‘They give us beauty and magic’: why prestige
dramas about fashion are TV’s newest obsession
From a Cristóbal Balenciaga biopic to a look at
Christian Dior and Coco Chanel’s rivalry, stylish television is all the rage.
Brace for tabloid titilation, wild characters and tons of glamour
Ellie
Violet Bramley
Tue 13 Feb
2024 11.36 GMT
Couture and
public transport have very little in common, but the adage that you wait ages
for a bus and then three come at once has some current crossover. In January, a
drama series about the Spanish designer Cristóbal Balenciaga, and the 30 years
he spent working in Paris, premiered on Disney+. Hot on its heels comes Apple
TV+ drama The New Look, which lands this week, and chronicles Christian Dior
and his contemporaries as they navigate the second world war. Later this year,
Daniel Brühl (Good Bye, Lenin!, All Quiet on the Western Front) will play Karl
Lagerfeld in a series that has been given the working title Kaiser Karl and
will chart the late designer’s rise through the world of fashion in Paris in
the 1970s.
It’s
striking that a glut of TV not just about fashion, but the rarefied world of
high fashion, should be cutting a course for our screens in such a short space
of time. On one hand, the reasons why are obvious – the characters are
colourful and complicated and the clothes are beautiful. There are big egos and
even bigger hats, era-defining cuts and cutting rivalries. But on the other
hand, if it was that obvious, why hasn’t it happened before now?
This kind
of fashion TV feels like a departure. From America’s Next Top Model to Project
Runway and Next in Fashion, fashion on telly in recent times has often meant
reality. Or what the fashion writer Justine Picardie sums up as “shiny Saturday
night TV”, talkshows and Strictly, which isn’t ostensibly about fashion, but
getting dressed up. This new wave is, she says, “giving us beauty and magic in
a different way”.
Mid-century
fashion being the subject of these new series fits with what Helen Warner, a
senior lecturer at the university of East Anglia and the author of Fashion on
Television, sees as a “more general preoccupation with this time period in
terms of fashion history. We’ve moved from the elites in society dictating
style, as was the case in the 1800s, to a system where specific designers
define trends,” she says “There is a mythology around it and a certain amount
of mystique surrounding these figures.”
They are
also household names. Take Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel. She is, says Picardie, who
spent a decade researching her for a 2010 book called Coco Chanel: The Legend
and the Life, “one of the most famous figures in the world when it comes to
women”. Christian Dior, meanwhile, “was not only the most famous Frenchman in
the world”, but, in the aftermath of the second world war, “his name would have
been more recognisable probably even than Charles De Gaulle or Jean-Paul Sartre
because he becomes this enormous economic revival”.
Then there
is the fact that they were not only big names, but that many of them were also
big characters. Again, take Chanel. It is no surprise that The New Look, a show
whose name comes from the sartorial revolution that Dior inspired in
post-second world war Paris, is as much about her as it is about him. “She’s an
incredible character,” says Picardie. She adds spice, glamour and questionable
ethics to Balenciaga and The New Look, with the complicated picture of her
collaboration with the Nazis making for knotty viewing. In one scene in The New
Look, a perfectly cast Juliette Binoche knocks back cocktails and shoots out
witty lines while sitting next to Heinrich Himmler, the commanding officer of
the SS, at a dinner party.
These new
shows are highlighting what many fashion fans have long known – that fashion is
intrinsically shaped by its social, historical and political context. But also
that it shapes it. Once again, Chanel is a fitting example. “She influenced
modernism,” says Picardie. “Picasso called her the most intelligent woman in
Europe. She expressed modernism through the medium of clothing.” Rising to fame
during the first world war, “when women were really entering the workforce for
the first time”, she changed the way women dressed. “She gave herself dignity
[when] women didn’t have the sartorial dignity that was afforded to men through
tailoring.”
We cannot
kid ourselves that we are purely in it for the historical depth, though.
Audiences are nosy. “Of course, we will watch them for human interaction and
portrayal of the highs and lows of a kind of success that few of us know. But
we also love a bit of tabloid titillation,” says the fashion and identity
commentator Caryn Franklin – a former presenter of The Clothes Show, she knows
her way around fashion on the small screen. It shows us, she says, that “they
were just like us most of the time: sometimes marvellous, often deeply
competitive and insecure, and occasionally badly behaved but all the while
better styled and far better connected with stylish people than us.”
