Juliette Binoche On Embodying Coco Chanel’s Contradictions for ‘The New Look

In a lot of ways, Juliette Binoche playing Coco Chanel is a natural fit. Binoche is a Queen of French Cinema while Chanel’s name remains the top of everyone’s list as royalty of French couture. Both women are at the top of their respective fields. Even as Chanel deals with her eventual involvement with the Third Reich, she retains a sense of confidence of self and her claim over her business. In Binoche’s hands for The New Look, Coco Chanel is as complicated as she is revered

In the beginning of the season, Walter Schellenberg approaches Chanel for her connection with Winston Churchill. He butters her up by telling her that she will help World War II ending, and he says, ‘You will be remembered more for this than any garment you have ever sewn,’ and I couldn’t help but think about legacy. For Binoche, she thought a lot about what the famed designer did for women, but, most importantly, that hard word and dedication will pay off if you let it.

“The legacy that Chanel gave is actually is very big, and people wouldn’t know it unless [they] read books about her life,” Binoche says. “There are so many different books, because they’re different points of view. You understand how much she did for women and for the liberation of women. She was a Me Too woman in the 20s during the First World War in Europe, and that’s really where her creation in garments really took off. (9:59) After that, in the ’20s, she created this number five perfume that was a huge success internationally. I would say that the main legacy she gave us as women is that you can build yourself from nothing. At the time, that was a big thing because she came really from misery, and she really came from background that was very, very heavy. She was in a state of poverty, and her mother died. Those are really big pillars that when they’re not there in your life when you’re a young woman , you are miserable. If you were born in that misery, you die in that misery.”

Chanel retrieves Emily Mortimer’s Elsa early on in the season, and they fight like sisters. As the season progresses, more and more layers get peeled back between them. Chanel’s hard exterior clashes with Mortimer’s freewheeling lifetime and effervescence. These are two characters who, on the surface, look like women who could learn from one another, when in reality when they are really tethered by their history.

“This relationship is the mixture of two real people that Chanel lived with in different period of times in her life,” she says. “One is Vera Lombardi who was an inspiration for Chanel because she was dressing up in a kind of tomboy way and stealing things from men. Chanel liked that. She really put it into her behavior and her way of designing what she was selling at different time. The other really important character who was important in Chanel’s life is Misia. She was sort of an orphan like Chanel and from from Polish roots. She was an amazing pianist, and then she served as inspiration for a lot of painters. There are so many women that had very different lives.

Chanel was thirsty for art and meeting with famous artist, and she did because of Misia. At the end of Misia’s life, she was addicted to drugs, but Chanel lived her addiction in a better way–she was only using it to go to sleep. There’s so much to say about their relationship. Working with Emily was so fun, but it made me realize that working on a television show is so much work. I love Emily’s spirit. She’s so bright, and she’s a real intellectual in the best way. Also, she loves people.”

How do you talk about Chanel and not talk about style? I always think of the Chanel suit since it afforded so many women the opportunity to feel sophisticated when nothing else did the trick. For The New Look, however, we are seeing Chanel in her private life, and Binoche wears everything with such panache.

“Chanel is Chanel,” Binoche says with a wry smile. “Chanel is style, and she invented a way of wearing clothes throughout time, and, later on, she brought in her famous suit. Everyone knows what suit I mean. Before that, though, her history of dressing was very active and creative. Because the story happens at the end of the war and during the liberation, she was not working. She was fighting to get her business back. The only way to show that style and her strength was in the garments. I loved that our costume designer, Karen Serreau, designer picked black-and-white. Decorating with jewels was very important, and depending on whether she was taking meetings or hanging out at home, we were playing with jewels. There was a common denominator of the stark color and simple lines. Dior, Chanel, and all the other designers has a sense of architecture. The building had to be on the body and how you put the lines together. It’s so fascinating to me. It becomes about the proportions and the equilibrium. I don’t think Chanel learned that, it was instinctual even if she changed her style at different points of her life. I always feel like inside her there was a rage of wanting women to win their freedom. Wearing pants at the time wasn’t something women did. The same with cutting hair or wearing flat shoes–that was only for men–and she made it feminine.”

A lot of press has been made about Chanel’s connection with the Nazi Party, and Binoche doesn’t make any excuses for Chanel. What she does, however, is hit home how she understood a lot of her perspectives because of her upbringing. Look at the scenes where Chanel is by herself (or pushing Elsa away) when Christian Dior embraces being around his contemporaries. Coco Chanel’s decisions are uniquely her own, and Binoche was thrilled to pay homage to someone we all think we know.

“What I was really aware of is that knowing what Chanel went through in her childhood was so rough,” she says. “Doing this was giving her a sort of vaccination. She came into life with not wanting to be bothered by things coming into her life and stopping her. Before World War II, she was a star in her world, and she was a reference for a lot of women as a top designer of the time. There was a need of freedom that was very strong in her. There was no moral idea of what’s right or what’s wrong, I think, because she didn’t have the basics of that as a child. She was so tormented by this childhood that the rules for others were not her rules. She made up her own rules. I think the lack of morality and the lack of boundaries comes from her being married to freedom, and that’s dangerous. It’s a very fascinating kind of mind and heart that was in her.”

The New Look is streaming now on Apple TV+.