Get ready for a glut of fashion dramas

Fashion is not new to television and film screens — we’ve lived for decades with Fashion TV, Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model and designers, such as punk godmother Vivien Westwood, tragically troubled Alexander McQueen and, now, the disgraced bad drunk John Galliano, have been the subject of acclaimed feature documentaries.

But now the stories of fashion legends have suddenly become hot property for prestige television drama, with Disney Plus releasing in January a plush period drama about the life of Cristóbal Balenciaga; The New Look — about the rivalry and very different World War 2 experiences of French legends Coco Chanel and Christian Dior — arriving on Apple TV this week; and the forthcoming Kaiser Karl starring Daniel Brühl as Karl Lagerfeld. Fashion and its superstars are going mainstream and the real question is why it’s taken so long and why now?

On one level, as Ellie Violet Bramley, writing in The Guardian this week, points out, the fashion world is an obvious place to mine for drama, with its colourful characters, beautiful clothes and characters whose oversized egos are matched only by their oversized hats. There’s also, in the case of The New Look, the added drama of the contrasts between Chanel, who had a complicated relationship with the occupying Nazi powers in France during World War 2 and Dior, whose sister Catherine was a member of the resistance. She was captured, tortured and sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, an ordeal that she thankfully survived, providing obvious meaty dramatic contrast and big moral questions that resonate with the politically charged present moment. In the case of Balenciaga, who was famously media shy, a peak behind the veil offers plenty of new information for ordinary viewers who, though they may know his name, don’t know that much about his personal history or character.

There has also, as Helen Warner, a lecturer at the University of East Anglia and the author of a book about fashion on TV, told The Guardian, been a recent preoccupation with the history of midcentury fashion and the ways in which Chanel, Dior and Balenciaga pioneered a new movement in the history of fashion, characterised not by the dictation of style by Victorian elites but rather the designs of a few central figures who were revered as geniuses on a similar level to visual artists.

In the process they became household names, with Dior arguably enjoying greater name recognition at the height of his powers than French president Charles de Gaulle or existentialist philosopher icon Jean-Paul Sartre. Chanel was revered by modernist art pioneers like Pablo Picasso, who once famously declared her, “the most intelligent woman in Europe”, and the changes she made to the way that women dressed, continued long after her death in 1971.

While all this meaty historical detail and import may provide some intellectual justification for the growing TV drama interest in the fashion world and its icons, it’s not the only reason that studios are banking on them to attract audiences. There’s also just the plain, old, reliable factor of human drama and interest. After all, as fashion commentator Caryn Franklin observes, “We will watch [these shows] for human interaction and portrayal of the kind of success that few of us know [but] we also love a bit of tabloid titillation.”

By delving into the personal stories and struggles of the names behind the ubiquitous fashion brands, these shows ultimately demonstrate that the gods of style “were just like us most of the time: sometimes marvellous, often deeply competitive and insecure, and occasionally badly behaved but all the while better styled and far better connected with stylish people than us”.

The timing of this glut of fashion dramas is also not coincidental or merely based on a renewed interest in fashion history. As with much in the television universe these days, it also makes algorithmic sense. Chanel, Dior and Balenciaga have millions of followers on social media, so it’s not hard for executives looking around for the next big thing to see that the metrics of making drama out of the histories of these mega-brands on paper makes good business sense. Recent films and series have made acclaimed and popular drama out of the stories of tech legends like Facebook, Apple, Uber and Blackberry, and so fashion seems an obvious next choice for dramatic material to feed the ravenous appetites of streaming audiences.

Fashion history has also been the subject of blockbuster museum shows around the world, demonstrating an appetite for its glamorous clothes and mythical stars. A show celebrating the life and work of Dior at London’s V&A was the largest and most successful fashion-related exhibition in the museum’s history and a subsequent show devoted to Chanel sold out its tickets in two days.

Last, there’s the nostalgia factor and how the stories of past couture designers, who spent years painstakingly working on their creations, offer a stark contrast to the hyper-fast fashion world we live in today. Haute Couture is even more of a luxury than it once was and a dying art in a world where you can order a tailored suit online and have it delivered to your door in three days.

Whether this moment of cultural divergence will mean that fashion lovers and history buffs are in for a feast of lushly created period dramas that offer new insights into the personalities and creative passions of fashion designers, who they believe should be held up as true artists, or merely be the beginning of an onslaught of fast fashion TV that seeks to hype up the “tabloid titillation” at the expense of carefully worked-out historical considerations, remains to be seen. For now, with apologies to David Bowie, if you turn to the left and turn to the right on your television, it seems that the fashion goon squad has firmly arrived in your recommended drama series tab.