‘The New Look’ chronicles the rise of fashion designer Christian Dior
“The New Look" on Apple TV+ focuses on the lives of Christian Dior and Coco Chanel and offers an unflinching look at the decisions and moral compromises they made to survive during the Nazi occupation of France.
For the better part of the last century, the names Dior and Chanel were synonymous with luxury goods: custom-made gowns, stylish handbags, elegant fragrances and fine jewelry. But when most people think about these iconic fashion houses, they often don’t think about the historical figures whose names they bear: Christian Dior, whose debut collection signaled a return to ultra-femininity and opulence after the horrors of World War II, and Coco Chanel, who was credited for revolutionizing the way women dressed in the early 20th century.
“The New Look,” which premiered Wednesday on Apple TV+, focuses on the lives of Dior (Emmy winner Ben Mendelsohn) and Chanel (Academy Award winner Juliette Binoche) and offers an unflinching look at the decisions and moral compromises they made to survive during the Nazi occupation of France.
“The irony is that when you read about Dior, you end up running into Chanel over and over again,” executive producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura told NBC News in a joint video interview with series creator Todd A. Kessler. "She was the king of the world in fashion, and he became the king, so she was dethroned in reality by him …The duality that they represented with each other is what made it, I think, probably inevitable that the two of them were going to collide in this series.”
In the 10-episode first season, Dior, then a little-known designer working for couturier Lucien Lelong (John Malkovich), begrudgingly agrees to make dresses for the wives and girlfriends of Nazi officers in order to support himself and his French Resistance fighter sister, Catherine (Maisie Williams), who is later captured and sent to a concentration camp. Chanel, who decided to close down her couture house at the start of the war, begins an ill-advised romantic relationship with German officer Hans Günther von Dincklage (Claes Bang) and is later used as a Nazi agent to attempt to broker a secret peace deal with her old friend, Winston Churchill, in Madrid.
In 2017, a few months after wrapping up their three-season collaboration on the Netflix series “Bloodline,” Kessler visited Mendelsohn’s home and, while making Neapolitan-style pizzas together, began discussing the prospect of making a sumptuous show about the rise of Dior that would be set and shot in Paris.
Rating: 5