The New Look (2024), Episode 1

If you have Apple TV+, boy are you in for a treat. The Dior biopic The New Look (2024) dropped a week ago, and I am here to tell you that you should drop everything and watch it. I was intending only to do an overview of the show, but after watching a single episode, I realized I really needed to do one post per ep in order to really dig in and do the costumes justice.

Starring Ben Mendelsohn as Christian Dior, and Juliette Binoche as Coco Chanel, the show focuses on their messy relationship during the Second World War and Nazi occupation of France. Maizie Williams plays Dior’s sister Catherine, who is a resistance fighter in Nazi-occupied Paris, while her older brother and his rival, Chanel, are shown trying to navigate the difficult politics of the time.

Neither Dior nor Chanel are completely without taint, as both worked for Nazis during the occupation, but history has usually been very quick to point out Chanel’s “collaboration” with the occupying forces, while Dior escaped relatively unscathed by historical standards. In fact, as a historian of fashion history, I remembered really only that Chanel was the couturier for the Nazi elite in Paris during the war and honestly did not realize that Dior also had dealings with the German occupiers. I also expected the series to judge Chanel far more harshly than Dior, expecting Chanel to be set up as the bad guy, and yet that assumption was pretty thoroughly subverted.

So, what I’m trying to get at is that, plot-wise, this is not some cut-and-dried “Chanel = bad; Dior = good” situation. Neither are totally without blame, but both are sympathetic at times.

With all that out of the way, what about the costumes? Karen Muller Serreau, who designed the costumes for The Serpent Queen (2022), helmed the costume department for this series. With a mix of archival clothing and bespoke costumes made for the show, the costuming is positively exquisite.

The first episode starts in 1955, eight years after Dior has debuted his revolutionary “New Look,” at a lecture and fashion show at the Sorbonne (so great is Dior’s influence by that point that he warrants a sold-out crowd at the 800-year-old university). However, a young woman in the audience asks him during the Q&A about whether or not it’s true that he made gowns for Nazi wives and girlfriends during the war. The hostess attempts to deflect, but Dior insists on answering the question honestly, and we are immediately transported back to 1943, during the height of the occupation of Paris, where we see Dior waiting in line for rations, while his sister runs afoul of some Nazi soldiers and is attacked in an alleyway, being saved at the last minute by her resistance compatriots.

The episode weaves Chanel’s story during the same period with Dior’s, both “surviving” in Paris during the Occupation, and both doing what they justify as needing to be done in order to survive — albeit luxuriously compared to the average Parisian. Chanel is being courted by the Nazis for reasons that are slowly revealed throughout the first episode — essentially, the Nazis want Chanel to reopen her house in Berlin to establish a Nazi couturier to dominate the global fashion market (sounds bonkers, but this is documentable). Dior becomes involved when the Nazi forces (spearheaded by Himmler) select him, Balmain, and Balenciaga, to create designs for the girlfriend of a high ranking Nazi official, with the aim of stocking Chanel’s design house with new talent. So yeah, if you want to nerd out about early-mid-century couture during a really dark time in history, this is basically your show.

Are you watching The New Look (2024)? Let’s talk about it in the comments!