'The New Look' Threads a Villainous Needle with Coco Chanel

By Chris Revelle | TV | February 22, 2024 |

By Chris Revelle | TV | February 22, 2024 |

The fictional villain can be a tricky notion in media. Obviously villains must be bad and do evil, but the way that evil is framed is incredibly important. Depending on what kind of story you’re telling, a villain can be too broad or too sympathetic and the balance between those poles can be very hard to strike. Look at the Fast & Furious franchise, where villains are usually one movie’s length away from joining the hero squad or the MCU, where villains are either forgettable non-entities or are made so sympathetic they stop being villains. Thanos was an interesting attempt at applying sympathetic shading to an inarguable villain, but for me, that fell flat because “what if we killed half the living things” feels like a shallow edgelord idea floated in Philosophy 101 more than it feels like a believable motivation for a despot. These examples are all fantastical, so what about villains in more grounded media? What about villains from our actual history?

In starting its story of creation and redemption during the Nazi occupation of France, The New Look dives head first into sensitive waters. World War II and the Holocaust comprised an era of tremendous devastation with shockwaves still rippling today. It’s an incredibly sensitive thing to tell a story about that kind of evil and the pitfalls are plentiful. You cannot hold space for sympathy when it comes to the actions of the Nazis, nor does it pay to portray them as cartoonish. The Nazis and the Holocaust were very real and to portray the perpetrators as something simpler than human carries the insidious suggestion this kind of fascism and bigotry are such rare and aberrant things in humanity. As inhumane as the Holocaust was, it was a very human thing and it’s important to see how humans could participate in it.

This logic extends to Nazi collaborators and there were plenty in Vichy-era France. As The New Look shows us, Coco Chanel was one of many designers in Paris when the Nazis invaded and were presented with a difficult choice: design for the Nazis (their uniforms, ballgowns for their dates) or likely stop designing entirely. Christian Dior and Pierre Balmain took gigs designing gowns for the House of Lelong where its owner Lucien carefully omitted who the clients were to spare Dior and Balmain the pain of knowing they were designing for Nazi WAGs. Coco Chanel very famously refused and closed her atelier when she stopped designing altogether. This narrative of Chanel the Virtuous remained strong until it was quite starkly refuted in recent years. The New Look points out that yes, Coco did tell the Nazis off, but she’s curiously staying at the Nazi-controlled Ritz Paris hotel.

In truth, Coco Chanel was working as a Nazi informant and keeping Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, a superstar of the Gestapo, as a lover. As with the portrayal of Nazis, the portrayal of their collaborators is a delicate needle to thread, but The New Look nails the portrayal of Chanel’s villainy in this arc by sticking to the facts and portraying her thought process as humanly as possible.

As seen on the show, Chanel’s plunge into Nazi collaboration begins with an effort to free her nephew from a German POW camp. She used her connections with Vichy fixtures like Baron Louis de Vaufreland to grease the wheels and get her nephew released. However, of course, that favor had some strings attached. While Chanel was canoodling with Dincklage, she was also expected to wine, dine, and party with the highest echelon of Nazis in Paris. The New Look never gives you the impression that Chanel is enthusiastic about or even agreeable to what the Nazis represent, but that she is willing to go with their horrific practices if she can get what she wants. Chanel was locked in a protracted legal battle with her business partners, a pair of Jewish brothers. Chanel consents to the Nazis “looking into” the brothers and she knows exactly what that means. You never get the sense Coco wants them to die, but that her desire to control her company is greater than the desire to see them alive. That is the central theme of Chanel’s villainy: she will stop at nothing to get what she wants and to protect herself. It’s a believable headspace for Chanel that doesn’t ask the audience to take pity on a Nazi collaborator. We understand how Chanel got to this place without being asked to excuse her responsibility for helping Nazis out.

There’s an excellent scene that encapsulates Chanel’s journey: she’s just had a romantic dinner with her Nazi spy lover who then suggests they go “shopping.” He leads Chanel to an empty apartment building and into one of the vacant units. As Chanel looks around at the furniture, art on the walls, plates on the table, she asks if the recently-evicted family is Jewish. Of course they are, the Nazi says, but they can’t own anything anyway, so please feel free to take what you want.

We see Coco look around the apartment, seeming queasy and uneasy, but still going along with it. And then she sees an antique phone that she’s been searching for and a change comes over her face. The moment there was something for her to gain, Coco was able to reprioritize her values and work with Nazis. Crucially, we don’t see Coco deal with this in emotionally honest terms. As her frenemy Mrs. Lombardi (who Coco really did have dragged from Italy to Paris by the Gestapo for a harebrained Nazi mission) puts it, “Your only real talent is believing your own lies.” Chanel believes her own narrative because to engage with anything beyond it would mean having to reconcile all she’s done. This is an evil that I can recognize, one that’s perpetrated by humans in our world all the time. For people like Chanel, the moment they allow accountability, that they take full responsibility for what they’ve done is the moment they fall apart. As the Allies approach Paris and the Nazis begin their withdraw, Chanel scrambles to get her name off the Resistance’s list of collaborators, finally offering her most loyal Vichy connection who helped her free her nephew. On The New Look, Chanel exemplifies this cowardly evil where the worst thing isn’t aiding and abetting Nazis, it’s people knowing you aided and abetted Nazis. This isn’t merely a statement on the shallowness of facades; Chanel uses her nature as a windsock, always changing with the direction of the wind, as a means of survival. When the Allies liberate Paris, she’s out on the streets throwing the soldiers perfume and telling them France loves them. Survival is a recognizable motivation, but it makes a snake of Coco Chanel.

It would have been easy to make Coco Chanel a cackling supervillain whose only aim is cruelty, but she’s a more impactful character the way The New Look renders her. Chanel shows how human evil can be and stands as a powerful statement: you don’t need to agree with the evil to become a part of it; you only need to believe that aligning with the evil is worth it.