Chanel and Dior’s fashion rivalry woven into the grim tapestry of war: Ex-Vogue editor ALEXANDRA SHULMAN reviews The New Look series on the fashion legends

THE NEW LOOK (Apple TV+)

Judgement:

During the four years Paris was occupied by Nazi Germany, the elegant city – known for its artisans, ateliers and haute couture designers – was reduced to curfews, food trucks and trigger-happy soldiers patrolling every street corner.

It is against this unnerving backdrop that The New Look, Apple TV+’s new blockbuster series, an “inspired by true stories” drama, sets the lives of fashion legends Coco Chanel and Christian Dior.

Dior, a then unknown young designer with a sister who secretly worked for the French Resistance, works in Lucien Lelong’s studio and unwittingly makes dresses for fashionable Nazi wives and mistresses. Chanel, already famous, hides with her Nazi lover in the largest hotel in Paris, the Ritz. Both survive as best they can.

Maisie Williams plays Catherine Dior, the sister of designer Christian who is imprisoned in the infamous Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany

Fashion has always been difficult to bring to the screen: the special alchemy of creativity, originality and hunger, overloaded with the need for commercial success, is difficult to pin down. Here it fits beautifully, seamlessly you might say, into a larger story about the challenges and compromises of war.

The New Look isn’t the only image of the feverish fashion industry currently on screen. You can choose from a glamorous selection: High & Low: John Galliano, a documentary about the designer’s fall from grace after an inexplicable anti-Semitic outburst, will hit theaters next month; the excellent Kingdom of Dreams – the story of Tom Ford and Alexander McQueen – is available to stream on Sky, along with the Disney Plus miniseries Cristobal Balenciaga.

However, the opening episode of The New Look, which was released yesterday, isn’t really about fashion. The closest we get to the skill and passion of clothing design is in the beautiful opening credits that evoke the intensity and detail of the workroom.

The compelling story of Dior (played by Ben Mendelsohn) desperately trying to free his sister Catherine (Maisie Williams), imprisoned in the infamous Ravensbruck concentration camp, is juxtaposed with the plush world of Chanel, described by a Nazi general, as she meet at a ball, ‘bigger than any Hollywood star’.

Juliette Binoche’s Chanel is convincing without being accurate. The actress is more beautiful than Chanel, whose look was what the French call jolie laye (ugly beautiful) – more boyish and less feminine.

It wasn’t Chanel’s beauty that attracted powerful men – like the Duke of Westminster, with whom she had an affair, his friend Winston Churchill and the Nazi high command – but her confidence, incredible style and the fact that for Chanel, sex was a coin like anything else.

Binoche is softer and less stiff than the original, sometimes sinking into her chair in a way a real woman never would.

At the time episode one opens, Chanel’s business was closed (and remained closed throughout the war), but it would have been useful to get a glimpse of how she had already defined the contemporary woman’s wardrobe: loose trousers , custom work with soft shoulders, beautiful costume jewelry. However, Mendelsohn’s Dior is completely different from the real Dior, a plump, round-faced young man who came into fashion after his career as an art gallery owner failed when his father ran out of money to support him.

Ben Mendelsohn, left, stars as Christian Dior, a then-unknown young designer working in the studio of John Malkovich’s Lucien Lelong, right

The actor portrays Dior’s general physical discomfort and embarrassment, but doesn’t give us even a hint of the intellectual firepower and young creative genius that made the House of Dior, by the time he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1957 , earned $20 million a year. years – a staggering amount for that time.

The New Look brilliantly evokes the Paris of the time – both the richly decorated rooms with scarlet Nazi banners and the dirty cobbled streets and tunnels of the Resistance.

Many of the places depicted are still those of today’s fashion world: in particular the Ritz, which is at the center of fashion during Paris Fashion Week, while several of the grand buildings with their beautiful stone staircases house household names, including St Laurent, Dior and Chanel.

The New Look is a visual feast, but more importantly, it is a lesson in the decisions that everyone in wartime – even the apparently most privileged – must make to survive.

The first three episodes of The New Look are now available on Apple TV+. The next episodes will be released every Wednesday until April 3.