The New Look review: Chanel and Dior anchor a handsome period drama
The Apple TV+ series puts Parisian fashion at the heart of a stirring tale about resilience and creativity
TV Reviews Dior
When Christian Dior unveiled his 1947 collection “Corolle,” he harkened back to the opulent femininity of the late 19th century, to a pre-war world that felt decidedly novel precisely because it was such a strident throwback to elegance and tradition gone by. Dior’s instantly iconic “New Look” gives Apple TV+’s period-drama series, about the designer’s storied journey toward that famed collection, its name. But beyond just chronicling a pivotal moment in 20th century fashion history, The New Look, which premieres February 14, is a sweeping historical drama about what complicity and resilience looked like in Paris during its Nazi occupation and the years that followed.
Todd A. Kessler’s series opens not during those tumultuous years in the French capital, but in 1955. Christian Dior (Ben Mendelsohn) is set to speak to a packed house at Sorbonne University on the social, cultural, and economic importance of fashion. But as his anxiety risks keeping him from taking the stage, another fashion designer is gearing up for what she hopes will be a triumphant return and a powerful rebuke of all that Dior stands for. Coco Chanel (Juliette Binoche), in turn, becomes a key figure in the conversation at the Sorbonne: Is it true Dior stayed behind and designed for Nazi officials while Chanel couldn’t bear it and fled during the war?
Dior is diplomatic in his answer: Those years were chaos. And maybe the oversimplification that one collaborated with Nazis while the other stood their ground is not as obvious or as simple as it may appear. To flesh out those murky ethical areas, The New Look flashes back to wartime Paris where we meet a designer brimming with talent who’s yet to break out and another seeing her legacy at the brink of collapse. Dior is a dutiful worker under Lucien Lelong, forced to design for the wives of occupying Nazi officers; Chanel faces losing her company to her partners, two brothers who have fled to America to escape the threat of Hitler.
What’s soon clear is that each will be forced to make choices—about their work, about their lives, about their very approach to creation and design—that are marked and marred in equal measure by the chaos around them. For no sooner is Dior realizing the only way Lelong’s house will survive the occupation is by gritted subservience to fashionable wives of Nazi officers than he finds himself unwittingly helping the resistance, of which his sister is a key player. Later still when Catherine Dior (Maisie Williams) is abducted and taken to a war camp, her brother will have to find ways of bending the rules here and there to make sure the person he so adores comes back to him alive, if perhaps not entirely in one piece.
In contrast, and at a similar loss, Chanel ends up connecting with Hans Von Dincklage (Claes Bang), a German intelligence officer who soon uses his tryst with the designer to turn her into a Nazi asset—one who could very well end the war if only she could contact her old friend, Winston Churchill. These parallel stories, both of which serve as the aesthetic and cultural backdrops to how Dior came to represent a new fashion vanguard, make for a rather thrilling history lesson, one that finds novel angels with which to tell otherwise stale World War II tales.
What’s most fascinating about the series is how seriously it takes its themes around complicity. The very “chaos” Dior talks about in that first episode can only account for the way in which someone like Chanel would soon become a Nazi asset. Indeed, avarice and desperation, snobbery and disdain, hopefulness and despair, all become further useful facets with which to understand such complicity, not to mention the scars, both private and public, it engenders.
History buffs will surely relish the chance to witness a war-time drama that hinges on expensive silks and gorgeous gowns (not to mention the tricky business that was opening a haute couture house in postwar Paris); but fashion aficionados will, perhaps, be most enthralled with seeing the likes of Pierre Balmain, Cristóbal Balenciaga, and (especially!) Pierre Cardin rounding out the show’s sprawling collection of characters.
With a stellar roster of actors (Binoche is sublime as the ever vexing and mercurial Chanel, while Mendelsohn brings a welcome fragility to Dior), The New Look is as gorgeously mounted as any series about fashion would need to be. Even the many songs featured on the show (produced by Jack Antonoff, who’s recruited everyone from Florence + The Machine and the 1975 to Lana Del Rey and Perfume Genius) manage to conjure the fey elegance of the two designers at the heart of this period drama. If it’s a tad too didactic and maudlin at times, such faults are easily overlooked when the overall effect is so stirring, reminding us how much strength is required in living (and creating) according to one’s principles. And, perhaps more importantly, how such superficial things as fashion carry within them entire histories worth unearthing.
