La Maison is a show born out of what executive producer Alex Berger has described as a desire to depict environments that are “fantasized about but people [don’t] understand how they work.” With his new Apple TV+ series in particular, he wanted to show that for all its glamour, the fashion industry runs like any other: Bottom lines, not hemlines, are what spirit us from season to the next.
It’s a bit like Succession in that way. In La Maison’s jam-packed pilot, the ample plots and subplots are just that: plots. While one brother schemes to overthrow another at the family fashion house, a ruthless self-made fashion CEO plans to gobble up a long-standing family-owned business. Does the show have the winning, cunning, meme-spawning dialogue of Succession? Not quite—but it does capture the steely world of the ultra-wealthy with a remarkably well-dressed cast. (It’s rare to see so much good Alaïa, Haider Ackermann, and vintage Claude Montana onscreen.) La Maison is melodramatic—soapy, even—but in a world of frothy shows like Emily in Paris, consider this an Aesop opera. Even more: It gets quite a few things right.
Here’s our analysis of what’s true to life—and what isn’t so much—about Apple TV+’s La Maison.
Do fashion brands destroy their unsold clothes? Fact.
In the first episode, we see Paloma Castel (Zita Hanrot) and Ye-Ji (Park Ji-min), partners in the Berlin-based, inclusivity-minded brand Doppel, raid a garment destruction and incineration facility, where they happen upon discarded, unworn pieces from two premiere fashion houses: Ledu (run by Vincent Ledu) and Rovel (run by Diane Rovel).
In reality, both luxury and fast-fashion brands engage in the controversial and woefully wasteful practice of incinerating unsold goods—and yes, this includes luxury handbags and footwear. Luxury brands are motivated by the rationale that unsold inventory is better destroyed than made to seem cheap by being massively marked down or sent to an outlet. For fast-fashion chains, on the other hand, in some cases there’s a tax advantage to burning versus storing excess inventory.
The European Environment Agency shared that “it’s estimated 4 to 9% of all textile products put on the market in Europe are destroyed before use, amounting to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles destroyed each year.”
Do brands use discarded fabrics from other brands? Fact.
Early on in La Maison, we see a Doppel runway show featuring garments bricolaged together from old Ledu and Rovel pieces rescued from the aforementioned incineration plant.
In real life, a growing number of designers are committed to using deadstock (or unsold yardage) fabrics. Doppel winks to real-life brands like New York’s Collina Strada, Paris’s Marine Serre, and London’s Chopova Lowena, three labels that have led the charge in the large-scale use of deadstock materials. There are also brands making clothing out of textiles with a purposefully identifiable provenance: For example, LilyEve’s jackets are made of Hermès silks and terry cloths.
Do fashion CEOs actually purposefully avoid their adversaries’ advertisements? Fiction (probably).
We first meet Diane Rovel (Carole Bouquet) on her way to a meeting. As the (extremely wealthy) head of Rovel, an LVMH-type fashion conglomerate, Mrs. Rovel is driven through Paris by a chauffeur who has explicit instructions to cruise past Rovel ads only. Nary a billboard belonging to her competitor, Ledu, should be on view. (To really get into it, if Rovel is meant to be LVMH-esque, Ledu can be likened to Chanel or Hermès—both of which sit outside the noisy matrixes of luxury-fashion conglomerates. Thus Ledu is Mrs. Rovel’s white whale.)
While we can’t say for sure if fashion executives are protected from their competitors’ ads by their drivers, we can say that it seems like a highly inefficient and protracted way for a person with places to be to get around town. And what is time but money?
Do designers get canceled and asked to step down? Fact.
This feels like an obvious one. After a racist rant from Vincent Ledu (Lambert Wilson) goes viral online, the public demands that he step down as creative director of Ledu. This darkly familiar plotline recalls John Galliano’s fall from grace and subsequent exit from Christian Dior in 2011. In fact, that real-life incident is even referenced in La Maison: “Ledu just pulled a Galliano,” one viewer of the Ledu clip remarks.
Do designers have retrospective fashion shows? Fact.
Even after the court of public opinion decrees Vincent Ledu canceled, he moves ahead with the world’s worst-timed retrospective fashion show anyway. In an interview with Vogue, La Maison costume designer Carine Sarfati detailed how she staged a full-on fashion show for the house of Ledu using lace sourced from esteemed lace makers like Sophie Hallette, Solstiss, and Hurel. “It was important to have a combination of dresses that could have been from different decades,” Sarfati said of the resulting collection.
Designers are known to stage look-back showcases that reprise pieces from their archives to mark an anniversary or commemorate their tenure. Just see the retrospective show put on by couturier Giambattista Valli during Couture Week in July 2022 or the Kim x Dolce Gabbana spring 2023 collection, based on D&G pieces from 1987 to 2007.
Are designers pressed to show a collection as soon as they’re appointed creative director? Fiction.
By episode three of La Maison, Paloma Castel has replaced Vincent Ledu and, in what seems like a matter of days, is presenting her first collection. Didn’t we just get a Ledu retrospective? How did another Fashion Week creep up? While a real-life French couture and ready-to-wear label like Ledu would theoretically show more times than a strictly ready-to-wear label, the race to get Castel’s first collection out seems awfully fast. Assuming the Ledu retrospective happened during Couture Week in July, Ledu wouldn’t show another collection until October, during Paris Fashion Week. That’s three-ish months!
Do designers have in-house muses the way Vincent Ledu has Perle Foster? Fact.
Vincent Ledu doesn’t need to close his eyes to envision the ideal Ledu woman; she’s right there with him at the atelier. Though Perle Foster (played brilliantly by Amira Casar) is gunning for the artistic-director title she rightly deserves, at the moment she’s just a muse—inspiring Vincent with her je ne sais quoi and keeping the temperamental designer on track. The in-house muse is one that’s long been a resource to some of history’s greatest design talents. Yves Saint Laurent had Loulou de la Falaise. Azzedine Alaïa had Farida Khelfa. Halston had Elsa Peretti. Karl Lagerfeld had Amanda Harlech. These muses may not be able to design themselves, but what they lack in technical skill they make up for in vision.
