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 that 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 longstanding 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 Ackerman, 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.
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/incineration facility,.
