Apple TV’s The New Look Sets the Record Straight, Kind Of

By Rhys Adams ‘26

“To choose a path forward, you must leave another behind.” Thus declares the world-renowned fashion designer Coco Chanel in Episode 4 of AppleTV’s The New Look at the narrative midpoint of the series in September 1944. Allied forces have liberated Paris from German occupation and Chanel, played oh-so-humanly by Oscar-winner Juliette Binoche, finds herself at risk of standing trial for pro-Nazi collaboration. We know her guilt is incontrovertible: onscreen she takes a Nazi officer, portrayed perhaps inappropriately suavely by Claes Bang, as her lover and works as a spy for the infamous Schutzstaffel (SS). The New Look follows both Chanel and Ben Mendelsohn’s Christian Dior as the seamster fights for the safety of his sister Catherine, a messenger in the French Resistance, and develops the series’s titular style that would come to define postwar European fashion. While Dior bribes Parisian functionaries and meets with antifascist partisans in darkened garages, the show also examines Chanel’s wartime days at the Ritz, drinking champagne with Heinrich Himmler and petitioning for the seizure of her perfume company from Jewish investors using the Nazi regime’s notorious “Aryan laws.” 

The historical events propelling the divergent lives of France’s two most famous couturiers sync up episode-by-episode, but Dior and Chanel’s arcs directly intersect only through fleeting references and barbs. Meanwhile, director Todd Kessler seeks to contrast Dior’s rise with Chanel’s fall, asking a host of historical queries in the process. As Dior and his boyfriend Jacques, played by David Kammenos, agonize over the fate of Maisie Williams’ harrowingly poignant Catherine, Chanel, along with Christopher Buchholz as the Baron Vaufreland, fall deeper into the Nazi web via a progression of suspicious decisions, some perhaps with individual plausible deniability, but in sum a damning reexamination of the two French socialites. Later, when Dior’s business-savvy confidante Madame Raymonde Zehnacker, portrayed by Zabou Breitman, thinks of leaving behind Lucien Lelong and Pierre Balmain, Dior’s boss and colleague respectively, the future king of couture argues that “war is ending” and calls for “life to begin anew,” masking his profound depression and trauma from the war. Will life ever go on as it once did? Were the fashion houses of Paris dancing on the graves of Holocaust victims? Chanel had no such qualms. 

One of the show’s greatest assets lies within its refusal to lecture its audience. While Nazi commanders and spies come across as unambiguous villains (a fair characterization), viewers turning to The New Look for a definitive moral judgment of Charles de Gaulle’s French Forces of the Interior, the uneasy European bourgeoisie, or even Winston Churchill will complete the program sorely disappointed. Not even the actions of Dior and his artsy friends escape implicit scrutiny. When Lelong assures his employees that “all of the work we did for or with Nazis, we did so that we could survive,” the statement hangs in the air, with the assembled group of couturiers unable to retroactively justify creating beauty amidst horrors. Hugo Becker, as Catherine’s turbulent, freedom-fighting boyfriend Hervé des Charbonneries, periodically serves as a moral gadfly, criticizing Dior’s cautious political posture. To hammer home the point, the horrors of the World War II era punctuate the first half of the series, but the show thankfully evades the drawn-out ‘trauma porn’ that a similar program may use to serve the development of a man like Dior. 

Especially in its later episodes, The New Look delves more intimately into the stylistic and professional competition between Chanel’s old-guard, who favored nonchalant 1920s wearability, and Dior’s newcomers, whose elaborate silhouettes promised the culmination of the feminine form. As such, below the personalities of the series lies a narrative of the takeover of women’s high fashion by male designers. Although The New Look views this era through the lenses of a Dior, a gentle, conscientious man and Chanel, a venal, fascist woman, the series’ upbeat depiction of the transition from interwar to postwar European haute couture leaves behind visionaries like Elsa Schiapparelli and Jeanne Lanvin. On the other hand, The New Look harbors no illusions of providing a comprehensive account of the French couture world from the 1920s to the 1950s; it is a character study, and in that capacity, the show succeeds and sometimes soars. 

Some standout moments from across The New Look’s ten hour-long episodes include guest performances from Emily Mortimer as Elsa Lombardy (based on the real-life Vera Lombardi) and John Malkovich as Lucien Lelong. Mortimer’s amoral but sensitive portrait of an Italian socialite and old friend of Coco left me as tickled as Lombardy left Chanel uneasy. I see no reason, however, why the show failed to properly explore the lesbian subtext between the two. Malkovich, contrastingly, leaves no room for the audience to relish the occasional absurdity of the show and its subjects; he strides and sighs through every scene with the weight of war, buried imposter syndrome, creeping irrelevance, and the expectations of his protegés. At its best, The New Look is Mortimer and Malkovich: witty, gritty, flawed, and despairing. At its most unexceptional, the series is a raw, if incomplete, reminder of the brutality behind history’s most recognizable beauty houses.