La Maison offers an insider’s look into the closed worlds of haute couture
French language series La Maison offers an insight into the rarefied world of luxury fashion, and counts the cost - and opportunity - of a scandal.
There is a scene early in the first episode of the forthcoming Apple+ TV series La Maison where Vincent Ledu, the artistic director of a fictional heritage French couture house, tells Perle, his long-time ‘muse’ that “luxury is time.”
This reverence for time is shown in the opening credits, as a piece of lace finely woven by artisans somewhere deep in France, is delivered to the atelier of white coat-clad workers, who will carefully craft the lace and other exquisite materials into designs worn by the very few.
Yet as the show soon details, time can be an enemy of fashion too. A scandal undoes 100 years of carefully built prestige in mere seconds (and a smartphone). What’s more, the repercussions can be swift – and just – if you do not keep with the times. Though uniquely galvanising if you do.
The 10-part series stars Lambert Wilson, Amira Casar (Call Me by Your Name), Carole Bouquet and Zita Hanrot (César Award-winning actress for Fatima). Central to the show’s tensions are two rival families in the worlds of fashion and luxury – the Ledus and the Rovels (headed up by the brazen matriarch Diane Rovel) in a story of ambition, power, family ties and the cost of the pursuit of uncompromising beauty.
That fashion makes for high stakes drama has become something of a boom for the entertainment industry. This year alone there has been a series about the Spanish couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga, The New Look, starring Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn as Christian Dior during the second war in Paris and Becoming Karl, with Daniel Brühl playing fashion maestro Karl Lagerfeld.
What’s more the major fashion and luxury conglomerates – many of them family businesses – are buying in. LVMH, which owns the likes of Dior, Fendi (another family- owned business) and Louis Vuitton, this year announced its Hollywood venture 22 Montaigne Entertainment. It was described by LVMH North America chairman and chief executive Anish Melwani as “a single platform to accelerate its 75 maison marketing efforts into premium films, TV and audio formats.”
Kering, meanwhile, via Groupe Artémis, the family office of Kering owner François-Henri Pinault, bought a majority stake in the Creative Artists Agency, which represents the likes of Zendaya, Tom Hanks and Pinault’s wife, Salma Hayek. One of Kering’s brands, Saint Laurent, debuted three feature-length films - Emilia Perez, starring Zoe Saldana and Selena Gomez, Parthenope, directed by Paolo Sorrentino, and David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds starring Vincent Cassel at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
Then there’s the Emily in Paris effect. The second-half of the fourth season of the souffle-light show about an American marketing executive (Lily Collins) navigating life - and looks - in Paris has just dropped. Its impact on the brands it features can be enormous. A partnership between luxury re-sale platform Vestiaire Collective with the Netflix blockbuster resulted in an almost doubling of Google searches in the US, according to Vogue Business.
“We noticed significant growth, which is a testament in today’s challenging luxury market,” Vestiaire Collective co-founder Fanny Moizant told Vogue Business of the partnership. Indeed, when you consider the luxury fashion industry is worth billions of dollars, and millions of people follow the brands on social media, it makes sense that TV and Hollywood types are interested.
Beyond the numbers, fashion as entertainment fodder makes sense because with these very stories - of ambition, of power, of creativity and its cost- fashion too can tell us much about history, philosophy and how people live. Anyway, who among us doesn’t want a peek into the rarefied, absurd worlds of high luxury and haute couture?
It’s this resonance that La Maison costume designer Carine Sarfati believes drives the show.
“Luxury and power dramas have always fascinated people, and the fashion world embodies all of this. Fashion plays a significant role in people’s daily lives, which is why I believe fashion brands invest in movies and artists,” she says.
The way fashion and luxury is woven into French culture - the recent Paris Olympic Games with the major sponsorship by LVMH is a fine example - is exemplified in the show too.
“Fashion is an integral part of Parisian lifestyle and culture,” points out Sarfati.
“For example, while creating the costumes and fashion shows for La Maison, we collaborated with historic French lace manufacturers who work with high fashion.”
Thanks to Sarfati, the show is incredibly believable in its depiction of what the fashion industry wears too. This is as true of the pared-back ‘French girl’ style of the public relations team as it is the navy suits of the luxury executives, the dandy-ish flair of Vincent Ledu, the upcycled personal expression of the young and hungry designers who want to reshape the fashion industry and the crisp elegance of Perle, Vincent’s muse and right hand woman.
To get the references right Sarfati went people watching, pointing out that while the characters are fictional, she looked to those working in the industry, sitting on the front row at fashion week shows and snapped outside in street style photos at the shows for inspiration.
“For example, for the Vincent Ledu character played by Lambert Wilson, there were multiple references. The inspirations were designers as Giorgio Armani or Haider Ackerman as well as creators and ascetic figures as Steve Jobs or Norman Foster,” she says.
The character of Perle Foster with her super chic, avant-garde style (and a woman not given nearly enough credit) is another masterclass in fashion archetype.
“We built the Perle character very closely with Amira [Casar]. Amira has a true knowledge of fashion and a passion for it. We went towards radical sculptures such as Alaia, Comme de Garçons, Junya Watanabe, Dries Van Noten, Lemaire,” says Sarfati.
“We drew inspiration from iconic artists’ muses as well as fashion icons such as Farida Khelfa (muse of Azzedine Alaïa).”
To source the looks Sarfati looked everywhere, from famous luxury brands to emerging creators, as well as vintage and from fashion collectors.
For Sarfati, who says the show was a truly collaborative effort, the beauty of the show remains its humanity.
“I hope people will discover the behind-the-scenes of this fascinating world, but also understand that the people in this environment share the same concerns as everyone else,” she says.
La Maison premieres on Apple TV+ on Friday, September 20
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