The New Look premieres February 14 on Apple TV+
13 Comments
It’s a fascinating period, and having read a little bit about it, I guess I wonder how coy it about Chanel’s Nazi associations. Given the phrasing of “a German intelligence officer who soon uses his tryst with the designer to turn her into a Nazi asset”, it sounds like a fair amount. I’m not saying one can’t have a rounded view of her life, but her bio in our culture at large is very sanitized for what is known, even without the corroborating documents found in the last decade or so.Les Parisiennes is a book about women in Paris in that period, and for a more haute couture thing, Falbalas is a movie–with more than one note that reappears in Phantom Thread–made during the occupation. Probably the movie isn’t that insightful to the period, but that it was made under those conditions fascinates me.
Last summer I read a piece (can’t recall the source) that focused solely on Chanel and her activities with the Nazis. That certainly wasn’t coy. It didn’t aim to make her look like a monster exactly, but it didn’t spare the unpleasant details. I found my sympathies waning. After a search, I’m seeing that five films have been devoted to her life, but the summaries don’t explicitly mention the scandals. I’d like to see the movie just lay it all out there. There’s no denying her motives, at least according to that source. I’m wondering if she’ll be presented as a schemer or some victim of circumstance who made bad choices. The trailer kind of makes her look like a hunted animal. Anyway, here are the movies if anyone is interested: https://www.vogue.fr/fashion-culture/article/5-unmissable-films-about-coco-chanel,
Yeah, I don’t know what the right presentation is, and biopics in general are such subjective works, but her associations—continuing after the war—feel weightier than caught in the times. All the while you can walk into the Children’s section of bookstores and find bios of her by herself or in collections.
The first I heard of it was actually a piece comparing a biopic, I forget which, that said it was glossed over and that an Edith Piaf biopic glossed over the fact she was in the Resistance. I’m not a moviemaker but, wow, what an odd choice.
There’s almost a whole industry sprung up around whitewashing Chanel’s WWII history, and her suppossedly being in the Resistance was likely one of the lies she used to cleanse herself of fascism post-war.The V&A Museum in London, dedicated to fashion and design, is currently holding an exhibition on Chanel, and is sadly helping perpetuate that lie. They’ve got a certificate and ID card that purports to prove that Chanel was active in the Resistance – albeit only tangentially – but won’t say where they got them or how. And according to a French historian who specialises in the Resistance, it’s about the thinnest evidence he’s ever seen. These documents only surfaced last year.Not only that, one document “verifying” her membership was only written out in 1957 – very late to confirm, but also the same yeah she got mega-famous and won the Neiman Marcus award. The other one has corrective fluid applied to the part that specifies where she supposedly operated, with the word “ERIC” written over it. Eric was the codename for Resistance operations……in the Balkans. So, despite all the evidence of her being in Paris and France for the war, shagging Krauts for clout, she somehow kept slipping down the coast to the other end of the Mediterranean.
Nothing about Chanel’s anti-semitism, then?
Maybe not the best time to complain about historic antisemitism, when Gaza is being genocided by Israel right now.
By the look of it, no. Chanel’s “rehabilitation” in the 1950s remains one of the great PR scams of the 20th century, but let’s be clear: Coco Chanel fucked and praised Nazis, eagerly, frequently, and entirely of her own free will, and she was a vicious anti-Semite.Like, the instant the Nazis took Paris, they moved all their high-ranking officers into the Ritz. And then Chanel went and booked herself a room for the duration of the war. This write-up – I’m guessing Manuel’s just padding out a press release that seeks to glow-up the show – leaves a lot out. For example: Chanel faces losing her company to her partners, two brothers who have fled to America to escape the threat of Hitler.Oh, why did the Wertheimer Brothers flee to America? Just leaving that out? They were Jewish. That’s a pretty good reason to flee Nazis. And it was a brilliant opportunity for Chanel. She’d agreed to a deal, decades before, to hand production, marketing, distribution – everything required to make the perfume and get it on shelves – of Chanel No. 5, in exchange for 10% of the profits. The Wertheimers turned the fragrance into a legend, and Coco got pissed that she didn’t have a bigger stake, even though that’s what she agreed with.When the Nazis took over, she saw her chance: she petitioned the courts in charge of seizing Jewish goods that these brother, being Jewish (and thus allegedly shifty) screwed an innocent Aryan out of her rightful profits. She had these beliefs well before the war – it wasn’t something the Nazis introduced to her.Fortunately, the Wertheimers knew what a bigot she was, and what was likely going to happen to the business if the Nazis took over, and transferred it to a gentile businessman – so even after sucking all those Nazi dicks in the Ritz she still didn’t get to steal their business. It wasn’t some case of some poor, but resilient, woman trying to survive under the occupation. Chanel loved the Nazis and wholesale threw herself into them to further herself. She wasn’t forced, she wasn’t under duress. She actively ingratiated herself to them. She was also a strike-buster, and used the excuse of the war to fire all her seamstresses who wanted better pay and conditions as she got rich and famous off their toil, having no sympathy for the women who held the same job she once had, pulling the ladder up behind her.It was the post-war fashion world – in Britain and America, who were unaware of her dealings (indeed, it was Churchill that pulled strings to save her being tried as a collaborator) – who rehabilitated her.When she finally carked it, the first lady of France wanted to hold a state funeral…until the French intelligence services leaked what she’d done during the war.Fuck her. Metaphorically. Not literally, as I’m not wearing Hugo Boss.
