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One can easily imagine Coco Chanel — the fashion pioneer played by Juliette Binoche in Todd A. Kessler’s historical drama “The New Look,” which premieres Feb. 14 on Apple TV Plus — pulling it off. A gifted social climber, brilliant couturier and virulent antisemite who moonlighted as a Nazi intelligence operative (Abwehr Agent F-7124, code name “Westminster”), Kessler’s Chanel is a bold creation indeed. She’s a consummate strategist at some points, almost comically impolitic at others, but the character emerges as a formidably agile and semitransparent agent in both senses: frequently trapped but always decisive and quick to act. Binoche plays her as an opportunist so appealing, labile and self-pitying that one almost believes her when she tells whichever version of the story best sells and defends her own interests.
Chanel’s allure becomes this interesting but strangely disarticulated series’ greatest achievement and most significant obstacle. The show understands perfectly that the character’s appeal risks elevating her into a wildly compelling (but unthinkable) antihero. It spends so much effort compensating for that possibility, in fact, that it ultimately lapses into precisely the kind of slightly shallow morality play the cast repeatedly insists, in interviews, they weren’t making.
“The New Look” examines World War II through the rarefied lens of a small and exclusive crew of designers in Paris. By exploring how Chanel and Christian Dior (and a number of other couturiers including Lucien Lelong, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Pierre Balmain and Pierre Cardin) navigated the perils and temptations of the German occupation, the show seeks to put fashion in productive dialogue with the privations and horrors of war — and to craft something vaguely redemptive and meaningful out of a moment that did indeed change the way much of the world dressed.
The problem isn’t the show’s investment in fashion. I’m all for creative approaches to World War II, especially since the deluge of shows and films on the subject shows no sign of slowing. (One hesitates to call it overkill, but it bears mentioning that four new World War II movies have already aired this year. Those films — “One Life,” “War Blade,” “Will,” and “Zone of Interest” — will soon be followed by “Fortunes of War,” “Escape From Germany,” “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” and “Six Triple Eight.” On television this spring, in addition to “Masters of the Air” and “The New Look,” we can look forward to “We Were the Lucky Ones” in March and “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” in May.)
New angles are welcome! The problem with “The New Look,” however, turns out not to be the expected one — that it risks trivializing war by subordinating it to fashion — but rather that it trivializes fashion by subordinating it to war.
The series explicitly pits Chanel — and by extension her fashion legacy, which remains fuzzy and ill-defined in the show — against Christian Dior (Ben Mendelsohn), who spends much of the series blocked and groping for inspiration while trying to find his sister, Catherine (Maisie Williams), a freedom fighter who was captured and sent to a concentration camp.
Chanel is a little past her peak when the show’s main action starts in 1943. She has closed her business in Paris, ostensibly to avoid designing for the Third Reich, but resides at the Ritz, which doubles as a kind of Nazi headquarters. When Chanel’s nephew is captured fighting for the Allies, she uses her German connections to secure his release. Now indebted to the Nazis, she welcomes their additional offers of help, ends up dating the German spy Hans Günther von Dincklage (Claes Bang) and eventually embarks on a series of slightly batty missions at his behest in the company of her friend and boozy confidante Elsa Lombardi (Emily Mortimer, stealing every single scene).
Christian Dior, functionally a counterweight to these picaresque Nazi adventures, spends much of the series anxious, conflicted and stuck. Mendelsohn plays the designer — in his 40s during the German occupation and still working for Lucien Lelong (John Malkovich) — as fundamentally decent, a man of conscience who at least agonizes before going against his ethics. When the Nazis ask Lelong for dresses for their wives and girlfriends, Dior objects but unhappily complies. When Catherine is captured, Dior (very quietly) stews. Desperate, he tries to bribe Nazis to track her down, attempts to secure her release and repeatedly disappoints and steals from Lelong, his benevolent, long-suffering boss.
Catherine’s horrifying experience is obviously there as ballast to anchor (and condemn) Chanel’s high jinks. Her plight is also supposed to supply Dior with a creative arc. This last bit — on which the show’s major last moves depend — doesn’t quite land. Presented as essentially “good” in a show that didn’t necessarily need to assume such rigid contours, Dior comes across as dutiful, a little colorless and radically (though appropriately, given his sister’s suffering) uninterested in fashion. We are informed of his brilliance, but on-screen, he’s a largely passive addition to Kessler’s world of amiable Paris couturiers, most of whom, save for Chanel, seem to be friendly, loyal, and supportive.
They, too, barely talk about fashion. This starts to feel like a problem.
The show’s main flaw, magnified by a title sequence that presents Dior’s floral designs as a redemptive counterpoint to the harsh right angles of Nazi iconography, is the peculiarly apolitical angle from which it approaches its core subject. Even as it seeks to leverage Dior’s 1947 collection into a watershed moment capable of supplying narrative, aesthetic and ethical catharsis! Oscillating between a kind of apologetic crouch (from which the show sometimes apologizes for fashion’s frivolity) and bursts of sentimental triumphalism about what fashion can achieve, “The New Look” fails to contextualize the very real (and consequential) politics of the 1947 Christian Dior collection to which the title refers.
Mendelsohn said, during a Feb. 5 Apple TV Plus Television Critics Association panel, that the show was “not trying to paint a moral story.” One detects in that formulation the outlines of a project-wide anxiety — and a likely overcorrection. Because Chanel’s moral failures are so glaring and obvious, the show, which pits her against Dior without ever granting the two designers an extended scene together, may have opted to make up for Chanel’s appeal (as scripted) by sacrificing any extended discussion of her brilliance. In so doing, the show elides the two designers’ real (and interesting!) philosophical differences. Having made Dior out to be “the good one,” more or less, it pronounces his designs good, too, and presents his vision of womenswear as uncomplicatedly liberatory and redemptive.
The fashion history is more complicated. Chanel’s designs, many of which borrowed liberally from menswear, famously catered to women’s comfort and leisure and even athleticism. Some of her innovations were genuinely transformative in that they allowed women to move freely without corsetry or heavy fabrics. She was invested in making clothing that didn’t hamper movement with minimal adornments which (if they existed) did not weigh down the body. Dior’s “New Look,” with its acres of fabric, was in this respect less new than nostalgic and even retrograde. Drawing on older and far more constricting trends, he prioritized making the female body decorative rather than functional. Those hyper-feminine silhouettes, some of which required padding on the hips, weren’t an unmixed blessing. They formed part of a worldwide push to put women — who had joined factories and workplaces around the world while the men were at war — back in their domestic (and aesthetic) place.
A show billing itself as something other “a moral story” could have made a meal out of that complicating tension. As it is, one can watch “The New Look” in its entirety without quite appreciating that Chanel (who was definitely bad!) changed what was possible for women via designs that liberated them from the constricting shapewear and exaggerated silhouettes that had excluded them from full participation in the world. Or that Dior was designing in specific opposition to a trend she helped create. against that trend (and why he might have wanted to).
Despite those puzzling omissions, there’s a lot of beauty and intrigue here, bolstered by a remarkable cast, including Glenn Close as Harper’s Bazaar Editor-in-Chief Carmel Snow! Putting a new twist on an old story brings risks; one can understand why the experiment might inspire some compensatory tactical retreats. The series still offers many unexpectedly strange or tender moments and a lot of history that was, and remains, enormously interesting.
The New Look (10 episodes) premieres Feb. 14 with three episodes on Apple TV Plus, with subsequent episodes airing weekly.
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