Couture and public transport have very little in common, but the adage that you wait ages for a bus and then three come at once has some current crossover. In January, a drama series about the Spanish designer Cristóbal Balenciaga, and the 30 years he spent working in Paris, premiered on Disney+. Hot on its heels comes Apple TV+ drama The New Look, which lands this week, and chronicles Christian Dior and his contemporaries as they navigate the second world war. Later this year, Daniel Brühl (Good Bye, Lenin!, All Quiet on the Western Front) will play Karl Lagerfeld in a series that has been given the working title Kaiser Karl and will chart the late designer’s rise through the world of fashion in Paris in the 1970s.
It’s striking that a glut of TV not just about fashion, but the rarefied world of high fashion, should be cutting a course for our screens in such a short space of time. On one hand, the reasons why are obvious – the characters are colourful and complicated and the clothes are beautiful. There are big egos and even bigger hats, era-defining cuts and cutting rivalries. But on the other hand, if it was that obvious, why hasn’t it happened before now?
