If you’ve become infatuated with Paris after the 2024 Olympic games and miss HBO’s Succession, you will fall in love with AppleTV+’s La Maison. The series is set in Paris and is in French with English subtitles. La Maison is a behind-the-scenes look at Maison LEDU, the one-hundred-year-old haute couture brand created by the Ledu family.
The series opens with Maison LEDU’s star designer, Vincent Ledu (Lambert Wilson, The Matrix Reloaded), unknowingly being recorded throwing a racist hissy fit that goes viral. The adverse ripple effect creates a crisis that may jeopardize the family legacy. Vincent’s former muse, ex-model Pearle Foster (Amira Casar, Call Me By My Name), is the driving force behind LEDU, but she is kept in Vincent’s shadow. Pearle comes up with a clever plan to save the company, which includes partnering with a talented young up-and-coming visionary designer, Paloma Castel (Zita Hanrot, Love, Death, and Robots).
Pearle and Paloma are visionaries ready to revitalize, rebuild, and save this century-old brand. Both women have roots in this company that have been overlooked and are determined to shine. As Maison LEDU deals with its internal drama, Vincent’s cunning rival, Diane Rovel (Carole Bouquet, For Your Eyes Only), CEO of the influential Rovel Luxury group, uses Vincent’s downfall to make moves to acquire Maison LEDU by any means necessary.
I love Paris, and this series transports the audience to the city of light in all the best ways. The locations are just stunning. One of my favorites is the location of the Rovel headquarters is the new headquarters of Renault, the French car company, located on an island in the Seine. Two characters have apartments with balconies with the Eiffel Tower in the background. I loved that the directors chose to shoot several scenes with the Eiffel Tower at night, just as the sparkling lights dazzle.
As a fashion novice, seeing what goes into designing and building garments from scratch deepened the viewing experience and connected me to the story. The show educates as it entertains, giving nuanced perspectives on fast fashion, sustainability, and unintended consequences. The writers and directors do a fantastic job showcasing diverse haute couture elements. The opening sequence of the pilot shows how lace is constructed, and I could watch all day.
Later in the series, we are taught how centuries-old lace patterns are designed, which blew my mind. La Maison gives viewers a look at all of the seamstresses who work tirelessly on these stunning garments, which are indeed art pieces. The heads of fashion houses are men, but the workforce, the patternmakers, seamstresses, beaders, and most of the workers are women. Paloma, Pearle, and Diane represent three generations, and through these characters, the audience witnesses how the feminist movement impacted these women in all of its iterations.
Diane is a second-wave feminist coming of age in the ’80s when being a feminist was wearing a business suit and being a female version of the movie Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko. She is focused on individual financial freedom and preserving her legacy by any means necessary. Pearle is a third-stage feminist who was Vincent’s muse as a model in the 1990s. She found fame and power through her beauty first; then, as she aged out of the modeling world, she used soft power, being the woman behind Vincent, the male star designer. Pearle’s stalwart loyalty and magnificent ability to see situations with a bird’s eye view, making calculations before taking action, but she’s just a tad shady. She is willing to bend the rules for her benefit.
Then there’s Paloma, a Gen Z social justice warrior. Her mixed ethnicity gives her a unique perspective that Diane and Pearle don’t have. A social media savant, Paloma and her team of fashion renegades know how to take risks, call out oppression, and create viral moments using fashion as their bullhorn. Still, she’s never quite ready to deal with the unintended consequences of her activism. Paloma has a global view of oppression, is the unique talent of her generation, and is ready to challenge the establishment. At the same time, she is a designer with an ego and a desire to create her own legacy, as well as all of the wealth and power that comes with running a legacy fashion house like LEDU.
The series is well-balanced and gives authentic portrayals of racial dynamics in Paris. Paloma is mixed race, but her mother is Black and is an unseen character. It would have been more interesting to have seen how Paloma interacted with her mother to show that side of the narrative. I’d love to see Paloma’s mom if there is a second season. La Maison has several diverse Queer characters, and their queerness is not the central conflict. I love a series where there are sibling dynamics that are not sugar-coated. The three Ledu siblings’ relationship is messy and has decades-old baggage they are holding onto and acting on, making the drama super juicy. I love a nighttime soap opera where a family is cutthroat, fighting for power over the family business with some electric drama. Place all that juicy chaos in the high-stakes Paris fashion world, and everybody’s fighting in French? Yes, please!
La Maison is based on an original idea by Alex Berger, who is also an executive producer on the show. Showrunners José Caltagirone and Valentine Millville created it, and Fabrice Gobert (The Returned) and Daniel Grou (Lupin) directed it. La Maison premieres on AppleTV+ on Thursday, September 20, 2024.
