I’m a bit disappointed – déçu, as we Francophiles like to say – with La Maison. When French TV drama is good it can be very, very good, as we saw with Spiral, Les Revenants, and, maybe the best series ever made about spies, Le Bureau. But La Maison is not in their league.
This is a shame because its milieu is not one that has been explored that often in TV serials – and it’s something that a French production really ought to have handled brilliantly: haute couture. Judging by the fancy Parisian settings and general patina of Succession-style luxe, it hasn’t been short of a reasonable budget. What lets it down is that it appears to have no real love for or understanding of its subject matter. This is a fashion series made by people who hate fashion.
To appreciate what I’m getting at it helps if you’ve seen Kevin Macdonald’s recent documentary High & Low – John Galliano. The film dwells, rather too obsessively I think, on whether or not Galliano really meant it when he made some infamously anti-Semitic remarks one drunken evening, threatening to bring down his then employer, the house of Dior. But much more interesting, to me at any rate, was what it told us about the nature of the industry.
Up until that point, I’d been blithely dismissive of bad-boy designers like Galliano and Alexander McQueen. I thought – pure ignorant prejudice – that because one dressed like a pirate and the other invented weird, kinky things like ‘bumster’ trousers, they were probably just shock-of-the-new yobs who had been over-promoted to sate the fashion world’s relentless hunger for vacuous neophilia.
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