“La Maison” Is a Frothy Portrait of the Rich and Fashionable

The opening minutes of “La Maison,” a new succession drama on Apple TV+, offer up an irresistible depiction of the pride that goeth before a fall. Vincent Ledu (Lambert Wilson), the graying head of a Parisian fashion house that bears his name, is about to receive France’s highest civilian honor, but his grasp of his craft is slipping: a wealthy Korean bride whose patronage he urgently needs is proving resistant to his usual charms. After storming out of their meeting, he runs into his younger brother, Victor (Pierre Deladonchamps), whom he exiled from the firm years ago. “Vincent Ledu descends from Olympus to play salesman,” Victor says coolly. “Precisely,” Vincent replies. “And now I’m heading back up.” A day later, when a video goes viral of Vincent calling his difficult client and her entourage “dog-eating plebes,” he’s dragged back down to earth. Though Vincent wishes to envelop himself in “decorous silence,” he’s afforded no such luxury, least of all by his family, who treasure the century-old Ledu brand as their ancestral birthright and their cash cow. A stilted apology, scripted by his P.R. team, does little to ameliorate the crisis. The fashion industry is no stranger to scandal or to racism—as one onlooker puts it, “Ledu just pulled a Galliano”—but Vincent’s offense is immediately deemed fatal. The company’s continuation depends on whether the dynasty can expand its idea of family quickly enough to survive.

“La Maison” is more diversion than art, but what diversion. The ensemble soap is as bitchy and as backstabby as you could hope for, replete with bons mots and campy self-importance: Vincent’s spoiled thirtysomething nephew, Robinson (Antoine Reinartz), a runt within the family but a princeling at the atelier, refers to a subordinate called Céline by another moniker because he refuses to speak the name of the rival brand. Perhaps even more pertinent to its appeal, the series is ravishing to behold—the first of Apple’s fashion-related projects to merit the extravagant budget. And yet for all the Ledus’ jaunts to the Swiss mountainside or to their private island (where, naturally, Vincent and his siblings mope around in their childhood castle), they are the underdogs of this story. Their independence as a maison is threatened by Diane Rovel (Carole Bouquet), a luxury tycoon who prides herself on being the wealthiest woman in Europe but still dwells on what she doesn’t have. The owner of an Arnault-like constellation of labels, she has schemed for decades to add Ledu to her collection, and she senses that this may be her chance.

Don’t mistake “La Maison” for a beau-monde “Succession.” The French series, rather than insisting on the stakes of its inheritance drama, treats the conceit as a wicked game of musical chairs. It mattered who ran the Roys’ conservative media conglomerate; “La Maison,” to its credit, never makes such a case about the fate of a fashion house. Robinson compares his plight to that of “Diana, Fergie, and Meghan”—whom he calls “my girls”—and the show’s pleasures lie in royal-gawking of a sort, hewing more to the restrained elegance of “The Crown” than to the gaudy fantasy of “Emily in Paris.” It’s something of a relief, too, that “La Maison” is twisty without being cynical, free of the bleakness of its HBO predecessor. With the latter, one always got the feeling that, in any of the Roy children’s hands, the family’s empire would instantly collapse; their father was right to withhold the keys to the kingdom. In contrast, there are probably multiple paths to the reinvention of Ledu.

Enter Paloma Castel (Zita Hanrot), an upstart designer who joins the company as a way to learn about her father—the love of Vincent’s life—who died when she was two. (Satisfyingly, her origins are more complicated than they first appear.) The closest thing Vincent has to a scion of his own, the orphaned Paloma can be written into the family mythology (i.e., its rebrand campaign) with some careful finessing. And, as Vincent’s second-in-command, Perle (Amira Casar), points out matter-of-factly, in addition to being a generational talent, Paloma is “a biracial activist woman . . . the essence of everything we need now.” Vincent bristles at her invocation of le wokisme. His preferred candidate is Robinson, precisely because he’s less of a threat in the long term. Wait out the outrage cycle, Vincent believes, and he can retake the throne after the current occupant embarrasses himself. Never mind that Vincent has been repeating ideas for years—that the black gowns that have become Ledu’s signature may as well be funeral shrouds.

Paloma is at once Ledu’s surest bet and its riskiest gamble; when she débuts her first handbag for the house, she finds that her exacting ethical standards actually invite harsher scrutiny. Anyway, she’s more a conduit for debates roiling the industry—over diversity, sustainability, cancel culture—than a believable character in her own right. Previously the head of a Berlin-based label that traffics in unpolished designs and even less polished lefty messaging, Paloma is, frankly, a preposterous choice to run the high-end Ledu: her pants are sewn together from scraps of other pants, her shirts from those of other shirts, and her ideals are no more original. She rails against luxury firms stoking and exploiting “the frustration of people who don’t have money”—then expresses, in the next breath, a near-exclusive interest in haute couture.

Such a disconnect is revealing of larger issues: for every knowing wink at a Dolce & Gabbana stumble or the fabled genesis of the Birkin bag, there’s a detail that feels off, especially when it comes to the characters of color. The Korean client whom Vincent rages against, for example, likely wouldn’t need a translator to converse with the English-fluent designer; nor would an insider like Paloma be surprised that the Ledu enterprise is propped up—like almost all major luxury houses—by the sale of purses and perfume.

But, if “La Maison” occasionally falters on the runway, it is sure-footed as a study of the rich cannibalizing their own. That two fiefdoms are in play—Rovel and Ledu—adds to the sense of glamorous disarray. The wavy-maned, aristocratic Vincent, who looks like an even more dashing Yves Saint Laurent, is a howling lion done in by what he considers a mere thorn in his paw; the nouveau-riche Diane, who’s rarely seen without her achingly heavy gold jewelry, is a tigress slow to realize that the daughter she bats around for sport is growing into a predator to be reckoned with. The dysfunctional dynasties make a fascinating contrast; every unhappy fashion house, it seems, is unhappy in its own way. While Vincent has pointedly refused to cultivate a successor—and stunted once promising candidates like Robinson—Diane veers to the opposite extreme, pitting several potential heirs against one another so that only the most cold-blooded will emerge triumphant. The Rovel mogul’s baroque backstory epitomizes the series’ penchant for corny melodrama, but the character emerges, thanks in part to Bouquet’s grounded performance, as a woman who broke the mold for herself and simply can’t respect anyone incapable of doing the same. Thus Diane joins the pantheon of abysmal parents in prestige (and prestige-aspirant) dramas, expressing perennial disappointment in her daughter even as she forces her to compete against both her husband and her own child. Robinson’s self-sacrificing mother, meanwhile, is dismissed as “a woman who builds her own cage.”

Robinson himself reflects that his proximity to his famous uncle means that he’s seldom seen as anything more than an “opportunity” by the people around him—and yet he can’t help replicating the cutting hauteur with which his older relatives have whittled him down all his life. His ambition of becoming a designer was snuffed out early, such that the Ledu name is all he has to offer. Without the temerity to stand on his own, his pedigree is unlikely to be worth much. But a family pathology is a kind of inheritance, too. ♦