As to the
timing of it all, Warner flags that spikes in fashion film and television often
coincide with times of economic crisis. She points to a raft of Hollywood films
made during the Great Depression, such as Mannequin and Stolen Holiday, which
were “designed to facilitate tie-in opportunities with department stores” in an
attempt to boost the economy. “Right now, we find ourselves in a cost of living
crisis and climate emergency. Given that the contribution of the fashion
industry to global emissions is well documented, I wouldn’t discount the idea
that these shows are in part a response, and part an attempt to manage the
image of the fashion industry.”
Commerce is
greasing the wheels. These big brands have huge followings on social media –
Dior has 46 million, Chanel 60 million and Balenciaga a more modest 14 million.
Telly types will no doubt be wise to these metrics. “They are a big cultural
phenomenon,” says Picardie, “so maybe commissioning editors in the big media
streaming services thought: ‘Clearly people are interested.’” If any of them
are tempted to delve a little deeper, back to the Napoleonic era, which was the
backdrop to Louis Vuitton’s life, they may be interested to learn that his
namesake brand now has more than 55 million followers on Instagram.
Picardie
points to the effect of The Crown. Wildly popular, “it showed that people could
be interested in a different, alternative view of history”. In The Crown,
history is looked at through the “prism of British royalty”. In this new raft
of shows, history is looked at through the prism of high fashion. Why not use
the likes of Chanel, an incredibly complex, sharp-tongued and charismatic
character as a lens through which to retell a chapter in history that has been
told many times before? Or Balenciaga, whose camera-shyness has made him
something of an enigma in stark contrast to the stunt-y, viral-hungry clothes
of the current Balenciaga brand.
In both,
the lens alternates between zooming in on the particulars – the royal family
and the world of fashion respectively – and out, giving us the bigger picture.
In The Crown, there are episodes exploring the moon landings and the Aberfan
disaster; in Balenciaga and The New Look, we are given a view of life in Paris
under Nazi occupation. Particularly through the character of Catherine Dior,
Christian’s sister, The New Look delves into the story of the French
resistance, with Catherine’s part in it leading to her arrest in the French
capital in 1944, before she was tortured and transported to Ravensbrück women’s
concentration camp.
This isn’t
happening in a cultural vacuum. These stories are also being told in museums
and galleries around the world. Women Dressing Women, displaying the work of
French couturiers alongside contemporary designers such as Rei Kawakubo and
Simone Rocha, is now on at the Met in New York, while in Paris, the Musée des
Arts Décoratifs will be exhibiting the fantastical designs of Iris van Herpen
until April. It follows blockbuster exhibitions at the V&A. “The Dior show
was their biggest and most successful [fashion] show of all time, and so too
Chanel has been – the tickets sold out in two days,” points out Picardie. Bina
Daigeler’s costumes from the Balenciaga show were even made into an exhibition
in Madrid and there were, she says, long queues. “It was so busy that it
couldn’t have been just people who were interested in fashion – so, so many
visited.”
Looking to
fashion now might also provide clues. We are in the grips of fast, even
hyper-fast, fashion. Supercharged e-tailer Shein can decide on a product,
manufacture it and put it in the post to customers in less than three weeks. By
contrast, the painstaking and slow process of couture can take months. Daigeler
thinks that the beauty of this process and its fruits play a part. In a world
where fast fashion is the norm, “I think that makes it somehow now interesting
for people to watch what haute couture was.”
In a sense
the real question could be: why has it taken so long for these designers to
take their place on the small screen? “These are interesting figures who have
been sidelined and ignored,” says Picardie, whose initial research for Miss
Dior, a book about Catherine Dior, in 2011, met with no interest, while the
book would go on to become a bestseller upon publication in 2021. “It’s only
now that other forms of the wider culture are saying: ‘Oh yeah, maybe it’s
worth doing this – there will be an audience.’”
But for all
of the theorising, there is also a certain magic to these moments where culture
converges. Daigeler has seen it before. When she was working on Mrs America,
Hulu’s miniseries about feminism activist Gloria Steinem, there was also a
Steinem film in the making. “I think often it is just by chance, a
coincidence.” As she puts it: “I don’t know if it’s just something in the air.”
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