On May 16, 1929, the first-ever Academy Awards were held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles, honoring movies released between Aug. 1, 1927 and Aug. 1, 1928. There were 13 award categories including Best Actress, Best Actor and Outstanding Picture, now known as the Best Picture category, but it wasn’t until 1949 that costume designers were recognized for their work.
On March 24, 1949, the first-ever costume design category winners were announced, one for black and white film, awarded to Roger Fuse for “Hamlet” and one for color film, awarded to Dorothy Jeakins and Barbara Karinska for “Joan of Arc.”
As color films were gaining more and more prominence, the separation of categories was removed, bringing about a single costume design category. The first costume design awarded as a single category was won by Australian costume designer Orry-Kelly in 1958 for “Les Girls.”
Leading the category with eight costume design wins, the most of any costume designer, is Edith Head.
Head won her first award in the black and white costume design category for “The Heiress” in 1950 and the next year took home the costume design awards for both the color and black and white categories for her work in “All About Eve” and “Samson and Delilah.”
Head continued to dominate the category taking home the costume design award for “A Place in the Sun” in 1952, “Roman Holiday” in 1954, “Sabrina” in 1955, “The Facts of Life” in 1961 and “The Sting” in 1974.
Colleen Atwood, who won her first Oscar for Best Costume Design in 2003 for her work in “Chicago,” has also staked her territory in the category, winning the award three more times since then – in 2006 for “Memoirs of a Geisha,” in 2011 for Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” and in 2017 for “Fantastic Beats and Where to Find Them.”
Since its initial reviews in 1925, the outfits in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” have captivated readers.
In 1974 when the first film rendition of the book was released, audiences couldn’t look away and then in 2013, when Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan took on the roles of Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, audiences were drawn into the world of the 1920s once again, winning both films the Oscar for Best Costume Design in the years they were nominated.
In more recent history, costume designer Ruth Carter has been awarded the Oscar for Best Costume Design twice, once in 2019 for Marvel’s “Black Panther” and then again at last year’s ceremony for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”
Carter accepted her award saying to the audience, “It’s nice to see you again,” and continued by thanking The Academy for recognizing a black woman as a superhero.
This year marks the 96th year of the Academy Awards and the 75th year of the costume design category.
This year’s events, set to take place on March 10 at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood, California, feature an array of costumes from the Napoleonic era to the fantasy Barbie world. Take a look at this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Costume Design.
Jacqueline Durran – “Barbie”
Jacqueline Durran first worked with Greta Gerwig in 2019 on her film, “Little Women.” After taking home the Costume Design Academy Award for her work Gerwig asked Durran to return for her latest project, “Barbie.”
In an interview with Vogue, Durran said that she was only given 11 weeks to create everything, but she and her team continued to work on the outfits as filming began.
Durran said that in one of the later fittings with actor Ryan Gosling, he had come to her with the idea of creating Ken-branded underwear for his character, a detail that quickly went viral when the film’s marketing dropped.
Durran said that the process for creating looks for “Barbie” was different from other projects she had worked on.
“You don’t treat Barbie like you do a regular character because the motivation for what she’s wearing isn’t from within,” Durran said. “The defining characteristic of what she wears is where she’s going and what she’s doing. It’s about being completely dressed for your job or task.”
Durran has won two Academy Awards for Costume Design, her first in 2013 for her work on “Anna Karenina” and her second in 2020 for “Little Women,” and now is looking for her third win at this year’s Oscars.
Jacqueline West – “Killers of the Flower Moon”
Jacqueline West, a historian by training, has worked on everything from the Napoleonic era to over 20,000 years in the future.
Across her career, West has received Oscar nominations for her work on 2000’s “Quills,” 2008’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” 2015’s “The Revenant,” 2021’s “Dune” and is now up for an Oscar for “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
According to the Los Angeles Times, West spent the pandemic lockdown amassing images of the Osage and curating sample garments from the era before production began in Oklahoma’s Osage and Washington counties in 2021.
“Fortunately the Osage were wealthy enough to document their lives,” West said. “The only people in the 1920s who could afford home movies were the Osage and probably the royal family of England.”
