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PORTSIDE CULTURE

DIOR AND CHANEL SQUARE OFF IN THE MESSY THE NEW LOOK  
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Eileen Jones
February 21, 2024
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ Largely set in occupied France during World War II, the new Apple
TV+ series The New Look zeroes in on Christian Dior’s rivalry with
Coco Chanel — but it falls flat when it tries to handle Chanel’s
infamous Nazi sympathies. _

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_The New Look,_ a ten-episode series currently running on Apple TV+,
is such a dull muddle it’s bewildering, considering the lurid and
dramatic potential of the material. The narrative is framed by the
1947 feud between two major fashion designers, Christian Dior and Coco
Chanel, that’s rooted in their contrasting experiences surviving the
Nazi occupation of France during WWII.

Fashion designer feud? Legendary era of haute couture? Nazi-occupied
Paris? How can you make that boring?

Well, writer-director-producer Todd A. Kessler (_The Sopranos_) has
done it. The actors seem trapped in gradually hardening cement, trying
to bring the thing to life. Poor Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn,
who’s playing Dior, is fifty-four years old, older than Dior was
when he died at age fifty-two in 1957, and he looks every day of it.
Similarly aged-upward is the character of the prominent couturier
Lucien Lelong, played by John Malkovich looking ancient and ravaged in
pancake makeup. Lelong gets through the war by wrangling commissions
from prominent Nazis for the designers who toil for him. Nazis are the
only ones who can afford designer clothes in the conditions of
widespread privation in occupied France.

Dior was in his thirties during the war, but Mendelsohn plods glumly
through his role as a brilliant but oppressed fashion designer who is
the sole support of a Resistance fighter, his beloved younger sister
Catherine (Maisie Williams of _Game of Thrones_), who looks far more
like his daughter here. Dior’s extravagant ball gown designs
commissioned by the wives of Nazis create an income largely funneled
into her and her comrades’ dangerous missions to undermine Nazi
power. And his homosexuality makes him doubly vulnerable — the
consequences for being identified as such might very well mean death
in a concentration camp.

Meanwhile, Juliette Binoche struggles to fascinate as the spiky,
innovative, egomaniacal Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, but the entire
way the role is conceived is shockingly soft and sympathetic. It’s
pretty common knowledge by now that Chanel was no reluctant
collaborator with the Nazis. She was a right-wing nationalist,
furiously anti-labor, and she made manifest her vicious, outspoken
hatred of Jews, homosexuals, and communists. She admired Adolf Hitler.
Hell, why doesn’t anybody just say she was a fascist? Even the book
by Hans Vaughan, who did the research that exposed her work as a Nazi
agent carrying out missions for the Gestapo, has the strangely soft
title _Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War. _

But she wasn’t just sleeping with the enemy, she _was_ the enemy.
Give the woman some credit for feminist autonomy here.

She was actively working in the Nazi spy ring run by the Baron Hans
Günther von Dincklage (played by Claes Bang), whom she affectionately
calls “Spatz” for “Sparrow.” She lived at the Hotel Ritz,
which was headquarters for the Nazi brass in Paris. She only avoided
being charged as a collaborator after the war because of the
intercession of her pal Winston Churchill. She had many friends among
the British aristocracy, a number of whom had also been
Nazi-sympathizing antisemites and wanted that inconvenient fact
forgotten.

It’s awkward, of course, because Chanel No. 5 perfume is still a top
seller and the Chanel brand in general is ubiquitous. Coco Chanel
revolutionized women’s clothes in World War I by introducing
sportswear and casual wear. The wonderfully functional Chanel suit let
women move freely while looking fab. She gave us the concept of the
“the little black dress” that can be worn anywhere. Brilliant
woman. But absolutely pro-Nazi.

This makes the soft-pedaling of her character in the series a real
outrage. She’s introduced sympathetically pleading for the life of
her nephew, who’s about to be shot by Nazis and only survives
because of Spatz’s intervention. Then there’s her loss of control
over her perfume company, which she claims occurred when her two
partners, brothers Pierre and Paul Wertheimer, who were Jews, escaped
to America and somehow cut her off from any funds owed to her. The
series presents her collaboration with Nazis as an ugly descent into
treachery that was forced upon her as a vulnerable woman trying to
make it in a corrupt man’s world.

What’s left out
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that she was trying to wrest control of the Societe de Parfums Chanel
business away from the Wertheimers in 1941, using the Nazis
anti-Jewish laws prohibiting Jews from owning businesses. They
outmaneuvered her. Unless there are some big reveals to come in the
series, Chanel’s avidly fascist attitudes underlying her
collaboration are being glossed over.

Binoche does what she can to indicate Chanel’s steeliness underneath
the worldly, changeable, and occasionally charming surface of her
behavior. She brings a masklike implacability to the frame story of
the series set in 1947, featuring an older, harder, more epigrammatic
Chanel returning to Paris after her years in Switzerland. She’s
there to reclaim her supremacy in international fashion from male
designers she considers to be far less talented upstarts — Dior,
Cristóbal Balenciaga, Pierre Balmain, Robert Piguet, Jacques Fath.

Dior’s famous 1947 “New Look,” celebrated in this series as
representing a life-affirming embrace of beauty after the ugliness of
war, was distinguished by its extravagant exaggeration of the female
form. Signaling a return to opulence after the lean war years when
shorter, straighter skirts revealing a lot of leg had as much to do
with shortages of material as it did a celebration of more liberated
and athletic women, Dior’s long skirts belled outward from tightly
cinched waists and boasted lavish amounts of material. Of course, many
designs were memorably gorgeous, sumptuous, and elaborately detailed
dress-sculptures — his New Look creations. But they were also a
return to a more traditional emphasis on the hourglass figure that
became the visual representation of regressive 1950s conservatism in
gender ideology.

Dior’s New Look directly opposed Chanel’s lovely yet practical
body-liberating designs for women. And there’s the ideological crux
of the problem. How to appreciate her often commendable designs for
women and her impressive career while acknowledging her generally
loathsome personal and political identity? Surely, it’s not that
complex an intersection to negotiate, yet the series can’t seem to
work it out. Here’s Binoche’s all-too-tolerant take
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Chanel’s fervent support for the Nazis, which seems to reflect the
overall attitude of the series:

I read lots of books to prepare for the role, and I had to go back to
Chanel’s roots to try and understand why she behaved as she did
during the war. . . . She came from the kind of poverty in which
you’re born poor and die poor, and it was a time women didn’t get
a future. I think her need to survive came from her need for success.

But I’m not saying she was a saint. . . . My job as an actor is to
show the reality of her life during a dark and dehumanizing time in
history.

I wonder if we’d see the same sympathy in American mainstream media
for famous people who experienced poverty and became Stalinists?

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CONTRIBUTORS

Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of
the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.

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* World War Two
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* nazism
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* Fashion
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* apple tv+
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* Christian Dior
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* Coco Chanel
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