Stylish Streaming: "New Look"

 
If you expect a lovely romp through fashion, be warned. "New Look" (in 4 of the 10 episodes released at this writing) is about war. Not the war between competing fashion houses for the acclaim and the business, but WWII, that one.       

Spoiler alert not needed as we are dealing with real people and real events. The disclaimer "inspired by true events" should be warning enough that all we are about to see is not historically accurate. 

1930s Chanel designs

Chanel, 1930s

 I'm not a scholar of Chanel or Dior but have read enough on both of them to sense that sometimes in "New Look" inspiration went into the cornfield. No doubt two of the most recent books served as jumping off spots—Justine Picardie's "Miss Dior: A Story About Courage and Couture" on Christian and his sister Catherine, a member of the French resistance who paid a hefty price, and "Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War" by Hal Vaughan.

The "New Look" of 1947

Christian Dior, same year

I might quibble that Chanel and Dior would appear in greater clarity if some effort had been made to give us background. Dior's family was comfortably well-off. His father had made it big in fertilizer. Chanel led a hardscrabble life to get where we see her here, a tale familiar to some but perhaps not all.

1930s Lelong designs

Lucien Lelong

More backstory on Lucien Lelong, Dior's employer, would have helped. Lelong was Chanel's rival as the premier French couturier in the 1930s. It's not entirely clear in "New Look" that he really was a good guy. When the Nazis threatened to move all the couture houses to Berlin, Lelong negotiated to keep them open and in Paris, saving hundreds of jobs. On the other hand Chanel had decided to shutter her business in 1939 (not mentioned in "New Look") and spent the rest of WWII living in the Ritz hotel.

Chanel's  character is the most unclear. The story begins in 1943 when she is 60. She might have been a great coquette in her youth, yet she is treated here as a femme fatale, especially by a much younger looking Nazi general. She also seems flummoxed by what is happening to her. What I've read is that if anything Chanel was determined, egotistical and above all a survivor. Wishy washy she was not.

Ben Mendelsohn as Dior, Juliette Binoche as Chanel

 
Early on we see Chanel grousing that her business partners, the Wertheimers, had run off to New York ahead of the Nazi invasion of France and "stolen" her company. She lobbied with the Nazis to get it back by agreeing to visit her old friend Winston Churchill in Madrid with a plan to end the war. In an earlier subplot Chanel has paid the Nazis a hefty ransom to release her captured nephew.

Churchill with Chanel, 1920s

 
In reality when they took over, Chanel asked the Nazis, who were seizing Jewish-owned companies and property, to give the company to her as it had been "abandoned by the Wertheimers". Unbeknown to Chanel, however, the Wertheimers had sold the company to a French Christian on the condition it would be sold back to them after the war, which it was. She was not pleased to learn this, but—believe it or not—the Wertheimers still own Chanel to this day.

And the Winston Churchill plot? Yes, it happened, but the trade off was in order to free her nephew. She went; Churchill wasn't there, but the nephew was released.

The viewer with only a passing interest may take "New Look"'s plot as gospel. I've no idea what we will see in upcoming episodes, but I think it's important to remember the difference between historical fiction and fictitious history.