REVIEW: ‘The New Look’ Season 1 Is Handsomely Dressed But Hollow

Created by Todd A. Kessler, The New Look Season 1 is something of a mixed bag. An editorialized, glossy look at fashion history and iconography, the series is handsomely dressed even if it lacks a vital, beating heart. Despite these characters’ trials and tribulations, there’s a critical lack of introspection. The writing is too willing to rest on pretty. Telling the story of Christian Dior’s rise to fame, the drama series has plenty of exciting notes. But the series never graduates from anything more significant than a straightforward biopic.

The series follows Christian Dior (Ben Mendelsohn) during World War II and afterward when he creates his fashion line. The line in question would go on to be known as ”New Look.” Setting the stage is commentary by Dior in front of a student audience and Coco Chanel (Juliette Binoche) to an interviewer. Both have opposing views towards women’s fashion and lived different lives during the war in an occupied France. Chanel is derisive towards Dior, vitriolic, and nasty. She claims that Dior ruined French couture.

But fashion is just one small part of the overall series. The New Look seeks to find truths behind these two icons. Their fashion highlights their differences from the start. Dior sought extravagance and beauty in his designs, especially post-war, to return light to darkness. His designs accentuated femininity with cinched waists and full skirts. In comparison, Chanel favored accessibility, simplicity, and accommodating movement. These ideals fuel Mendelsohn and Binoche’s performances. The former plays Dior as reserved and tightly wound as he harbors his many secrets. Meanwhile, Binoche lounges and fills space.

Again, though, The New Look hardly highlights fashion. Instead, the series focuses on the characters’ interior lives. Dior’s sister, Catherine (Maisie Williams), is a French resistance fighter who is captured and sent to a work camp. Meanwhile, Chanel makes the Ritz her home with her Nazi lover. The New Look Season 1 offers further insight into her life during these years as she fought for survival by undermining her soul. Shrewd, selfish, and self-made, she’s a complicated figure. However, the series is often forgiving towards her despite her many transgressions. Her antisemitism is depicted in how she engages with Nazis to satisfy her wants and needs, but the series takes pains to highlight how vocal she was about women’s rights, too, as if it can help balance her crimes.

It all plays it too safe. The brutality of the war is only partially seen, lacking decisive direction. Instead, the filmmaking mixes gloss and shakiness, creating something wobbling yet artificial despite the former trying to add an edginess to the series. Early on in the series, a list of famous fashion designer names rolls across the screen in opulent fonts, and it’s a strong indicator of the hollowness this series relies on. It all looks nice, but it has a similar effect to looking at a fashion spread. Where’s the light and humanity to make it something more than a pretty picture?

The performances do their best to imbue The New Look with a spark of life. Mendelsohn is, unsurprisingly, superb. He brings the right level of gravity to a man who lives his life through the beauty of his work. Closeted, Dior’s unable to engage in romance beyond the safety of shadows. Mendelsohn delivers a performance that implies that Dior’s truth came from his creations. Similarly, even when the script waffles on how it wants to depict Chanel, Binoche maintains composure as a woman whose success is hard-earned. She’s a mess of contradictions, enraged that a lover would’ve left her despite having been setting him up for capture.

Maisie Williams is suitable, even if she struggles with the French accent. Catherine is by far one of the more intriguing characters in the series. Similarly, John Malkovich as Lucien Lelong, Dior’s former employer, offers an array of subtleties to a character who fears for his survival and feels the burden of guilt over what that means. All of these characters are wonderfully complicated as Dior and Lelong design dresses for Nazi wives and girlfriends during the war. But the series never matches the rich character possibilities with the necessary vigor. It’s all got too much of a sheen.

Unsurprisingly the costumes are stunning. Both the recreations of Dior’s own work and the costuming for the characters themselves shine. And it all adds to the characterization better than the writing does. The suiting immaculately depicts these characters and their distinctive styles with flair and attitude, ensuring we understand their personalities even while the writing struggles to find compelling, flattering, angles.

The New Look Season 1 will undoubtedly offer something to fashion aficionados and those seeking out greater insight into the designer titans. But the series suffers from the biopic trappings that fail to enliven or engage with the enriching story it’s telling. There’s plenty of material here, but the final product is listless.

The New Look Episodes 1-3 are streaming now on Apple TV+.