Apple TV’s flashy fashion drama about legendary haute couture designers during World War II cuts a weak silhouette of a story
Viewers are promised a lot in the first 15 minutes of The New Look. It’s 1955. We see glittering shots of twirling models bearing the ‘New Look’ line of the legendary Christian Dior (Ben Mendelsohn) as the fashion maestro holds court at the Sorbonne. Elsewhere, a cigarette-touting Coco Chanel (Juliette Binoche) hosts a fiery press conference to launch her first collection since the war.
When Dior is asked by an inquisitive student why he still made garments for Nazis’ wives in the 40s, while Chanel ‘did the right thing’ and closed her atelier, he replies: “There is the truth, but there is always another truth that lives behind it.” And so off to 1943, Nazi-occupied Paris, where a younger Dior looks out for his Resistance fighter sister Catherine (Maisie Williams).
Captions in the opening sequence promise to tell the “story of how creation helped return spirit and life to the world” after World War II. Unfortunately, The New Look never delivers on this bold claim and the series trots out of the gate, focused on Dior’s increasingly perilous quest to save Catherine, and Chanel’s role as a Nazi agent after being easily bought.
We're given a relatively interesting and accurate look at Parisian couture of the time and how these household names of fashion were ‘up against it' morally when the Germans landed. How it deals with this, however, is clumsy and at times tone deaf. The horrific backdrop of the Holocaust is essentially written out of the story, while glacial episodes with shapeless story arcs and threadbare characters do nothing to help an ailing plot. Often scenes feel pasted together and the series, created by Todd A Kessler, resembles a docu-soap, with onscreen text supplying banal exposition.
Despite strong performances from leads Mendelsohn, Binoche and Williams, what should be a strong cast often doesn’t make sense. Chanel is a generation older than Dior, but Binoche is only six years older than Mendelsohn, while baby-faced Williams resembles a daughter rather than a sister. Meanwhile, John Malkovich (who plays Dior’s boss Lucien Lelong) is underused, even though his terrible French accent at times veers into parody.
The prevailing message of the series is that “creation is our way forward”, but Mendelsohn’s Dior for the most part mopes around, wallowing in various setbacks before finally triumphing. Intended as the show’s protagonist, the designer's boring storyline differs vastly from the ‘exciting’ time Chanel was having, raising Champagne glasses with SS officers, seemingly without guilt or issue. Even after Binoche’s Herculean effort to inject some complexity to the character, viewers are still left scratching their heads as to the real reasons she had for collaborating with the Nazis.
Unlike the joyful escapism that fashion so often presents, The New Look is a tedious, rather insipid trudge through a poorly taught history lesson.
By Tom McGhie
Images courtesy Apple TV
The New Look is available to stream now on Apple TV.