‘The New Look’ Review: Juliette Binoche and Ben Mendelsohn Play Coco Chanel and Christian Dior in Sumptuous Apple TV+ Series

Drinking through “another night of German-occupied misery,” as his friend puts it, Cristóbal Balenciaga (Nuno Lopes) reflects on the days left to come. “Some day this will all be over, yes?” he says. “And right now, you must ask yourself: When it is, will you be able to live with what you’ve done? Our choices, believe me, they matter.”

Apple TV+’s The New Look introduces itself as a chronicle of a watershed moment in French haute couture when, as a title card loftily informs us, “creation helped return spirit and life to the world” in the wake of World War II. But it proves less persuasive as a lesson in art or history than as a bittersweet reflection on choice, illuminated through two rivals cutting wildly different paths through the era: Christian Dior (Ben Mendelsohn) and Coco Chanel (Juliette Binoche).

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The New Look‘s initial draw lies in its superficial pleasures, starting with a character list that reads like a map of Rodeo Drive. There’s a thrill in watching Dior talk shop with his buddies Balenciaga and Pierre Balmain (Thomas Poitevin), or Chanel scoff that Dior “doesn’t deserve his praise,” simply because we know these names will endure. And as befits a drama about aesthetes, The New Look is handsomely produced. No expense has been spared in constructed lavish ballrooms or cozy ateliers or exquisitely detailed dresses, and each episode is capped off by the additional extravagance of a Jack Antonoff-produced cover song by a famous artist — Florence Welch’s “White Cliffs of Dover,” Lana del Rey’s “Blue Skies.”

But beyond the high-end trappings, creator Todd A. Kessler (FX’s Damages) presents Coco and Christian not as icons but simply as people, making painful, sometimes vile decisions. When we meet them in 1943, neither is much interested in getting involved in the war, though circumstances inevitably draw them in. Christian is still a nobody designing ballgowns under Lucien Lelong (John Malkovich) for a Nazi clientele, even as he provides money, shelter and moral support to his Resistance-fighter sister, Catherine (a heartbreaking Maisie Williams). Meanwhile Coco, having already built her reputation and her fortune before the war, first turns to her Nazi connections in a desperate attempt to save her beloved captured-French-soldier nephew — and then, increasingly, to enrich herself or save her own skin.

From the start, Coco and Christian’s arcs diverge so vastly that the two characters are only in the same room twice over ten hour-long episodes. Nevertheless, Kessler keeps their stories in conversation with one another through common themes, wringing intellectual and emotional power from the contrasts between their journeys. One moment we’re in a gloomy café with Christian, where he’s commiserating with a stranger over news reports about the horrors of the camps to which their loved ones have been sent. The next, Coco and her young grand-niece are breezing through a shopping district in Switzerland without a care in the world. The juxtaposition of their respective positions is downright stomach-turning.

Of the twinned portraits, Coco’s is the more easily legible, and The New Look threads the tricky needle of explaining her motivations without excusing them. Binoche is magnetic, but it’s a cold-blooded, opportunistic sort of charm. In the premiere, a handsome Nazi officer (Claes Bang) takes Coco “shopping” at an apartment seized from a wealthy Jewish family. For a second she looks troubled, gazing at photos of the previous occupants while musing darkly that “without wealth, without power, we’re all replaceable.” Then she sees a telephone she wants to take. Her eyes light up, and whatever qualms she might have had dissipate completely. Later, when the Nazis are no longer ascendant, Coco’s lengthy complaints about how offended she is at being labeled a collaborator — and how none of it was ever her fault anyway — spell out the mechanics of her self-justification.  

By contrast, Christian’s psychology is more complex and more haunting. Burdened by profound guilt for everything that befalls Catherine, he’d surely be the first to agree that she’s the real hero of this story. But he’s the show’s heart — fragile and frightened but fundamentally decent, in an intriguing break from the scuzzier, showier types that Mendelsohn has tended to specialize in (including on Kessler’s Netflix drama Bloodline). His Christian appears perpetually braced for punishment, with an apologetic French-accented murmur and hangdog expression. But as powerfully as Mendelsohn expresses Christian’s heartbreak or terror or regret, the scripts offer rather less insight into the thinking that allow him to channel all of this emotion into his craft.

Indeed, for all Christian and Lucien talk about how “creation is the way forward” from the pain of the war, both Christian’s drive and his process are left largely abstract in The New Look. (For her part, Coco is far more invested in commerce than art.) There are acknowledgments of the practical challenges he and other couturiers face, like the fabric shortage that led to the legendary Théâtre de la Mode exhibition of miniature dresses. But the drama offers little sense of how Christian relates to his work, or of why his designs were so revolutionary. There is almost no analysis of Dior and Chanel’s output within a larger cultural context, beyond characters like Harper’s Bazaar editor Carmel Snow (Glenn Close) explaining vaguely that “fashion needs a new leader.”

Perhaps The New Look presumes we don’t need that element. The first season ends on a moment of triumph for Christian as he launches the widely celebrated 1947 collection that gives the series its title, and one of apparent defeat for Coco as it seems her secrets might finally catch up to her. Tempting as it might be to celebrate her comeuppance, however, we know perfectly well that the truth will not crater her name or her business, as she fears; in 2024, Chanel remains one of the most highly coveted luxury brands in the world, and its founder’s Nazi ties only a hazily remembered bit of trivia. All the same, we’re left with the sense that this is history worth knowing — if not for the sake of Christian and Coco’s legacies, then for our own, as we consider our own choices in our own fraught era.