Coco Chanel and Christian Dior were rival couture designers in the 1950s. But during World War II, they found themselves in the same tragic situation: Both had family members imprisoned by the Nazis and were pulling every kind
That’s the premise of The New Look, out on Apple TV+ on Feb. 14, starring Juliette Binoche as Chanel and Ben Mendelsohn as Dior. Over 10 episodes, The New Look shows them fighting to save their loved ones and then fighting to save their own couture houses in the post-war period.
Here, TIME talked to biographers of Chanel and Dior about what the designers really went through during World War II, what to make of Chanel’s association with Nazi officials, and the little-known story of Dior’s resistance fighter sister Catherine, who was an inspiration for his legendary 1947 “New Look” collection.
Chanel's Nazi ties
As shown in The New Look, Chanel had a bedroom at the Ritz, at a time when many wealthy individuals gave up their homes during the occupation and moved into hotels to be more cost efficient. But Chanel biographers differ on to what extent the designer interacted with the Nazis when they occupied the building in 1940.
“Chanel definitely socialized with them,” says Lisa Chaney, author of Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life. The New Look portrays Chanel hanging out with them at small gatherings on the property, which Chaney says matches what the designer would have done in real life. But according to Chaney, “There is no proof that she was in any way actually a Nazi by herself.”
On the other hand, Justine Picardie, author of Coco Chanel: The Legend and The Life, says that Chanel was not socializing with the various Nazis in the building, and that she only talked to them when she needed to get information on the whereabouts of her French soldier nephew André, who had been captured. The one Nazi she socialized with was Hans Gunther von Dincklage, a spy nicknamed Spatz, and she wasn’t going out in public with him.
The New Look is correct that Chanel was intimate with Spatz. “She starts having the affair with him in the hope that he will help get André out of the prisoner-of-war camp,” Picardie says. But Picardie, who has seen The New Look, says the show only shows one side of the designer—focusing solely on her Nazi associations without showing that she also had a role in the resistance movement. Chanel let members of the French resistance take over her home in the south of France, known as La Pausa. “Her cellars were used to hide Jewish refugees,” Picardie says.