The Big Picture

Todd Kessler discusses how
The New Look
‘s soundtrack evokes emotion and when Jack Antonoff joined the project.
Kessler is hopeful for the series to continue, with plans for five or six seasons.
Juliette Binoche discusses bringing to life Coco Chanel, and how trauma underscored her choices.

Todd Kessler is no stranger to bringing to life complex characters. After writing for The Sopranos, he went on to co-create Damages and Bloodline, and now he’s immersed himself in the garments and grit of The New Look. During the junket for the series, which focuses on Christian Dior (Ben Mendelsohn) and Coco Chanel’s (Juliette Binoche) lives during World War II, I made note of Kessler’s particularly keen skill at plucking at the threads of complex characters. Kessler seemed rather surprised by the praise, “Well, thank you for that. If it’s a compliment, I’ll take it.”

While World War II is a well-tread era for Hollywood, few have dared to explore what was happening in the fashion industry during this time, but Kessler has deftly peeled back the layers with a degree of nuance that makes for very compelling characters. I couldn’t help but ask him what drew him to this particular story, to which he explained:

”
For me, it started in 1997, really, with Christian Dior. It was the 50th anniversary of him launching his first collection in 1947, and I read an article in the newspaper about it.
It struck me as just a very unique moment in history where all of these designers — Dior, Chanel, Balenciaga, Balmain, Givenchy — they all knew each other and they all lived through the four-year-long Nazi occupation of Paris. And so while I knew the brand name Dior, I knew nothing about the individual.”

He went on to explain that his research into Dior picked up after his work on Damages and Bloodline. “In 2017, I turned my attention to the history of Christian Dior, and that very quickly led to my intrigue about Coco Chanel, because she was the world’s most famous fashion designer at the start of the war, one of the most wealthy women on the planet at the start of the war.” He continued, “I knew nothing about her as a person, and then found out that there is an extraordinary life that was lived and that she’s perhaps, in my experience, the most intriguing, complicated, fascinating character that I’ve come up to research, and to even just spend time thinking about to make sense of her life. So essentially, the research into Christian Dior led me to Coco Chanel, which then also led me to Balenciaga, Balmain, Catherine Dior, Lucien Lelong, and the war.” That research certainly paid off, as Mendelsohn shared during our discussion that something Kessler told him about the project got him to immediately say yes five years ago.

The New Look Explores the rise of fashion designer Christian Dior, as he dethrones Coco Chanel and helps return spirit and life to the world with his iconic imprint of beauty and influence.Release Date February 14, 2024 Creator Todd A. Kessler Main Genre Drama Seasons 1

Will ‘The New Look’ Get a Season 2?

While The New Look still has quite a few episodes left to air in Season 1, I can tease that the final episode ends in such a way that they could easily return for a second season to continue onward into the modern era of fashion. Last year, amid the strikes, a report by Variety revealed that there was a potential second season in the works for The New Look before Hollywood came to a standstill, so naturally the future of the series was one of my main questions for Kessler and di Bonaventura, the latter of which offered an optimistic answer: “We hope so.” Kessler, on the other hand, went into more detail about what he hoped to achieve with the series, should they secure a Season 2 renewal.

“Well, as with every show that I’ve created, the beginning feeling of, “Okay, we can get going now,” is that there is enough material for five or six seasons. And so there’s definitely enough material in following the history of Christian Dior, Coco Chanel. Past the end of the first season, their lives only became even more intriguing. And then there’s other designers that enter their worlds, including Yves Saint Laurent, who is a protege of Dior that Dior hires at age 19, and by age 21 Yves Saint Laurent has taken over the world’s most profitable, influential fashion house, which was Dior after he passes away. So there’s definitely material for five or six seasons.”

