There’s the endless parade of expensive locations: the Hamptons house, the Paris Fashion Week vacation rental that is an actual castle, Julia’s cavernous walk-in closet, which must house approximately $10,000 worth of designer clothing per square foot. What’s unfortunate is that this novel stuff comes wrapped in the shiny, same-y packaging of a standard docusoap. If he and, to a lesser extent, Shlomo are less sanguine about the Haarts’ exodus than their sisters, the implication is that it’s because the frum lifestyle is so much harder on women.
Aron considers himself a pious “black-hatter”-a persona that, for him, seems to satisfy an adolescent urge to rebel against his parents. Ben has a hard time getting used to the idea of Bat wearing pants. Bat and Ben, who married at 19 and would more than likely have a family of their own by now if they’d stayed in Monsey, struggle over when to start having kids. Only Miriam has gotten all the way there. Although she often claims that it’s fundamentalism she loathes, not religion per se, Julia would clearly like to see her kids reject Judaism as fully as she has. The show highlights some fascinating tensions that arise within an apparently loving family in which no one occupies precisely the same point on the spectrum between Orthodox and secular life. Now a remarkably young 50, Julia is doing everything she didn’t get to do in her 20s: wearing leather catsuits, talking constantly and graphically about sex, radiating big girlboss energy. She’s since gotten divorced and remarried, to super-rich Italian entrepreneur Silvio Scaglia Haart (who took the last name she gave herself upon leaving the Monsey fold), moved into a vast Tribeca penthouse and propelled herself rapidly upward in the fashion world. But secretly, that circumscribed lifestyle was killing her. Just six years earlier, Julia was living a fully frum life in the Orthodox enclave of Monsey, in New York’s Rockland County-keeping house, tending to her four children, wearing wigs, submitting to her husband, strictly observing the Jewish sabbath, the whole deal. The eponymous unorthodox life belongs to Julia Haart, who has, since 2019, been the chief executive of modeling mega-brand Elite World Group. While I’m sure it makes perfect sense to the algorithm, the result is an exceedingly strange, questionably authentic mix of moods, genre conventions and contrivances. Instead of an eye-opening docuseries or a tear-jerking drama, it’s a reality show in the glossy, soapy Bravo mold. My Unorthodox Life, whose nine-episode first season just arrived on the service, is yet another story of an irrepressible woman escaping her ultra-Orthodox prison. Now Netflix, like Eve in the Garden of Eden, has finally seized the low-hanging fruit-and it’s a juicy one. But no mass-media trend stays earnest forever. Their tone tends to be somber, then triumphant. “I thought about all the things that bother me about clothing, like those pieces that you just have so much difficulty finding that I would call the essentials of any woman’s wardrobe, and that’s what I geared this collection toward.These are, for the most part, tales of trauma, abuse and repression, culminating in hard-won liberation. Well, I don’t believe in that, and I would like to give women a new choice,” she began. I think women want a new choice, and what I mean by that is I think women have been told their entire lives that you have to suffer for beauty.
“What we’re trying to do with this ready-to-wear collection is to bring something newer to the market. Speaking with Haart on the phone in advance of the announcement, the designer explained that her intentions for the label go deeper than just capitalizing on the style trends of the moment. It’s great timing, then, that La Perla, the luxury Italian intimates brand famed for its lacy little things, is expanding its ready-to-wear presence under a new creative director, Julia Haart-or so you’d think. Think for a moment about the wardrobes of Rihanna, Kim Kardashian West, and Gigi Hadid, and you’ll realize that a vast majority is comprised of lingerie-inspired pieces, from slip dresses to corsets worn as tops.
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