The New Look (2024), Episode 4

The war is over in The New Look (2024)! Paris is liberated! Chanel thinks she can over-compensate with patriotism, and no one will notice that she was collaborating with Nazis!

Joséphine de La Baume plays the French actress Arletty, who had a very public relationship with a German officer during the Bad Times. Unfortunately for Arletty, you can’t just wear blue, white, and red and expect people to forget that you were literally in bed with the baddies.

Chanel is also up to her eyeballs in collaborator stain, and the French government (aided by MI6) are out to try to prove that the designer was more than just casually rubbing elbows with Nazis. After a tense interrogation with MI6 agents, requiring her to name-drop her good friend, Winston Churchill, Coco decides to leave Paris for Switzerland, taking with her her nephew and his daughter, Gabrielle.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Paris, there’s a shortage of fabric because the Nazis destroyed every textile mill in the country. Lelong (John Malkovich) has a cunning plan, however…

Lelong continues to support his star pupil in any way he can, including giving him a bolt of silk to use as payment for informants who may know where Dior’s sister is being kept.

Lelong’s genius plan is to have the designers who are part of the collective create looks using 1/8 scale dolls, which will then be displayed at the Louvre instead of paraded down a catwalk in a fashion show. This allows everyone to use much less of the precious remaining stock in Lelong’s atelier.

Christian is struggling, however. He’s virtually paralyzed with worry over his sister’s fate, and when he suddenly is given a promotion in Lelong’s workshop, he feels overcome with guilt that his fortunes are starting to turn and yet he can’t locate Catherine.

Ultimately, he caves in and seeks the help of a clairvoyant, Madam Delaaye, after eschewing her offer of help at the start of the episode. She reassures him that all is not lost, and he eventually receives word that Catherine has been located at Ravensbrück and is being returned to Paris.

Overall, this episode had a lot more pretty things to look at, what with all of Paris seeming to burst forth in color after the Nazis were defeated. We get more colorful clothing and accessories on all of the characters surrounding Dior and Chanel, who are both wearing their typical dark-hued clothing. For Christian, it seems to reflect the seriousness of his situation and his anxiety surrounding his sister’s fate. For Chanel, well, she always was very monochromatic. Black dress, white pearls, lather, rinse, repeat.

Even Lelong adds a pop of color here and there amongst the somber gray and black suits.

Have you seen The New Look episode 4? Tell us about it in the comments!

More Frock Flicks

3 thoughts on “The New Look (2024), Episode 4”

I haven’t seen the show, but I’ve seen the little fashion dolls many times. Starting when I was a child in the 1960s, my mother would drive us to the Maryhill Museum to look at the various exhibits and that’s where those little dolls were for decades. Eventually the museum even build beautiful sets and rotated the dolls to minimize light damage to the fabrics. The couture clothing and accessories were so beautiful. Now they occasionally tour part of the exhibit so others have a chance to see them.

Fran in NYC says:

March 21, 2024 at 11:09 am

Some of the dolls went to the Brooklyn Museum and now they and the whole costume collection are with the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute. I saw them on exhibit when the consolidation was announced and the Met had an exhibition of the newly added collection.
1. Daniel Milford-Cottam says:
  
  March 22, 2024 at 1:18 am
  
  Those are a closely related but separate set of dolls called the Gratitude Train dolls, made in 1948 as part of a French gift to the USA and representing different eras of fashion from around 1715 to 1906. They have quite a story, but as I understand it, the surviving dolls (5 or 6 have gone missing over the years) have been quietly transferred back to Brooklyn by the Met

Comments are closed.