The Music of ‘The New Look’ Takes It to a New Level

As I noted in my review, one of the most intriguing aspects of The New Look is its soundtrack. But it’s more than just the wartime songs that Jack Antonoff curated for the end credits that makes the series’ auditory landscape so mesmerizing. It’s the way composer James S. Levine interwove those selected tracks throughout each episode’s scores to prepare audiences for those poignant songs, and the way that score works in tandem with the sound mix to push and pull at the audience’s heartstrings.

It’s something I made note of while watching and was eager to discuss with Kessler, who seemed quite pleased that I had picked up on their intentions with the soundscape. “It’s a great question, and it’s very gratifying to hear that you picked up on that because a lot of time and inspiration goes into creating those.” He said, before addressing a specific scene I highlighted in Episode 5. “Not only those transitions, but to bring an audience along emotionally—not dialogue, not music playing that is dictating exactly what you should feel, but to figure out ways to affect an audience emotionally. And so it sounds like it had an impact.” He went on to say:

“We spend a lot of time, every second, trying to use as many of our resources to provide an entertaining experience, be it emotional, thrilling, all of the things to get feeling from.
If we’re feeling it, we believe that an audience will feel it, and that moment specifically.
As you’re saying it, I just had a flashback to the sound makes where we’re adjusting all those dials to create that very specific moment for Dior where he doesn’t find his sister, and what that could feel like, where dialogue and words would fall short, and then also the transition to Coco Chanel who’s in a very different place.”

Di Bonaventura echoed those sentiments, adding, “We’ve both been really lucky to do a lot of entertainment, actually. When you see a show without music and without sound effects, you realize how much is missing. And so those two aspects, in a way, fill out. Different people have different theories of how much it represents entertainment, but our feeling is it fills out the entertaining experience, and so it’s a very important component, too. I think that when people just don’t really care about it, I think you’re missing a big point about how to move an audience.”

When asked about how early on Antonoff was brought onto the project, Kessler revealed, “We’ve been working with Jack for over close to two years now, so it was before we started production. We worked very closely with him in selecting the songs.” He went on to explain how the songs are meant to thematically match with each episode.

“Then also, it may be more experience on a second viewing, but that song that ends each episode is the basis of the score for the entire episode.
It’s been deconstructed, and so if you go back and watch once you get to the end and hear it as a full song, if you went back and watched the episode, you would realize, like, “Oh, that’s part of the melody of that song throughout the episode that’s then built.”
Measure by measure, the harmony is built, so by the end it culminates.
And it’s totally great if you haven’t sensed that at all and the song has an impact. I would suggest that it’s having even a greater impact because subconsciously you’ve been hearing it without identifying it all through the episode.”

How The Cast of ‘The New Look’ Became Those Complex Characters

In The New Look, Mendelsohn stars as the legendary designer Christian Dior, who navigates the tedious world of fashion amid the Nazi occupation of France, while his younger sister Catherine (Maisie Williams) risks life and limb to work with the French Resistance, fighting back against the Third Reich. As Kessler noted during our interview, The New Look is very much a series about both Christian Dior and Coco Chanel. While the Dior siblings experienced the horrors the Nazis wrought, Coco Chanel aided and abetted the Germans during the war.

When I spoke with Binoche about her portrayal of Chanel, she underscored how the trauma Chanel endured throughout her youth and her adulthood shaped her into the woman she was during the war. “She came into the war alone. She stopped everything when the Germans came to Paris during World War II. Then, I think that this relationship with Boy Capel cut her off from her emotions somehow.” She went on to say:

“[S]he went with artists, she went with aristocrats, and she went with Germans because there was always a way to hold on to different ways of surviving. And with Spatz it was related to the fact that he was staying, also, at the Ritz at the time when she came back to Paris, because that’s where she was living
before
the war, and she went back during the war at the Ritz, because that was her home. She called it her home.”

Be sure to check out all of my interviews with the cast of The New Look, including Maisie Williams and John Malkovich, in addition to watching Binchoe’s interview above. The first three episodes of The New Look are streaming now on Apple TV+. Check out a clip from Episode 4, featuring Juliette Binoche, below:

Watch on Apple TV+