The New Look ★★★
Apple TV+

Ambitious in its scope, this period drama about two original giants of French fashion – Christian Dior (Ben Mendelsohn) and Coco Chanel (Juliette Binoche) – refuses to indulge in shortcuts. Where most shows would focus on the pair’s creative rivalry in the early 1950s but illustrate it with flashbacks to how they survived France’s occupation by Nazi Germany in the previous decade, The New Look opens with a trio of episodes set in the grim 1940s. Cold-blooded executions are initially more common than seamstresses.

Fashion starts as an afterthought, a means of survival, in this story, and that’s one of several concepts that boomerangs back in this series from Todd A. Kessler (Damages, Bloodline). When Dior, after Paris is liberated, finally commits to designing haute couture, he tells a prospective financier that he wants to create a “return to joy”. Having seen a smattering of the occupier’s crimes, some of which were perpetrated against his younger sister and resistance member Catherine (Maisie Williams), the designer’s pledge rings true.

The New Look makes clothes matter. As totems of beauty, as cultural weapons, as economic temples. Named for Dior’s revolutionary 1947 show, which is the ground zero of modern fashion, the show embraces too much for a simple theme. Dior and Chanel, for instance, are essentially separate storylines until his belated success stirs her competitive spite. There’s always a little too much to accommodate in these episodes, but equally, there’s often a surprising connection.

It’s fascinating to see Mendelsohn play such a recessive character. His Dior frets and defers. When Catherine, the original Miss Dior, is arrested by the Gestapo, Christian’s anguish is consumptive. By contrast, Binoche is a hurricane as Chanel, with the story hewing to the newly established history of her Nazi collaboration. An opportunist who gets in over her head and then sacrifices others, Chanel is a blithe villain sketched with her many flaws, stretching back to a deprived childhood, as genuine illumination.

The tone can wander somewhat – sometimes it wants to approximate the feel of a period piece, at others it reaches for contemporary phrasing. The same can happen visually, especially in the episodes Kessler directs. Another Edith Piaf depiction was probably superfluous, as are the many variations of French accented English the multinational cast deploy. But The New Look wrestles with such varied ideas, from France’s painful reckoning with its many collaborators to the silhouettes that defined the 20th century, that its aspirations trump its failings. The stitching holds. Just.

One Day ★★★
Netflix

Some nagging issues aside, this adaptation of David Nicholls’ best-selling 2009 novel about the romantically tinged friendship that unfolds as two university students go through their lives achieves an important goal: it lets us forget the dismal 2011 film version starring Anne Hathaway. Patient within its romantic-comedy parameters, this One Day has lead performances that reflect favourably on each other and a measure of charm that’s only occasionally ladled on too thickly.