Two tales of Christian Dior and Karl Lagerfeld
I just finished HULU’s Becoming Karl Lagerfeld and am now on episode five of AppleTV’s The New Look. While neither shows are perfect, they feed my love of archived fashion. I absolutely eat it up. Mostly, I love learning about source talent, their lives, and their success in such a fickle business. Now, through the lens of our peak capitalism, I observe how we currently view acquiring the houses’ modern offerings (but that’s for a later post).
In The New Look, it’s easy to see Christian Dior as the hero and Coco Chanel as the villain. The show portrays Dior as a gentle, dutiful soul. He is kind, obligated, and talented. Chanel is portrayed as selfish, brash, opportunistic, bigoted, and privileged. While rivals during this time in history, they navigate drastically different priorities. The contrast is compelling. It’s heavy backstory, and fashion isn’t at the forefront. But seeing the costuming and styling, especially Coco Chanel’s clothing, elegantly worn by Juliette Binoche, was striking. The French-German dynamic is at the heart of the show.
The distinct scene of Dior believing in tarot feeds my curiosity about his usage of tarot. Dior’s tarot card reader is one of my favorite characters. It made me think back to the very inspiring Dior Spring/Summer 2021 Haute Couture collection designed by Maria Grazia Chiuri, which explores the motifs of a tarot card deck with all its mystery and deliciousness. Both are beautiful nods to Dior’s belief in tarot (he also conferred with numerology and astrology. I love a witchy woo).
With both The New Look and Becoming Karl Lagerfeld, the talent in the room was mindblowing. Balenciaga, Pierre Balmain, Christian Dior, Schiaparelli, Lanvin, Rochas, Ricci…wowza. How about Yves St. Laurent, Thierry Mugler, Gaby Aghion, the founder of Chloé, and Karl Lagerfeld? Yes, we know this happened, but it still amazes me. Both designers employed sex workers to model. And in both shows, the funders are the pivotal intersection of art, commerce, and the masses. The dance with the funders…what a chore. A constant and exhausting game of chicken.
In Becoming Karl Lagerfeld, we see the young designer on the precipice of an exploding career. He’s a hustler, a son, extremely disciplined, and has an inescapable German heritage that others use to define him. The French-German dynamic is residual.
Lagerfeld designs :::::ghast:::: Ready-to-Wear. His frenemy is Yves St. Laurent. And while Daniel Brühl holds his fan-in-hand own, I could not keep my eyes off Arnaud Valois as the tragic, obsessed, and talented Yves St. Laurent.
When Thierry Mugler enters, he represents the power of the youth, the cutting edge, in the defiance of the establishment. And while only in a few scenes, I can’t keep my eyes off him either. He’s a pivotal pawn. Lagerfeld is a step towards check-mate against Pierre Barge, YSL’s mean handler. At the end of season one, Lagerfeld is offered the position of creative director of Chanel. We’ve come full circle.
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