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On Monday evening along Madison Avenue in Manhattan, while fashionistas on the Upper East Side finished their shopping rounds at Dior and Chanel, a crowd headed to the French Institute Alliance Fran\u00e7aise to attend the premiere of an Apple TV+ series that recounts the origin story of those two fashion houses through the tale of Coco Chanel and Christian Dior\u2019s lives in war-torn Paris during the 1940s.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe New Look<\/a>,\u201d which starts streaming today, is a period drama that portrays the rivalry between Chanel, who is played by Juliette Binoche, and Dior, who is played by Ben Mendelsohn. The show chronicles how these two figures were shaped by the moral challenges of life in Nazi-occupied Paris and how they managed survival and self-preservation. The war\u2019s effect on Crist\u00f3bal Balenciaga, Pierre Balmain and Pierre Cardin is also explored.<\/p>\n The series depicts portrays Chanel\u2019s well-documented collaboration<\/a> with the Nazi party: her use of Aryan laws to try and oust her Jewish business partners, her romance<\/a> with a high-ranking German officer, and her participation as a secret agent assigned to a covert operation, Modellhut (\u201cmodel hat\u201d), that tasked her with delivering a message to Winston Churchill. Her younger and striving rival, Dior, resentfully makes evening gowns for the wives of Nazis, while his sister, Catherine, is sent to a concentration camp after her arrest as a resistance fighter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n During red-carpet interviews inside the French Institute, the show\u2019s cast reflected on the challenges of playing the characters.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI read lots of books to prepare for the role, and I had to go back to Chanel\u2019s roots to try and understand why she behaved as she did during the war,\u201d Ms. Binoche said. \u201cShe came from the kind of poverty in which you\u2019re born poor and die poor, and it was a time women didn\u2019t get a future. I think her need to survive came from her need for success.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut I\u2019m not saying she was a saint,\u201d Ms. Binoche added. \u201cMy job as an actor is to show the reality of her life during a dark and dehumanizing time in history.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Mendelsohn, paying homage to his character, wore a brown Dior suit and Dior black leather derbies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe show looks at what these French fashion titans went through in the war,\u201d Mr. Mendelsohn said. \u201cWhat they endured, triumphed at and failed at. Everyone has some sense of themselves and what they stand for, but until reality meets you, you don\u2019t really know what you stand for.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Jack Antonoff, who produced the show\u2019s soundtrack, said: \u201cWhat I wanted to capture with the music was that whatever humans are going through, whatever joys or horrors, they feel the need to create. In this case, these designers made fashion in the face of an occupation.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Antonoff opened the lapel of his gray Martin Greenfield<\/a> suit jacket and pointed at its label.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was a Holocaust survivor,\u201d Mr. Antonoff said of the nonagenarian master Brooklyn tailor<\/a>, who was sent to Auschwitz as a teenager. \u201cI\u2019ve worn his suits for a while now. Wearing his suits always feels resonant for me.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Soon the crowd settled into the theater to watch the series\u2019 first episode. In opening remarks, the show\u2019s creator, Todd A. Kessler, announced that Dior presented his first collection<\/a> in Paris 77 years ago that day. Then he led the ovation for the show\u2019s seated cast, which included John Malkovich, who plays the couturier Lucien Lelong; Maisie Williams, who plays Catherine Dior, the fashion designer\u2019s sister; and Glenn Close, who plays the Harper\u2019s Bazaar editor Carmel Snow.<\/p>\n After the screening, the crowd walked through the cold to a nearby after-party at The Pool<\/a>, a restaurant that occupies part of the old Four Seasons<\/a> space in the Seagram Building. The room\u2019s metal chain curtains shimmered as guests swayed to D.J.s while plucking hors d\u2019oeuvres like hamachi crudo and chickpea fritters from trays.<\/p>\n As it happened, the specter of World War II history had followed them to the party: The landmarked interior was designed in the 1950s by the architect Philip Johnson<\/a>, a Nazi sympathizer who attended rallies in Germany as a young man. But while the crowd danced and snacked on stracciatella toast, the brutish realities of the past no longer seemed to be in the air.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n