerings: High & Low: John Galliano, a documentary about the designer’s fall from grace after an inexplicable anti-Semitic outburst, will be released in cinemas next month; the excellent Kingdom of Dreams – the story of Tom Ford and Alexander McQueen – is available to stream on Sky, along with the Disney Plus mini-series Cristobal Balenciaga.
The opening episode of The New Look, released yesterday, however, is not really about fashion. The closest we get to the skill and passion of dress design is in the splendid opening credits that conjure up the intensity and detail of the workroom.
The compelling story of Dior (played by Ben Mendelsohn) desperately trying to free his sister Catherine (Maisie Williams) who has been imprisoned in the infamous Ravensbruck concentration camp, is juxtaposed with the plush world of Chanel, described by a Nazi general, when they meet at a ball, as ‘bigger than any Hollywood star’.
Juliette Binoche’s Chanel is convincing, without being accurate. The actress is more beautiful than Chanel, whose appearance was what the French call jolie laide (ugly pretty) – more gamine and less feminine.
It wasn’t Chanel’s beauty that attracted powerful men – such as the Duke of Westminster, with whom she had an affair, his friend Winston Churchill and the Nazi high command – but her confidence, incredible style and the fact that, for Chanel, sex was a currency like everything else.
Binoche is softer and less rigid than the original, slumping in her chair at times in a manner the real woman would never have done.
At the time episode one begins, Chanel’s business was closed (and remained closed throughout the war), but it would have been helpful to get a glimpse of how she had already defined the wardrobe of the contemporary woman – loose trousers, soft shouldered tailoring, beautiful costume jewellery. Mendelsohn’s Dior, though, is utterly unlike the real Dior, who was a podgy, round-faced young man who fell into fashion after his career as an art gallerist failed when his father ran out of money to back him.
Ben Mendelsohn, left, stars as Christian Dior, a then unknown young designer working in the atelier of John Malkovich’s Lucien Lelong, right
The actor portrays Dior’s general physical unease and shyness but gives us not even a trace of the intellectual firepower and fledgling creative genius that meant that, by the time he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1957, the House of Dior was making $20million a year – a staggering sum for the time.
The New Look brilliantly evokes the Paris of the age – both the richly-panelled rooms hung with scarlet Nazi banners, and the dirty cobbled streets and tunnels of the Resistance.
Many of the haunts depicted are still those of the fashion world today: particularly the Ritz, which is fashion central during Paris Fashion Week, while several of the large buildings with their magnificent stone staircases house the enduring names including St Laurent, Dior, Chanel.
The New Look is a visual feast, but, more importantly, it’s a lesson about the decisions that anyone in wartime – even the seemingly most privileged – faces to survive.
The first three episodes of The New Look are available now on Apple TV+. Subsequent episodes will be released every Wednesday until April 3.