The year is 1955, and Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel is talking to a handful of reporters. Her couture house has been closed since 1939, when she threw thousands out of work and tucked herself into the Ritz, where she sipped champagne with Nazis and took one for a lover. In 1945, to escape the charge of “horizontal collaboration,” she had fled Paris for Lausanne. Obviously, these subjects are verboten. Chanel’s return to Paris, she announces, is because “Christian Dior ruined French couture, and I’m coming back to save it.”
Across town at the Sorbonne, a packed auditorium of students applauds the man himself, Dior. During a Q&A session, however, one of them asks, “Is it true that, during the German occupation of Paris, Coco Chanel closed her atelier and refused to design dresses for the wives of Nazis while you kept designing and making money?”
The moderator waves off the question, but Dior insists on answering. He does not say that Chanel was rich and didn’t need to work; he does not say that she collaborated. “For those who lived through the chaos of war,” he explains, “four years’ Nazi occupation, darkest days of our lives. And yes, we did sell our designs to Nazi wives and girlfriends. There is the truth”—pause—“but there is always another truth that lives behind it.”
The New Look, a stunning new television series created by Todd A. Kessler for Apple TV+, is about that other truth.
Cutting between the couture’s pre-war queen and postwar king—between Chanel, quick and slim as a switchblade, and Dior, the shy but lionhearted dreamer—the first 11 minutes of The New Look set up a counterpoint that carries us through 10 episodes, from breadlines in 1943, where the story really begins, to the day of February 12, 1947, when the house of Christian Dior opened. Its debut collection, arguably the most important collection in history, was momentous in the way its corseted waistlines and full skirts symbolized the re-blossoming of society, art, life after a horrific World War.
It was never just a fashion story. Dior’s first collection, La Ligne Corolle, quickly christened “the New Look,” was about resistance, resilience—a vision of civilized beauty, women as glorious blooms in cities reborn. “You pad your hips & squeeze your waist & skirts are to the ankle it is bliss,” wrote the novelist Nancy Mitford of her New Look wardrobe. “So then you feel romantic like Mme Greffulhe.”
In fact, it was Greffulhe—immortalized by Proust as the Duchess de Guermantes—who said, “I don’t think there is any pleasure in the world comparable to that of a woman who feels she is being looked at by everybody, and has joy and energy transmitted to her.” Joy and energy! That’s what Dior detonated with silk and scissors, just when the West needed it most.
Those first 11 minutes also set a standard for the acting in The New Look. Juliette Binoche, in a bravura performance, is Coco Chanel. Conducting conversations with her cigarette, she’s as swaggering as her ropes of pearls, hat jammed down on her signature bangs and bob cut. Past 60, steeped in success, yet needling, competitive, she’s still wielding a sexuality that gets what it wants. Ben Mendelsohn is cast as Dior, and while he doesn’t resemble the rounder, prematurely balding designer, he’s found the man’s soul. The diffident bow of his head, the unblinking blue eyes, the smile that crumples inward—you feel his goodness. And his voice breaks your heart.
“There is the truth … but there is always another truth that lives behind it.”
That no one before Kessler thought to tell the story in just this way (the series is superbly structured and scripted) is no doubt due to a number of recent books on the two designers. Kessler has said he read everything available. Prime among the titles must be Hal Vaughan’s Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War (2011), which revealed her relationship with Nazi overlords (Chanel’s Abwehr code name was “Westminster”), and Justine Picardie’s Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture (2021), a book about Dior’s younger sister, Catherine, the baby of the family.
She worked in the Resistance while living in Paris with Christian, was captured by the Gestapo in July 1944 (just one month before the liberation), was tortured and sent to Ravensbrück, survived a final death march, and in 1945 was returned to her father and three brothers, damaged but a heroine covered in honor. She was Christian’s ballast and undertow, and he did not rest until she was home.
Catherine is played by Maisie Williams, who has a period face and projects a steely French disdain for those who get in her way. She, even more than her brother, represents the flip side of Chanel. And then there’s John Malkovich, mesmerizing in the role of Lucien Lelong, the head of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. Lelong was Dior’s employer during the war, the businessman who kept his doors open so that he and his workers could eat. With a tremulous voice, Malkovich moves through the series like a heartbeat, making the difficult decisions for others.
The series’s most enchanting episode is the fourth, in which Lelong oversees a magical couture collection designed for wire dolls—Théâtre de la Mode—devised in the early days of Paris’s liberation. (Then again, Cristóbal Balenciaga sharing a bit of Swiss chocolate with Dior—lovely.)
Emily Mortimer, playing a composite of Chanel’s friends Vera Bate Lombardi and Misia Sert, is irresistibly loopy, while Glenn Close is pure poise as the Harper’s Bazaar editor Carmel Snow, in Paris sniffing out the first postwar couture collections. Given a peek at Dior’s preliminary sketches, she says, “I’m not seeing it yet”—the definitive piece. Dior, too, knows it’s still in the air. By February 12, he has it: Bar, an ivory jacket of shantung silk, deeply fitted at the waist over a pinwheeling pleated black skirt.
The name “Bar” has always been a bit of a mystery. The curator and archivist Marika Genty said it was a reference to “the bar at the best hotels,” the only place society women could meet for drinks. The same silhouette appears in Manet’s painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. But Kessler, who here and there takes liberties with a date or fact, has his own ideas.
In Episode Eight, Dior visits his younger brother Bernard, who suffers from mental illness and is in a psychiatric hospital. They take a walk, and Bernard says, “We are all two parts. The light and the dark. Separated by a bar. That’s what you need to show the world.” Bernard’s comment tightens a thread, gathering up the story’s layered lives. Chanel and Dior both possessed genius, but when the war hit she went dark, receding into a mess of survival strategies, and he ascended. “For me,” Dior tells those students at the Sorbonne, “creation was survival.”
The New Look is available for streaming on Apple TV+
Laura Jacobs is the Editor of the Arts Intel Report at AIR MAIL