I finally watched the remaining three episodes of Apple TV+’s The New Look (2024), and it took all the way until the last 10 minutes of the final episode to get to the dresses. The dresses that were the entire reason I started watching this show, mind you.
Dior’s historic debut collection, bestowed with the name “The New Look” by Carmel Snow, editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, is legendary fashion history fodder. When I was doing my undergrad degree in clothing and textile design, Dior’s 1947 New Look collection was flogged to death in the texts and lectures as being, like, the most important moment in fashion history ever. As someone who is 100% on Team Elsa Schiaparelli, I begged to differ, but ok, there really is no denying that Dior did this new thing that sprang out of the horrors of war-torn Paris and injected youthful elegance back into the world of haute couture (all while reintroducing corsets and crinolines back into female fashion).
I know I sound flippant about The New Look, and that’s because I can respect what Dior did while not needing to valorize it. And this show was 10 tedious episodes of watching Ben Mendelsohn flog himself relentlessly as he experienced STRUGGLES and SET BACKS in bringing his historic collection to fruition, all the while surrounded by characters who had WAY more struggles and set backs flung at them in far more dire ways, but somehow we are supposed to empathize with the tortured (male) genius? I’m sure Dior’s life wasn’t a cakewalk, but after seeing his sister (played by Maisie Williams) go through some absolutely awful shit after being captured by Nazis and sent to a concentration camp, then having the scene cut away to Christian and a bunch of his (male) fashion designer friends sitting in a cafe and fretting about how to perpetuate fashion during rationing … like … I dunno, man. After a while, it all started to become increasingly absurd, and yet the show just doubles down on giving equal weight to fashion designers in competition with one another and people being tortured by Nazis.
And, I’m dropping this edit in here after the post has already gone live, but DUDE. THIS ANNOYS ME SO MUCH. In one scene in the last ep, Chanel is in tense negotiations with the Jewish businessmen brothers who own the rights to her fragrance line (note for everyone: the real money is in fragrance, not fashion). It finally comes to a head when one of the brothers (ugh, I don’t even care which one, anymore) confronts her face to face about her Nazi collaboration and the fact she hates Jews, and she spits out some retort to him about how everyone suffered under Nazism, and she was only doing what it took to survive, but… and this is the kicker… she basically said that she, a Christian woman, had more in common with the Jews than he realized. She saw the coming of Nazism, equating it to how men treat women, and said that the difference was that she wasn’t surprised when it happened because she’s been used to the way the patriarchy fucks over women for, like, all of human history. And while that was a whole thing to swallow, the show then ends with the fashion show at the Sorbonne that it opens with and there’s this girl who is trying to get Christian Dior to admit that he too collaborated with Nazis during the Occupation, and he just waves it off as “We all did what we had to survive,” which, I SHIT YOU NOT, is the same thing that the famous actress Arletty basically says in Episode 4 right before she’s hauled off to have her head shaved for fucking a Nazi officer. It’s the same thing we’ve spent TEN FUCKING EPISODES hating Chanel for doing. But… Dior was just trying to survive, guys, m’kay?
And the real annoying part of all of this was that there really wasn’t any fashion to speak of, until the very end. Yes, from the standpoint of “everyday wear of the fashionable elite in the late-1940s” this show knocks it out of the park. But COME ON. You rope me into this show with the promise of some delicious eye candy and then hold out on me until the last 10 minutes of the last episode? WTF, dude. Uncool.
Anyway, enough of my ranting, let’s talk about the final handful of minutes that deliver everything I’ve been waiting for for 10 freaking episodes. How did the show recreate the costumes in Dior’s 1947 debut collection? Costume designer Karen Muller Serreau spent quite a bit of time researching the pieces she and her team were to recreate for the finale in the Dior archives. There were no extant garments loaned for the series, much to my surprise.
“We were looking at any photos from that period, magazine cuttings and the drawings, and then trying to really work out with the help of Dior, who have an understanding of the absolute shapes of what he was doing,” Serreau explains. “So that was them measuring up waistlines and things to try and get it as exact as The New Look fashion show was at that time.”
Karen Muller Serreau, Elle Magazine
In closing, I thought the show was probably about four or five episodes too long. It really bit off way more than it could chew, trying to juggle the disparate storylines of Chanel and her Nazi collaboration and attempts to get her perfume business back from the evil clutches of the Jewish businessmen she detested, and Christian Dior’s far more sedate lifestyle in post-occupation France, along with his sister Catherine’s story of heroism and survival (which, seriously, should be made into its own miniseries). It wasn’t a bad show by any means … it was just trying to do too much and it felt like it lost its identity along the way.
Have you seen The New Look (2024)? Tell us what you thought of it in the comments!
I’d be interested to know why they settled on “The New Look” as the title. If they’d titled it “The Life of Christian Dior” you wouldn’t have gone in expecting it to be focused on 1947.
Equating the suffering of a woman sent to a Nazi concentration camp with the suffering of a man angsting over his collaborating with the Nazis while his sister is in a concentration camp is definitely an interesting take.
Coco’s speech reminds me a little of the 1999 Mansfield Park, with the “status of women = slavery” viewpoint.
Glad they got to the eye candy at the end though.
I do have to say I REALLY hope you can get to review the Balenciaga series, because that really was amazing all round and I’m kind of hoping you’ll appreciate it. Plus, Schiaparelli has a fabulous and very memorable cameo in it.
Ah yes, that one aired on Disney, & we don’t subscribe to that streamer, so we’d have to do a one-off to review it. So, maybe?
I really was hoping for more fabulous frock content focusing on how Dior came up with all his designs? But C’est La Vie!
I haven’t watched this series yet, but I might. I LOVE Juliette Binoche and John Malkovitch as actors; and I like what little I’ve seen by Maisie Williams and Ben Mendelsohn. I’m pretty new to AppleTV and have been impressed by the quality of its shows. So, I’ll probably watch it eventually. I’m glad to have your reviews in order to temper my expectations re fashion content. Without it, I would’ve expected something along the lines of House of Elliott.
Because you mentioned that the real money is in the fragrance not the fashion, I have to say that most of what I know of the old fashion houses comes from an early 2000s coffee table book I found at a bargain store called “Fragrance and Fashion.” Thirty fragrance companies that sprang from design houses each have a 4-page spread featuring info, ads, and other great pictures. Even though it was “only” a coffee-table book, it was an informative and fascinating read.
For the record I HATED this show, which is hard to accomplish with Juliette Binoche AND Maisie Williams in the same project.
Chanel’s rant at Pierre wasn’t presented as the monstrously self-centered garbage it really was. Jews were murdered by the millions and she thinks she suffered just as much because she lost control of her perfume business?
I agree, Catherine deserves her own series, but according to her biographer, so little is known of her experiences that it would be difficult to flesh out a script.
And the fashion show should have been much longer.
I feel as if I can just skip to the end of the last episode. I saw the first and started getting a little too anxious, and hadn’t watched more, and like you, the only thing I care about is the clothing. Heaven knows that conflict is required for convincing drama on stage or on film, but there’s enough anxiety producing activity in real life that I’m wanting complete escape for my viewing pleasure these days.
I don’t feel at all sorry for Chanel, but I think that in general female geniuses don’t get cut as much slack as their male counterparts. I remember a review of the film about Chanel’s affair with Stravinsky which made a lot of Chanel’s bad behavior but not Stravinsky’s (which was equally bad if not worse). Apparently male geniuses don’t have to be good human beings, but women geniuses do.