How Chanel and Dior went to WAR
She collaborated with the Nazis, he tried to save his Resistance fighter sister from their evil clutches. Now a new show follows the two legendary designers’ lives in Occupied Paris
As German tanks rolled into the French capital on 14 June 1940, no one was thinking about fashion. For decades Paris had been heralded as the style capital of the world, but as the Nazis swarmed into France all the colour and verve that had characterised the nation slowly gave way to the grey ugliness of war.
Yet even as the dark days of Occupation unfolded, an extraordinary group of people were fighting to bring Paris once more into the light. Now a forthcoming Apple TV+ series, The New Look, featuring a stellar cast including Juliette Binoche, Glenn Close, John Malkovich and Ben Mendelsohn, explores how iconic designer Christian Dior along with contemporaries such as Cristóbal Balenciaga and Pierre Balmain helped launch modern fashion.
And then there was Coco Chanel – lauded for her creations but whose hugely controversial actions during the war have cast a pall over her reputation. ‘The details of what defined them in their personal lives, the forces that shaped them, the specific choices they all made... this is what led to a cultural revolution that brought spirit and life back to a world decimated by the Second World War,’ says Todd A Kessler, the show’s creator.
Filmed in Paris in collaboration with the House of Dior, the luxury brand that still carries his name, the ten-part series focuses on Christian Dior (played by Bloodline’s Ben Mendelsohn), whose experience of the war was very different to Chanel’s. One of five siblings who hailed from a prosperous Normandy family, his fortunes changed after his businessman father lost his riches in the Wall Street Crash and his mother died of septicaemia in 1931 when he was 26. Working as a designer in Paris at this point, he brought his 14-year-old sister Catherine (Game Of Thrones star Maisie Williams) to live with him in the capital. Despite the age gap the two were incredibly close and she went on to model her brother’s early designs.
Events were to take a far grimmer turn after the
Nazis arrived. Some of the biggest names in fashion fled the country, and by 1942 Christian found himself working for the couturier Lucien Lelong (John Malkovich), who along with other designers was ordered to produce dresses for the wives of German SS officers. Catherine, meanwhile, joined the Resistance, setting up office in Christian’s apartment. After being betrayed by a fellow Resistance fighter in 1944, she was seized by four armed men who took her to an apartment and subjected her to the ‘bath torture’, plunging her naked into icy water and almost drowning her.
Christian desperately fought for her release but to no avail. Catherine was deported to Germany and taken to Ravensbruck concentration camp. While a prisoner working 12 hours a day in a munitions plant, malnourished and prone to disease, she still had the fortitude to sabotage the machinery.
After eight months she was sent with her fellow inmates on a death march as the Allied troops closed in. Eight days into the march, her spirit unbowed, she made a break for freedom. When Christian met her at the station on her return to France in May 1945, he didn’t recognise her.
Her fortunes couldn’t have contrasted more sharply with those of Coco Chanel (Juliette Binoche). Already hailed a genius for creating the little black dress and her Chanel No. 5 perfume, during the war she tried unsuccessfully to wrest ownership of Parfums Chanel from the Jewish Wertheimer family, using the ‘Aryanisation’ laws that forced Jews to give up their businesses.
Once the German Occupation of Paris began she took up with Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage (Claes Bang), a German military intelligence officer. It was Dincklage who introduced her to Baron Louis de Vaufreland, who allegedly promised to help free her nephew André who was being held in a stalag in Germany, in exchange for her services as a German agent.
Her most famous mission, named Operation Model Hat by the Germans, was to get a letter to Winston Churchill, a personal friend, to relay word that many senior Nazi officers were seeking an end to the bloodshed. But after travelling to the British Embassy in Madrid with a friend, she was forced to beat a hasty retreat when the friend denounced her as a Nazi spy.
A few months later when Paris was liberated she fled to Switzerland, returning to the French capital in 1949 to account for her actions during the war. She escaped unscathed after an intervention by the British Royal Family, but her reputation suffered greatly. As for Dior, the end of the war filled him with resolve to create a new, brighter future. He set up his own couture house in April 1946 and the following year his debut collection featuring cinched waists and full skirts so stunned Harper’s Bazaar’s editor-in-chief Carmel Snow (Glenn Close), she exclaimed, ‘Your dresses have such a new look!’ The New Look, as it was henceforth known, became the most sought-after style across the world. And the perfume he named Miss Dior after his sister went on to become a global phenomenon.
For her part Coco Chanel dismissed the work of her chief rival, who was gay, completely. ‘Look how ridiculous these women are,’ she remarked, ‘wearing clothes by a man who doesn’t know women, never had one, and dreams of being one.’ It’s a peach of a role for Juliette Binoche, who admitted recently that taking on the part was like ‘playing different roles because we’ll show her at different stages of her life’.
With costume designer Karen Muller Serreau pulling together a suitably stunning array of outfits, and a soundtrack that features covers of 20th-century songs by the likes of Florence Welch and Nick Cave, the series shows how a talented few brought hope, colour and life back to a world besieged by the drabness of evil. As Christian Dior himself said of his work, ‘Everything that has been part of my life, whether I wanted it to or not, has expressed itself in my dresses.’
The New Look,from 14 February, Apple TV+.