Apple TV’s ‘The New Look’ Casts Maisie Williams as Catherine Dior
Williams is set to play Catherine Dior, a French resistance fighter who was the couturier’s younger sister and namesake of his Miss Dior fragrance. (She was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, and worked in a concentration camp before being released and awarded the King’s Medal for Courage in the Cause of Freedom.) Set in the decade following World War II, when Catherine turned her attention towards growing roses for Miss Dior, the series will presumably kick off in 1947, the year Dior introduced the “New Look” silhouette that would go on to revolutionize the fashion industry and establish Paris as the world’s fashion capital. Thanks largely to Chanel, it didn’t do so without drama. “Look how ridiculous these women are, wearing clothes by a man who doesn’t know women, never had one, and dreams of being one,” the designer once snapped when asked for her opinion on her peer.
It’s unclear how prominently Chanel—and her mysterious ties to the Nazis—will figure into the series, seeing as she moved to Switzerland for several years after the war. But you can expect “surprising stories” of plenty more of her and Dior’s rivals and contemporaries—Cristóbal Balenciaga, Hubert de Givenchy, Pierre Balmain, Pierre Cardin, and Yves Saint Laurent all among them. (The latter became Dior’s design assistant in 1955, and went on to become the world’s youngest couturier when he took over from Dior upon the couturier’s sudden death two years later.) And yet, that may not be all the sartorial content that the series’s writer, executive producer, and director Todd A. Kessler has in store. According to the Hollywood Reporter, The New Look may be adapted into an anthology series that focuses on a new fashion set each season.