’The New Look’ costume designer on recreating Christian Dior’s seminal silhouettes

In 1947, Christian Dior launched his fashion house with a collection that charmed and markedly changed the industry. Paris had been liberated from Nazi occupation three years earlier, while Dior’s own emancipation from Lucien Lelong, for whom he’d been designing since 1942, arrived in 1946. Labelled the ‘New Look’ by Carmel Snow, the acclaimed editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, the collection made a compelling argument for excess after post-war austerity. The bar suit in particular, comprised of an ivory, wasp-waisted jacket and full, pleated black skirt, was quickly championed for its dramatic new silhouette. Now, adopting its moniker from Snow’s baptism, a new ten-part drama from Apple TV+ titled The New Look excavates fashion history, tracing Dior’s professional and personal life during the Second World War and leading up to the New Look. 

’The New Look’ on Apple TV+

‘My grandmother used to talk about it,’ says the show’s costume designer, Karen Muller Serreau, recalling her introduction to Dior’s celebrated silhouette. ‘For her, the New Look had the feeling of future and hope.’ Conceived by Todd A Kessler, we first meet Dior (Ben Mendelsohn) backstage at the Sorbonne in 1955, where he is to give a speech to a hall full of enthusiastic design students. An audience question takes us back to 1943, and for much of the show’s run we’re privy to the hardships of occupied Paris, a restrictive environment that would ultimately provide the New Look its power. ‘I can understand how it brought hope to people,’ continues Muller Serreau. ‘We were building up to it as we worked, so when we came to the part with the bar suit, we felt like people then must have – a sense of wow, and this relief to have cloth and a full skirt.’

Running parallel to the Dior narrative, which sees him crafting party frocks for Nazi officer’s wives (a way for him survive the war), drinking with his contemporaries Pierre Balmain and Cristóbal Balenciaga, and worrying about his sister Catherine (Maisie Williams), imprisoned at a labour camp for her efforts in the French Resistance, is the story of Coco Chanel (Juliette Binoche). While Lelong kept his atelier open for the duration of the war, Chanel shut up shop, supposedly as an act of patriotism, though the show depicts the couturier living at The Ritz where she conducts an affair with a Nazi agent. The rest of The New Look charts the pair’s rivalry, and the changing fortunes of their eponymous houses. On-screen, clothing is largely employed as a vehicle for storytelling, while fashion and creativity are presented as a means for survival, as Mendelsohn’s Dior announces at the Sorbonne. 

Binoche and Williams’ characters in particular were the most fun to dress, says the costume designer, while Chanel was also the most challenging. ‘There aren't many pictures from during that period in her life, so it was [a question of] looking at before and after for inspiration,’ she notes, ‘[of] trying to get the essence and feel of her right, but not have her wearing what everybody knows.’ Chanel’s own rulebook was a valuable tool, and the designer’s famous directive to remove the last piece of jewellery you put on was frequently followed. ‘Catherine’s really interesting too, because she’s Dior’s sister and had been his model in her younger days,’ adds Muller Serreau. ‘But she’s then working for the resistance, so wanting to disappear, not be noticed in the outside world. It was always about pulling her back and making her sort of ordinary. She goes through several stages, so building the character was good fun.’

This disparity between the high glamour world that Dior and his peers were creating and the reality of war time, and subsequently Dior’s New Look and the rich attire of the editors who attended his debut, was keenly observed during production, says Muller Serreau. ‘There was this real contrast all the time, from wartime to a fashion show. That was kind of interesting,’ she explains. ‘I'd go from one part of the workshop where we were working on skimpy, dull-coloured outfits and then at the other end, there'd be these beautiful satin and silk things being worked on. We only had two scripts at a time, so we didn't ever quite know what was going to happen afterwards. We were always surprised.’

The New Look is available to stream on Apple TV+ now.

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