How Does a Serious Fashion Series Fashion Itself? With Alaïa, Haider Ackerman, and Vintage Claude Montana

Note: This article contains spoilers for Apple TV+’s new French-language series La Maison. The series follows a top fashion designer’s fall from grace after a racist rant heard in the first episode.

La Maison is a show about the fashion industry that smacks of reality. Where most fictional depictions of the fashion world resort to camp and frivolity, La Maison takes its subject deadly seriously. Fashion is a business, after all, and there’s nothing silly about making money—especially when billions are on the table.

In the first episode of the Paris-set show, we meet a cast of well-dressed fashion folk. There is Lambert Wilson as designer Vincent Ledu, who heads up his family’s prestigious fashion house; Carole Bouquet as Diane Rovel, the aging CEO of a competing mega-conglomerate who clings to stiff notions of “good taste”; Zita Hanrot as Paloma Castel, a climate-aware designer-on-the-rise who doesn’t give a second thought to her chipped nail-polish; Antoine Reinartz as Robinson Ledu, a scion of the Ledu house constantly swathed in goofy luxury pieces to signal his disdain for the family business; and Amira Casar as Perle Foster, the seriously well-styled muse of Ledu who looks the epitomize of je ne sais quoi.

Minutes into the first episode, things take a darkly familiar turn when, in what he believes to be a private moment, Vincent Ledu spews racist vitriol in a rant to Perel Foster that quickly goes viral online. In the days and episodes that follow, he dismisses calls to step down from Ledu, even proceeding to show a retrospective runway collection. All the while, Paloma Castel reacts by staging a fashion show under her own label, Doppel, using repurposed scraps from discarded Ledu wares, and Perle Foster transforms from muse to wheeler and dealer, making moves to replace Vincent with Paloma.

The person charged with fashioning all this fashion drama? Carine Sarfati, La Maison’s costume designer, who had the tall order of not only dressing all these industry insiders, but also producing their runway collections. Sarfati’s work not only passes as plausible, but I’d argue that her creations for La Maison’s fictional labels have such a credible point of view that they wouldn’t seem out of place on Vogue Runway. Her characters skulk and machinate in a range of Alaïa, vintage Jean Paul Gaultier, vintage Claude Montana, Chloé, and Lemaire, while the textiles for the various fictional runway collections were sourced from the likes of Sophie Halette, Solstiss, and Hurel.