A few years ago I stumbled across a kid’s book about her. It was part of a series of books for little girls about “inspirational” women in history. It turned my stomach a bit. And to the other person who replied to me, who I’d rather not ungray, yeah I do think it’s OK to complain about anti-semitism regardless of what Israel is doing in Gaza. I don’t believe in collective blame, nor do I believe that two wrongs make a right. And I especially don’t believe that people who were persecuted by the Nazis (with Coco Chanel’s approval, no doubt) deserve any blame for something done by some people who share their religion/ethnicity eighty years later. Because I’m not insane. Or racist.
Yeah, and it’s kinda galling that the article goes out of the way to mention that Dior made outfits for the Nazis’ wives, which, while not exactly above reproach, is nowhere near the level of Chanel’s love and work for them – she was a registered Abwehr agent, for Christ sake. Dior, by the way, was in the French Army fighting the invasion while Chanel was hastily using it as an excuse to settle her labour issues in the scummiest way possible short of asking the Nazis to gas her seamstresses. This whole “Oh, well, it was…y’know…a strange time, World War II, people did unusual stuff” hand-waving on the part of the producers is pathetic. I can see that applied to a Parisian café owner who had to serve Wehrmacht officers, or a laundress who had to starch their uniforms – or even Dior, who wasn’t working for his own fashion house during the war. But not Chanel. It wasn’t her trying to survive – it was her trying to expand and grow richer under an incredibly evil system that perfectly accommodated her. And she accommodated it.Yes, yes. I can see the appeal. It’s a shitty appeal. Here’s this woman who was fortunate enough to be attractive enough to screw her way out of poverty, design some pretty dresses – and get to hang out with dangerous, high-status people who were absolute shitbags and, somehow, reap benefits while remaining free and clear of any responsibility. It’s the ultimate bad-boy fantasy, where you get all the privileges of being mistress to a scumbag, but can come out the otherside not only unscathed, but also, somehow, a victim, skirting not only ambivalence but contempt for your actions that you decided to do. And even as you reap the rewards for your terrible behaviour that has benefited you, you are also owed more benefits in the form of sympathy. Chanel, post-war, this great symbol of France, immediately bailed to Switzerland post-war, possibly to avoid the good women of Paris, those who smuggled out Allied airmen and blew up train tracks during the war, stripping her naked in the streets, shaving her head, and marching her down the Champs Elysée with a swastika painted on her back. Nancy Wake would’ve slit her throat. Then after a decade of lolling around in neutral ground immediately, Chanel went back to the Wertheimers and demanded money to restart her fashion business, because she “was bored”. (She couldn’t even be a consistent anti-Semite – what, Coco? I thought only the Jews were meant to sell out the principles for money, eh?)And to the other person who replied to me, who I’d rather not ungray, yeah I do think it’s OK to complain about anti-semitism regardless of what Israel is doing in Gaza.Not only is it racist – it’s also self-defeating, because it plays perfectly into Israeli propaganda: that the state of Israel perfectly represents each and every Jewish person on the planet, and that the actions of Israel are approved by each and every one of them – and so criticising Israel is to simply be anti-Semitic.People – Jewish people – like Louise Adler, Shulamit Aloni, and Ken Roth have been calling out this bullshit for ages.
They said something like, “Maybe not the best time to complain about historic antisemitism considering what’s happening in Gaza,” and I’m just thinking, “What the fuck are you talking about? When is it ever a bad time to complain about any kind of bigotry? Especially something as big as the murder of six million people.”
Ah, I did only skim over it. Still though, equating all Jewish people to Israel is a bad idea.
I thought the header image was Mrs. Doubtfire.
A lot of the complaints that this series glosses over Chanel’s Nazi affiliations are incorrect. The writer is trying to avoid spoilers. It’s a very nuanced look at how it happened.