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The trailer for Apple TV+’s The New Look is exhilarating. Flashbulbs pop. Models in exquisite gowns twirl. Janelle Monáe’s swaggering “Haute” blares. Ben Mendelsohn and Juliette Binoche, as Christian Dior and Coco Chanel, cast smoldering gazes at the camera. “Parisian couture could influence how thousands of ordinary women dream and live,” proclaims Glenn Close, in character as the influential Harper’s Bazaar editor Carmel Snow. Fans of not just fashion, but also lush period dramas must be counting down the days until the show’s Feb. 14 premiere.
What a shame it is that the 10-episode series bears so little resemblance to the ads promoting it. Nor does it quite deliver on the prefatory text that sets up the premiere: “This is the story of how creation helped return spirit and life to the world.” Framed as an account of Dior’s meteoric rise in the aftermath of World War II, The New Look is, in practice, a dull, morose, bafflingly executed trudge through Nazi-occupied France, as navigated by two of the most famous names in the history of fashion. The pace is sluggish and the characters thin. A-list actors and directors are wasted. Big questions about art and politics are left not only unanswered, but also largely unasked. If the show can be said to capture any spirit at all, it is one of generic wartime gloom.
The series opens in 1955. While Coco is firing off feisty quips to the press in advance of her first collection since Germany invaded France, Christian, the reigning king of Parisian couture, is addressing an audience of starstruck fashion students at the Sorbonne. But all anyone seems to want to talk about is his rival’s return. One young woman takes the microphone and asks: “Is it true that during the German occupation of Paris, Coco Chanel closed her atelier and refused to design dresses for the wives of Nazis, while you kept designing and making money?” The moderator tries to shut down the question, whose answer is technically…
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