AFTER A FASHION
A TV series about Christian Dior and Coco Chanel adds a new dimension to the fashion-verse
IT’S QUITE A REVOLUTION, dear Christian! Your dresses have such a new look!” So gushed Carmel Snow, the legendary editor of Harper’s Bazaar, back in 1947, when Dior unveiled his first couture collection in Paris. The collection was dubbed Corolle, French for flowershaped, in a nod to the petals echoed in his voluminous skirts, which were paired with the so-called Bar Jacket to create a new silhouette, thus heralding the arrival of a designer set to change the world. Not to mention a template that soon became part of the very fabric of the beau monde.
Snow’s phrase, meanwhile, stuck – so much so that it serves as the title of an exhaustive new AppleTV+ series about Christian Dior and his contemporaries. The New Look, which launches Feb. 19, stars Ben Mendelsohn as the upstart Dior and Glenn Close as Snow, and it’s written and created by Todd Kessler, who contributed to series like Damages and Bloodline.
(Clearly, we are in for some fervid, psychological probing, in addition to padded hips and cinched waists.) According to the streamer’s description, it is “set against the World War II Nazi occupation of Paris … when the French city led the world back to life through its fashion icon Christian Dior,” and when his extravagant use of fabric represented a sumptuous pivot, and symbolic departure, from the austerity of the war years.
It’s an interwoven period piece, à la
The Crown, and a good swath of the 10-part series also involves the welltailored rivalry between the new missionary of glamour and its hitherto reigning queen, Coco Chanel (Juliette Binoche). The taffeta-loving Dior, inspired by the Belle Époque, is on one side; Chanel, the weaver of an understated elegance and popularizer of the little black dress, is on the other. This is the woman who once famously bristled: “Dior doesn’t dress women.
He upholsters them.” (The New Look is not the only series launching in 2024 that braids history and haute
couture: Cristobal Balenciaga, about the storied Spanish designer’s Paris debut, just launched on Disney+, and
the designer makes a cameo in The
New Look.)
As always, the fashion wars had a socio-political undertow. Dior’s sister and lifelong muse Catherine, a key member of the French Resistance, was captured and tortured by the Gestapo before she escaped from a concentration camp, while Coco was an intelligence agent for the Nazis.
The New Look, hopefully, will be just enough spectacle to keep bingers sated this winter, particularly since it promises to give good wanderlust. It was, after all, shot exclusively in Paris last year, with 30 Avenue Montaigne (the address of Dior’s headquarters) playing a central role. The soundtrack promises to be a feast, too: It has a range of artists, from Nick Cave to Lana Del Rey, covering songs from the early- to mid-20th century.
A New Look, but also a fresh take. Get ready for another bow, Monsieur Dior! –Shinan Govani