High fashion clashes with Nazi collaborators in Apple TV+ series “The New Look”
“The New Look” combines the rise of high fashion with questions about Nazi collaboration among its stars during World War II.
The Apple TV+ series follows the modern world of French fashion through the eyes of famed haute couture designers Christian Dior (Ben Mendelsohn) and Coco Chanel (Juliette Binoche) in the midst of Nazi-occupied Paris and how they and their compatriots dealt with that ordeal. With different shades of complicity.
Written by Todd Kessler (“Bloodline”), “The New Look” co-stars John Malkovich as Lucien Lelong, Dior’s first president; Maisie Williams as Catherine, Dior’s sister who fights in the French Resistance; Claes Bang As the Nazi operator Spatz, with whom Chanel collaborates; Emily Mortimer as Chanel’s mysterious friend Elsa Lombardi; and Glenn Close as the powerful Harper’s Bazaar editor-in-chief Carmel Snow.
Mendelsohn, Binoche and Malkovich spoke to The Post about their characters’ motivations.
When we first meet Dior, he is happy to work for Lelong and is somewhat mysterious about the Nazis, designing ball gowns for officers’ wives but refusing to meet any of them in person. But when Catherine is captured by the Nazis—and sent to the deadly Ravensbrück labor camp—Dior’s attitude toward war changes.
Mendelssohn: “[Getting Catherine back] It becomes his absolute raison d’être from that point on. She is his most adored sister, and she is his everything. I think it’s very painful for her, but they have a nice brother-sister relationship – and when she’s gone it’s a real nightmare for him. I think the cruelty and the efforts he put in to get her back… completely changes him and hurts him deeply.
Chanel has many gray areas: it bans Jewish business partners under the “Aryan Law” but is closing its store; He sleeps with Spatz but sets him up to be arrested; She lives at the Ritz with several high-ranking Nazis, but when she is targeted as a collaborator, she is distraught..
Binoche: “She had a kind of saying: ‘I don’t care about anything, I’m just living my life and I’ll never be poor again, and I’ll never be hurt by love.’” Her mentality was not moral, she had no external way of thinking that way. I tried to understand where she was coming from. She came, and the big trauma it left behind, and I wasn’t entirely surprised that she acted that way. Deep down, she hated the Germans, which is all the French did after World War I. There was no other way. So the fact that she got into that [collaboration] He was the real reason she was alive. That’s how I got it.”
Meanwhile, Lelong justifies his dealings with the Nazis by repeatedly saying that he keeps his workers employed.
Malkovich: “We are genetically and emotionally programmed to survive, and I think Lelong chose to survive. He made the compromises with the Nazis but then if you say, ‘No, we don’t design dresses for your wives and mistresses,’ what happens then? And I think places like [concentration camps] Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka and [Nazi] The Paris torture headquarters will tell you what happens next. People survived and wanted to forget about it after that.
Dior also wants to stay, but seems ambivalent about the Nazis.
Mendelssohn: “I would be very careful to draw on an additional ideological sense to his meta-thinking [collaborating]. He realizes all of this, and he’s not thrilled with the Nazis around, he’s alive and in danger, just…until Katherine comes back, that wakes him up. I can’t say it changes his broader world view.
Verdict on Chanel Re: Collaboration is strict In “The New Look”.
Binoche: “There are so many layers to her. What I tried to find and understand, so as not to judge her from the outside… is to look at her childhood, the great trauma in her life. They were the poorest family in the countryside at one time, at the end of the 19th century, where Conc. A poor woman is bad luck. Her mother died in front of her when she was eleven, and her father abandoned her children and never came back… I think this gave her a kind of freedom and a triumphant need to make her life something special – she would never be poor. And that’s why She said: “Without money, you are nothing.” She understood that in this world you have to fight.
New episodes of The New Look premiere every Wednesday on Apple TV+.