How Dior defied the Nazis and revived modern fashion

As a new drama tells the story of the fashion designer and his contemporaries, Tom Murray looks at the key role played by Dior’s family as part of the French Resistance during WWII

- Tom Murray

“It’s quite a revolution, dear Christian! Your dresses have such a new look!” With these words in 1947, Carmel Snow, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar magazine, ushered in a revolutionary era of fashion. She was speaking to Christian Dior after his debut fashion show in Paris. The New Look – a lavish repudiation of wartime pragmatism – went on to define Dior’s style and is now the title of Apple TV+’s latest drama series, with Ben Mendelsohn playing the famously understated French designer.

The show follows Dior and his contemporaries – Coco Chanel (Juliette Binoche), Lucien Lelong (John Malkovich), Cristóbal Balenciaga (Nuno Lopes) and Pierre Balmain (Thomas Poitevin) – as they navigate the terrors of World War Two while launching modern fashion.

Binoche portrays the rather one-sided rivalry between Dior and Chanel with gusto. From the off, we see Chanel bad-mouthing Dior, calling the attendees at his fashion shows “prisoners” who have to “suffer” through his designs. Her actual comments were even more spiky: “Dior doesn’t dress women, he upholsters them,” she once said. In the series, Chanel publicly maligns Dior for designing ball gowns for the Nazis, which she claims she refused to do. The truth, however, is far more complicated.

During the German occupation of Paris, Chanel sought refuge in the Ritz hotel. It was here, among throngs of Nazi officers, that she met Baron Hans von Dincklage (Claes Bang), with whom she struck up an affair. In his 2011 book, Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War, veteran journalist and exdiplomat Hal Vaughan offers convincing evidence that Chanel was a Nazi intelligence operative as well as a “vicious antiSemite”.