A little disappointed – It’s finishedas we Francophiles like to say, La Maison. If a French TV drama is good, it can be very good. spiral, Les RevenantsAnd it’s probably the best series about spies ever made. le bureau. but La Maison Not in their league.
This is a shame, as this environment is something that TV soap operas don’t often feature. And the French art of haute couture was something that should really be handled beautifully. Judging by the flamboyant Parisian vibe and overall patina; inheritance-Luxury in style, it’s not lacking on a reasonable budget. What’s disappointing is that this production doesn’t seem to have any real love or understanding for its subject matter. This is a fashion series created by people who hate fashion.
It helps if you’ve seen Kevin McDonald’s recent documentary to understand what I’m getting at High & Low – John Galliano. The film explores whether Galliano meant it one drunken night when he made his infamous anti-Semitic remarks and threatened to destroy his then-employer, the House of Dior. , I think it’s depicted quite relentlessly. But in any case, what was more interesting to me was what was being said about the nature of this industry.
Up until that point, I had despised bad designers like Galliano and Alexander McQueen. I’m purely an ignorant bias, but since one is dressing like pirates and the other is inventing weird and perverted things like “Buster” pants, perhaps they’re fashion-forward. I thought they were just some shocking young people overhyped to satisfy themselves. The world’s relentless hunger for empty neophilia.
But Galliano’s film and 2018 biographical documentary mcqueen It was an eye-opener. Despite their obvious flaws, there is no doubt that both of them were geniuses who understood haute couture like few other creators before or since. Like the avant-garde painters who learned perspective for the first time and learned how to draw a perfect sphere freehand, the reason they were able to conduct such original and productive experiments is that they Because it was based on tradition. They were first inspired craftsmen, then messed up, drugged-up freaks.
This distinction has now largely been lost La Maison. It depicts the fictional fashion house LeDoux thrown into turmoil after a Galliano-style racist riot, but it doesn’t give viewers any strong reason to care about its plight. The Ledoux we were shown owned a magnificent building in one of the best districts, had been run by the same family for over a century, had an understatedly elegant and very arrogant chief designer, and turned his staff into serfs. It is treated as such. But the series’ view of all this is not dissimilar to that of Trichochus gazing at Versailles in 1789. This outdated privilege is ripe for destruction.
We know this because the series’ most popular character is Vincent Redu (Lambert Wilson), a designer in trouble, or a fashion house still in crisis. Rather, it’s Paloma Castel (Gita Hanlot), an annoying and cocky young upstart who seems to despise couture. . Castel rejects the use of genuine leather, thinks the industry is disgustingly wasteful, is passionate about environmental protection efforts, and with his urchin girlfriend rides around in a beat-up camper van destroying guerrilla spray paint. doing the act. But judging by the first few episodes, at least, we should be rooting for her to replace the stuffy, outdated, cliched Vincent as LeDoux’s unlikely savior. what? Perhaps this is just my bias, but a series where the heroine is a wretched eco-warrior who probably doesn’t even do laundry, and the enemy is artistry, beauty, tradition, and where we’re supposed to be. Why would you want to watch a 100-year-old establishment be shut down because a drunk, grumpy man was recorded saying something stupid (in this case, about Koreans)? Do you believe that it is perfectly rational to be destroyed?
Well, if the script was this crisp, mediated, and interesting, I might do it. inheritanceor whether the characters were interesting enough, or whether the plot was more engaging. But so far everything feels very generic. It’s as if the template for a routine drama about succession issues in a family business was just randomly dropped into haute couture, but it could have just as easily been used in couture. A series depicting the struggle for control of the Lancashire Stomach Empire.
