“The New Look”: Chanel, Dior and the Nazis
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The series “The New Look” is being released on Apple TV+ about French fashion designers who did or did not collaborate with the Nazis during the occupation.
In 1955, at the Sorbonne, Christian Dior (Ben Mendelsohn), shy in front of a full hall of students, answers questions from the audience after a fashion show of fashion models in his dresses, as delicate as flower buds. “Is it true that Chanel closed her boutique in Paris so as not to sew for the Nazis, and you served them all the years of occupation?” – asks the ardent student. “Mademoiselle Chanel was the owner of the business and could manage it,” Dior mumbles, “and I was an employee. We all survived as best we could during these terrible years…” Then, over the course of 10 episodes, we will be told who survived and how, so that by the end we would understand that everything was the other way around: Chanel (Juliette Binoche) was a collaborator, and Dior hid the heroes of the Resistance – according to series author Todd Kessler (“Fight”, “Pedigree”).
The action plunges into 1943: Catherine, the younger sister of Dior (Maisie Williams), loves and helps the resistance fighter Hervé (Hugo Becker). Dior is against the participation of his adored sister in a dangerous matter, but Catherine is adamant and one day ends up in the Gestapo. Christian uses all his meager influence to rescue her, but to no avail. In this story, Herve looks like a useful idiot who can’t help, but only gets in the way and gets on Christian’s nerves.
The youthful, energetic Chanel has more influence among the new “authorities” – she manages to free her beloved nephew Andre (Joseph Olivan) from a prisoner of war camp. She lives happily in a luxurious room at the Ritz with the German Hans von Dinklage, nicknamed Sparrow (Klas Bang), who – forcibly, according to the authors of the series – takes her to dinner “with the most powerful politician” Himmler. “I’ve seen more help!” – Coco snaps, referring to Churchill. And then a real espionage mess begins, some kind of formal farce: Schellenberg (Jannis Niewöner) comes up with Operation “Fashionable Hat”, in which Chanel (she is agent Westminster in honor of her long-time lover) must go to Madrid and persuade Churchill to a separate peace. Needless to say, on the way of her train to Spain, the useless Herve is again snooping around, planting explosives anywhere, because Catherine will be taken to Germany by rail. Juliette Binoche plays Coco with passion and pleasure, although in Hollywood productions she has to speak English with a French accent, Schellenberg looks like a psychopath with a smile always wandering on his lips – all that’s missing is Stirlitz to completely ruin the operation.
Todd Kessler, a veteran screenwriter with five Emmy nominations, bases his story on real events, adding fiction here and there to spice things up. Chanel’s struggle with the co-owners of her brand, the Wertheimers, is a historical fact, as is the fact that she tried to take advantage of the Nazi law on the confiscation of property from Jews in order to squeeze the company from them. Binoche is so convincing in this role, and Kessler is so lenient in his script (she was forced!) that between the cuts one can read the familiar: collaborating with the fascists is bad, but if you don’t get pleasure from it, then it’s not so shameful. Where is Dior with his dresses against the backdrop of swastikas – however, the same all-understanding intonation prevails here: he sews, but with disgust, see what a suffering face he has?
But the bacchanalia after the occupation, when the French frantically shaved the heads of French women who had slept with the Germans, is described in the series without equivocation: here they shave the head of the great Arletty (Josephine de la Bume), who said (in the video she says this to Chanel herself, who bears the same sin): “ My heart belongs to France, but not my ass! But history does not remember that the French fought so furiously – the same Arletty, when asked why she communicated with the fascists, answered her persecutors: “Why did you let them in here?”
As for the story about the confrontation between Chanel and Dior – fashion rivalry and different attitudes towards collaboration – it swings all the way from condemnation to condescension. Only towards the end does the ambiguity in the script give way to a clearly stated position: Dior and his heroic sister are celebrated, while Chanel, who is too enterprising and unscrupulous in her means, is condemned. In the end, pathos also arises: they say, Dior’s New Look style became that very portion of beauty that helped the survivors regain the taste of life. As for Chanels, they always survive – but who are we to judge?
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