WWII Fashion Drama The New Look Is a Poor Fit for Its Material: TV Review

August 2024 · 7 minute read

World War II is well-worn territory for prestige TV, but at first blush, “The New Look” has a novel way in. The Apple TV+ drama, created by Todd A. Kessler of “Bloodline,” traces the conflict’s impact on the Paris-based fashion industry, focusing on two titans of the craft: Christian Dior (Ben Mendelsohn) and Coco Chanel (Juliette Binoche), both founders of legendary houses that persist to this day. For the purposes of “The New Look,” which begins with the French capital under Nazi occupation, these peers are also foils. Dior is a sensitive dreamer whose younger sister, Catherine (Maisie Williams), joined the anti-German Resistance and spent time in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Chanel is a shrewd, self-made entrepreneur who infamously collaborated with the Nazis, a relationship previously explored in the 2011 biography “Sleeping With the Enemy.”

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In a title card, “The New Look” introduces itself as “the story of how creation helped return spirit and life to the world.” The title comes from Dior’s legendary debut collection in 1947, featuring cinched waists and full skirts that announced a pendulum swing from wartime austerity to mid-century elegance. Not that you would know that from watching “The New Look,” which shows minimal interest in the details of what made Dior a master artisan, nor Chanel a successful entrepreneur. The contrast between the brutality of war and fragility of art is an ideal subject for extended study. With 10 hours at its disposal, “The New Look” has space both to argue for the value of a seemingly trivial indulgence and reckon with how aesthetic beauty can disguise moral ugliness. Sadly, the show does neither, instead focusing on the most familiar aspects of its setting while underserving those that could set it apart. 

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Though “The New Look” declares its intent to focus on the aftermath of the war, the clock quickly rewinds to the 1940s. From there, events proceed at a sluggish pace. It takes three full episodes until Paris is liberated, both too much time given the show’s stated interests and not enough to do the Vichy period justice. Dior spends the war working in the atelier of his mentor Lucien Lelong (John Malkovich — same halting delivery, different accent), sustaining the French fashion apparatus by dressing the wives of German officers. Chanel initially makes the less compromised choice to shutter her business, only to strike up an affair with a high-ranking Nazi (Claes Bang) and attempt to use the Aryan Laws to wrest control of the company from her Jewish partners.

Given how these actions hover over both designers as the season progresses, “The New Look” could have used a dual-timeline structure that juxtaposes trauma and recovery. Lingering on the occupation emphasizes the trauma at the expense of fashion, the series’ ostensible subject. With Chanel holed up at the Ritz and Dior still an anonymous apprentice, the show initially foregrounds Catherine’s subterfuge, capture and detention. The subplot both hews to well-worn tropes of heroic defiance and typecasts the former Arya Stark as yet another rebellious fighter ripped apart from her family. Chanel’s lover is nicknamed Spatz, but he might as well be dubbed The Prick, Bang’s equally awful villain in “Bad Sisters.” “The New Look” takes the same unimaginative approach to filling these roles as it does to portraying the creative process, rendered via Dior as an unspecific need for space and inspiration at the cost of close relationships. 

Mendelsohn, by contrast, is woefully miscast as the up-and-coming couturier. Kessler may have a rapport with the actor from their “Bloodline” days, but the 54-year-old Australian is unconvincing as the fresh face of a new generation, and doubly so as the older sibling of the 26-year-old Williams. (Dior is also meant to be nipping at the heels of the already-established Chanel, though Binoche is just five years her castmate’s senior.) Mendelsohn has a weathered face and gravelly voice that doesn’t square with the tender-hearted Dior, who becomes emotionally dependent on his tarot reader and balks at the idea of poaching employees from his friends. Said friends include fellow designers Cristobál Balenciaga (Nuno Lopes) and Pierre Balmain (Thomas Poitevin), who each get exactly one note of personality: Balmain is hot-headed; Pierre Cardin (Elliott Margueron) is eccentric. Their actual contributions to the field go entirely unexplored.

Yet these problems pale in comparison to how “The New Look” approaches Chanel and her connection to the Third Reich. The show doesn’t shy away from depicting the collaboration itself, which includes the attempted seizure of her business as well as attempted espionage under the codename Agent Westminster. Yet its portrait of Chanel is strangely soft. The mogul may be selfish, hypocritical and opportunistic, but she’s almost never shown to be overtly prejudiced, apart from a single antisemitic remark directed at her co-founder turned antagonist Pierre Wertheimer (Charles Berling). Rather than arising from a shared worldview, her alliance with the Nazis is played almost passively, as a woman succumbing to the pressures of a historical moment without fully considering the consequences. It’s an awfully generous interpretation of actively abetting a genocidal regime.

After the war, Chanel flees to Switzerland to avoid prosecution, as she did in real life. There, Chanel refuses to admit to or reckon with her betrayals. Such denial is psychologically plausible, yet awfully dull to watch for hours on end, giving Binoche little to do except tearfully rant about what her character is owed to her frenemy Elsa Lombari (a perpetually sloshed Emily Mortimer). “The New Look” comes dangerously close to indulging Chanel’s self-pitying conflation of well-deserved judgment with sexism or ageism. The opening flash-forward also shows Chanel back at the forefront of Paris couture, undercutting any hints of comeuppance while setting up an unearned triumph. A quarter century into the antihero era, “The New Look” is somehow reluctant to highlight Chanel’s worst qualities. The result lacks either the moral clarity or the emotional nuance required of this material. Between its lack of a handle on Chanel and lack of attention to her or Dior’s actual gifts, one wonders what “The New Look” wanted to be to begin with.

The first three episodes of “The New Look” premiere on Apple TV+ on Feb. 14, with remaining episodes streaming weekly on Wednesdays.

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