In this year’s Oscar race, the revolution will be stylized
To rebel is to defy. It is to understand that the world as it is can and should be better.
So it’s no surprise rebels were everywhere on our movie screens in 2025. Filmmakers in the U.S. and abroad depicted the lengths to which people will go to stand up against the bland (and at times violent) vision of conformity they see around them. It’s a theme that comes through most organically in these films’ costume designs.
In “Wicked: For Good,” for instance, Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba Thropp stands apart from the glossy superficiality of the Emerald City. Paul Tazewell, an Oscar winner earlier this year for the first “Wicked,” once again wrapped Elphaba’s defiant spirit in the very fabric of her costumes. As she fights for animal rights and defies the authority of that fraud of a Wizard, the titular witch dons dresses and capes (and, yes, even a knitted cardigan that had the internet abuzz) that ground her in that land “made of dirt and rock and loam” she sings about.
Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba in “Wicked: For Good.”
(Giles Keyte / Universal Pictures)
Not that all rebels choose to stand out. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s politically urgent thriller “One Battle After Another” — costumed by four-time Oscar winner Colleen Atwood — members of the French 75 revolutionary group know better than to draw attention to themselves.
“Take Deandra [played by Regina Hall], for instance, who’s always lived off the grid,” Atwood tells The Envelope. “They have lives, but they are still somewhere on the wanted list, and some weirdo can suddenly know who they are. So they really have to blend in. They have to be not noticeable. That was a big goal with everybody’s costume in the movie, all the French 75 costumes — and Leo as well.”
That’s why DiCaprio spends much of the film in a red bathrobe, making him both incredibly hard to miss and also decidedly ordinary-looking. “Would you wear it the whole time?” Atwood remembers asking herself: “Would he get rid of it? And Paul goes, ‘Why would you take off your clothes if you’re running?’”
Leonardo DiCaprio, left, and Benicio Del Toro in “One Battle After Another.”
(Warner Bros. Pictures)
Atwood’s choice to put Benicio Del Toro in a gi and a turtleneck was similarly driven by this approach: These are all people who move through the world wanting to disrupt the system without making such disruption all that conspicuous. Here we may also add the off-the-rack suits Teddy and Don (Jesse Plemons and Aiden Delbis) wear in “Bugonia” to face their kidnapped CEO; the beret-and-turtleneck-wearing revolutionary (Richard Ayoade) in “The Phoenician Scheme”; and the stylish, delightfully unbuttoned shirts Wagner Moura wears throughout “The Secret Agent.”
Not all instances of rebellion are so obviously political. Take Harry Lighton’s deliciously kinky dom-com “Pillion,” which finds shy young Colin (Harry Melling) entering into a BDSM relationship with an enigmatic biker called Ray (Alexander Skarsgård).
“Ray’s an anomaly; he’s the rebel, you can’t place him,” costume designer Grace Snell says. When we first meet him, he is wearing a striking white leather biking outfit: “I wanted him to be like a light at night on this bike and a shiny toy for Colin.”
Harry Melling, left, and Alexander Skarsgård in “Pillion.”
(Festival de Cannes)
The leather and kink gear that Skarsgård, Melling and the rest of the “Pillion” cast wear allowed Snell to give audiences the Tom of Finland fantasy Lighton’s film clearly demands. Yet the film is about a quieter rebellion.
“Colin’s kind of testing his boundaries and understanding who he is as a gay man, and exploring what that means for him,” Snell says. It’s why he spends much of the film in uniform, as a traffic warden, as a member of a barbershop quartet, and later as the new member of Ray’s biker gang.
“Pillion” is about self-fashioning at its most elemental: how gear and uniforms, roles and positions, can help you bloom into yourself; how in losing yourself in another you can find who you want to be.
Blending such a lesson in ways political and personal is Bill Condon’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” also costumed by Atwood. The musical is framed by the tension between Valentin (Diego Luna), a righteous revolutionary, and Molina (Tonatiuh), a gay hairdresser, who share a prison cell under Argentina’s military regime.
Diego Luna and Jennifer Lopez in “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”
(Roadside Attractions)
Along with designer Christine L. Cantella, Atwood aimed to honor the history the film was depicting and the message it embodies. “Not only is it set in a revolutionary time, but it’s also about two people opening each other’s eyes to the world,” Atwood says, “in a way that is such a great message for today.”
Atwood and Cantella had to balance the dingy reality of the prison — where Molina finds modest beauty in his silk robes — and the movie musical he loses himself in — where Jennifer Lopez’s Aurora is dressed like a silver-screen siren throughout. Lopez’s big number, where she dons an ode to the all-white ensemble Chita Rivera wore in the original Broadway show, including a fedora to match, is all about the lure of escapist Hollywood fantasy: “Turn off the lights and turn on your mind,” she sings.
As the ending of the musical attests, there may be a way to do both, to be politically engaged and still enjoy the beauty of the world around you. For, as these varied films attest, a rebel doesn’t just voice their discontent at the status quo. They wear it proudly.
