“Does she know our favorite dish is eating each other alive?”
So one family member asks another in an early scene of “La Maison,” a glossy new drama from Apple TV+, about two rival high-end, family-owned French fashion houses: Ledu and Rovel.
The show, which premieres on Friday, is filled with gorgeous people living in fabulous homes, fighting, scheming, flirting, plotting and betraying one another as they attempt to gain control of — everything!
Yes, like “Succession,” but with more glamorous outfits and, well, Paris.
Or akin to “a Shakespearean drama,” said Lambert Wilson, who plays Vincent Ledu, the longtime designer of the Ledu house, whose fall from power is fast and devastating when an unbridled rant about Asian clients goes viral, leading to his cancellation and unwilling resignation. Enter Paloma Castel (Zita Hanrot), a young, edgy designer with ideas about waste and sustainability, who is recruited by Perle Foster (Amira Casar), Vincent’s right-hand woman and former muse. (Amping up the tension and resentment, it turns out that Paloma’s dead father was Vincent’s lover.)
In the other camp, the terrifying chief executive Diane Rovel (Carole Bouquet) schemes to have her company take over Ledu, helped by Vincent’s brother, Victor (Pierre Deladonchamps), who is married to Diane’s daughter (Florence Loiret Caille).
“All the characters have scar tissue,” said Casar, “they are all damaged and lonely.” Her own character, Perle, is a watchful, lonely outsider. “On the one side, there is this old aristocratic family, the Ledus, who are hanging on to craft and tradition, on the other this nouveau riche bourgeoisie, the Rovels, who will destroy to have it all,” Casar said.
“La Maison” is the most recent in a spate of shows about the fashion world. Apple TV+ dipped a toe in the waters earlier this year with “The New Look,” about Christian Dior and Coco Chanel,” and “Becoming Karl Lagerfeld” debuted on Hulu in June. But “not being attached to a brand” allowed “La Maison” much more “freedom to roam,” said Alex Berger, one of the show’s executive producers.
Berger — who was a producer on the hit French show “The Bureau” — said he was inspired to make “La Maison” after noticing the contrast between the sleek images in magazines like Vogue and the economic realities and ruthless strategies of gigantic companies like LVMH.
“I was always curious about environments that, like in ‘Le Bureau,’ were fantasized about, but people didn’t understand how they work,” Berger said.
He enlisted José Caltagirone and Valentine Milville to write the show and become its showrunners. The idea, Berger said, was “to show in a very entertaining way, the other side of the curtain,” through these “very successful, very wealthy and very dysfunctional families.”
Still, the actors drew on real life figures to craft their stylish characters. For Vincent, Wilson said he drew inspiration from Lagerfeld. “I wanted the social status of Hubert de Givenchy,” who was an aristocrat like the Ledus, he said, “with the more modern feel of Lagerfeld and maybe Yohji Yamamoto.”
But while we are all familiar with designers as public figures, Wilson noted that the executives leading luxury fashion houses are even “more intimidating and less accessible, with those massive bosses like Bernard Arnault or Liliane Bettencourt.”
Bouquet said she “did have a Frenchwoman in mind, the captain of a huge industry,” when playing Diane Rovel, before laughing and admitting it was Bettencourt. “The hair: perfect; the dress: perfect. It took a long time every day in hair and makeup!” Bouquet said.
Diane “is so mean, so cruel, it’s a gift!” Bouquet said, with relish. She “has to conquer, has to win. She is in fashion, but she could have a sausage company. She is completely about the business, driven by money and most of all, power.” The character, Bouquet added “is extremely wounded. She wants, needs revenge.”
The reason she craves it is slowly revealed over the course of the ten hourlong episodes, but the emotional heart of “La Maison” isn’t the dog-eat-dog Rovels, but Paloma’s slow-building relationship with Vincent and her personal evolution as a designer.
Paloma, who Hanrot described as “a really modern character, full of life, passionate, an artist and creator,” embodies the contradictory aspects of couture, which pits artistic drive and old-fashioned skills against the realities of elitism and waste. (In perhaps the most shocking scene, painstakingly crafted couture dresses that have been rejected by a client are ruthlessly ripped apart.)
But the family psychodrama is always front and center.
“When they take off these beautiful clothes, they are alone with their solitude and melancholy,” Casar said. But in “La Maison,” clothes are mostly kept on — as armor, all the better for battle.
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