Review of the series about Christian Dior “New Look: Revolution of Style”

The Apple TV+ streaming series “The New Look” features famous fashion designers Christian Dior, Gabrielle Chanel, Pierre Balmain, Cristobal Balenciaga and their lesser-known colleagues. However, the focus of the show’s authors is not on the creation of dresses and fragrances, but on survival in the occupation, post-war trauma and the constantly asked question at what point a reasonable compromise turns into a deal with conscience. Tells Julia Shagelman.

The series starts with a short prologue. It’s 1955, and Mademoiselle Chanel (Juliette Binoche) has just returned to Paris after eight years living in Switzerland. When a small group of journalists convened for the occasion asks her for her opinion of the new couture star Christian Dior (Ben Mendelsohn), she declares that she is not interested in other designers and that she is bored talking about them, but at the same time that Dior has “destroyed French fashion,” and she’s going to save it.

At this time, the Sorbonne is just preparing to honor Dior, the first fashion designer invited to give a public lecture at a university with a 700-year history. The maestro gets nervous and insists on canceling the event, so the organizers change the order and put models on stage wearing his dresses. Waterfalls of silk, swirls of crepe de Chine, delicate colors, graceful silhouettes, thin waists and full skirts – the camera admires everything that received the name New Look in fashion history and returned glamor, beauty and the pure joy of admiring to the world exhausted by the Second World War.

True, after these shots you will have to forget about glamor for a while. The first question that the lively student asks Dior is not about fashion at all. And about why, during the years of the Nazi occupation, he sewed luxurious outfits for the wives and mistresses of the invaders (although then not under his own name, but in the fashion house of Lucien Lelong), while Chanel closed the doors of her atelier as soon as the German soldiers set foot on French soil? To answer this, the action moves to 1943, and there, as usual, everything turns out to be somewhat more complicated.

Style Revolution creator Todd A. Kessler co-showrunnered the legal drama Heat (2007–2012), and also produced and wrote several episodes of the second and third seasons of the legendary The Sopranos (1999–2007). Among the directors of the new show is Julia Ducournau, who received the Palme d’Or in 2021 for the body horror film Titan: although the elegantly stylized retro picture of the series does not allow for particularly bold visual experiments, her hand is still felt in unexpected angles and hard close-ups plans. It is clear that pleats and ruffles interest these people much less than human characters and the many shades of gray in the characters’ relationships with each other, the occupation authorities and their own conscience.

The first three episodes, set in Nazi-occupied Paris, explore the fine line between trying to simply lead a normal life in the hope that one day it will return to normal, and directly collaborating with evil – both of which can be caused by fear, anxiety about loved ones, indifference or search for personal gain. Dior and Balmain (Thomas Poitevin) actually create dresses for Lelong (John Malkovich), trying not to think about who will wear them, and avoiding direct contact with the customers. Christian’s sister Catherine (Maisie Williams), risking her freedom and life, participates in the Resistance and is arrested by the Gestapo. Chanel has useful friends and connections with the new authorities to help her first get her beloved nephew out of captivity, and then deal with her former Jewish business partners, applying “Aryan laws” to them.

The storylines that seem most improbable, such as Chanel’s recruitment by Walter Schellenberg (Jannis Niewoehner) to use an old acquaintance with Churchill to arrange separate negotiations between Germany and Britain, are surprisingly based on fact. As do Coco’s numerous masterly changes of friends, views and allies, sometimes several times per episode. Despite the obvious antipathy of the authors towards her, who nevertheless even soften some details of the biography of the famous mademoiselle, Binoche’s Chanel turned out to be a villain, which is very exciting to watch.

In contrast, Dior, as played by Mendelssohn, is a quiet man, keeping a low profile, at one point crushed by grief, but managing to shake off his mournful stupor in order to transform personal pain into a source of inspiration. The main characters are supported by a strong supporting cast, including Emily Mortimer as Chanel’s frenemy Elsa Lombardi. True, for some reason the authors forced all the actors playing the French to speak with a French accent (obviously so that we do not forget that this is happening in France), which they achieve with varying degrees of success and gives some scenes an unplanned comic tone. However, this does not prevent the series from moving forward, from the horrors of war to the dawn of new prosperity – the question is whether it can help to forget everything or will only throw a perfumed veil over the unsightly past.