West said she was able to find home movies of the Osage playing golf, shopping in Paris and documenting their children at Ivy League schools.
West also brought on Osage art consultant Julie O’Keefe of Tulsa for her costume design department and as filming began, West said she, O’Keefe and the rest of her team asked community members from the rural areas of Oklahoma in which they had been filming if they could bring family artifacts to an airplane hangar for socially distanced viewing in a car “trunk show.”
“This is the part that turned this epic film into what felt like to everyone a community project,” O’Keefe said.
Janty Yates and David Crossman – “Napoleon”
Director Ridley Scott may not have requested exacting historical accuracy for his 2023 film, “Napoleon” but costume designers Janty Yates and David Crossman made sure that was what he ended up with.
Scott returned to frequent collaborator Janty Yates who won an Oscar for her work on Scott’s “Gladiator” in 2001. Yates then turned to Crossman, a military costume design expert, to create the extensive wardrobe for the film.
Together the pair created thousands of military uniforms, hundreds of civilian outfits and a few dozen elegant royal and aristocratic designs. According to the Los Angeles Times, the pair dressed up to 900 background characters daily.
But that didn’t stop Yates and Crossman from creating an accurate and detailed wardrobe for every character.
According to the same article from the Los Angeles Times, Crossman said the project included a huge amount of hands-on research, visiting museums and historical sites including the Château de Fontainebleau, the Musee de L’Emperi, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Château de Malmaison, where Empress Josephine retired and died in 1814.
“We were able to borrow lots of absolutely original French Revolution coats and breeches, which we then took patterns from and made copies of,” Crossman said.
This attention to detail and historical accuracy has led Yates to her second Oscar nomination and Crossman to his first-ever nomination.
Ellen Mirojnick – “Oppenheimer”
Ellen Mirojnick, costume designer for one of the year’s biggest films, “Oppenheimer,” revealed in an article for The Hollywood Reporter that director Christopher Nolan had one early request when it came to the film’s wardrobe, he wanted the looks to look timeless, not dated.
Mirojnnick said the wardrobes for Cillian Murphy’s portrayal of J. Robert Oppenheimer were largely based on David Bowie’s “Thin White Duke” persona of the 1970s.
Mirojnick said she walked each of the actors through production designer Ruth De Jong’s showrooms, all of which were filled floor-to-ceiling with images and research from the era.
“Each actor came in with a very big understanding of every character, every scientist that they were playing,” Mirojnick said. “Each one took on a different tonality, a different silhouette. I love designing menswear because menswear is not embellished. It is very expressive and informative.”
But Mirojnick was also able to design womenswear outfits for the two female leads, Emily Blunt who played Kitty, Oppenheimer’s wife, and Florence Pugh who played Jean Tatlock, his lover.
“One of the elements of Kitty was to create a character of a woman who is lost — and who has lost her ambition,” Mirojnick said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “She’s not happy being a mother, she’s not happy in the place that she’s at and therefore, her salvation is liquor — and in that type of woman, I wanted to make sure that her costumes in what she would actually put on her body didn’t feel like a costume. It was just put together. It was like, if she had to go outside, put a shirt and pants on, and that was not precise but messy.”
Holly Waddington – “Poor Things”
Costume design has always been an important aspect of a film, but nothing compares to the role fashion plays in Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Poor Things.”
Holly Waddington, the film’s costume designer, said in an interview with BBC, that the costumes are fundamental to the surreal world in which the film is set, as well as being essential to the characterization of the film’s protagonist, Bella Baxter, played by Emma Stone.
As audiences watch Bella transform from a grown woman to an infant and then back again to a grown woman, the costume changes are somehow a balance of subtle changes and monumental storytelling.
At the beginning of the film, as audiences are introduced to the infant-brained Bella her outfits consist of babydoll dresses, joyful ruffles and enormous sleeves but as the film continues and Bella matures the outfits move more into sensible, protective coats and more sensible monochrome while still staying true to the surreal world Bella lives in.
"Her style is a reflection of where she's at in her development," Waddington said in an interview with BBC, a style that she coined as "Bella style.
The result, which has been called "Age of Innocence meets surrealism meets couture,” provides a visual narrative through which to understand Bella's character.
