2025 Oscars: Best Costume Design Predictions

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Nominations voting is from January 8-12, 2025, with official Oscar nominations announced January 17, 2025. Final voting is February 11-18, 2025. And finally, the 97th Oscars telecast will be broadcast on Sunday, March 2 and air live on ABC at 7 p.m. ET/ 4 p.m. PT. We update our picks through awards season, so keep checking IndieWire for all our 2025 Oscar predictions.

The State of the Race

The 2025 CDGA (Costume Designer Guild Awards) nominees were announced on December 13, providing Oscar boosts to Oscar frontrunners “Wicked” (Universal), “Nosferatu” (Focus Features), “Dune: Part Two” (Warner Bros.), “Gladiator II” (Paramount), and “Emilia Pérez” (Netflix). The winners will be announced at the 27th annual awards held February 6, 2025, at The Ebell of Los Angeles.

Giuseppe De Domenico, Martina Scrinzi, 2024. © Janus Films /Courtesy Everett Collection

The period nominees are “Nosferatu,” “Maria” (Netflix), “Gladiator II,” “Saturday Night” (Sony Pictures), and “The Book of Clarence” (Sony Pictures), with contemporary nods going to “Conclave” (Focus Features), “Emilia Pérez,” “Challengers” (Amazon MGM), “The Substance” (MUBI), and “The Fall Guy” (Universal).

The sci-fi/fantasy nominees went to “Wicked,” “Dune: Part Two,” “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” (Warner Bros.), “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” (Warner Bros.), and “Borderlands” (Lionsgate Films).

“Wicked,” Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of the Broadway musical fantasy by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, explores the teen friendship between the Wicked Witch and Glinda before they become rivals. Cynthia Erivo stars as Elphaba, the compassionate girl born with green skin, and Ariana Grande plays the conceited, popular Galinda. Costume designer Paul Tazewell (who teamed up with Chu on “In the Heights”) is no stranger to the world of Oz. He previously designed five productions of “The Wiz” and worked on “The Wiz Live.” Tazewell’s approach to Elphaba and Glinda’s costumes was to create intentional differences and highlight the juxtaposition of dark and light, textured versus refined, using a connection with nature for Elphaba and a floating sensibility for Galinda.

“Gladiator II,” Ridley Scott’s sequel to his Oscar winner, takes place two decades later as the Roman Empire continues to implode, providing a legacy-building opportunity for go-to costume designer Janty Yates (who won the Oscar for “Gladiator”) and co-designer Dave Crossman (“Napoleon”), who created the costumes for the Roman military and gladiators. It concerns Lucius (Paul Mescal), the former heir to the Empire, forced to enter the Colosseum as a ruthless gladiator. For Denzel Washington’s Macrinus, Yates took inspiration from painters Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant and Jean-Leon Gerome to deliver classical Roman attire with opulence. She went over the top for the eccentric Emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) with plenty of embroidery, gold on gold, and silver on silver. There’s a bit of a modern touch to Lucius’ mother, Lucilla (reprised by Connie Nielsen), whose costumes pay slight nods to 20th-century designers Halston and Courreges.

“Nosferatu,” director Robert Eggers’ reworking of F.W. Murnau’s legendary silent vampire film, is a new take on the pre-Victorian haunted tale of gothic horror. It stars Bill Skarsgård as the infamous Count Orlok, Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, the object of his desire, and Nicholas Hoult as her husband. The social status of the characters is part of the costumes’ DNA and impacts everything. Go-to costume designer Linda Muir carefully designed Ellen’s wardrobe, for example, to convey her troubled state of mind. An other-worldly connection to Orlok lends an ethereal quality to her clothes.

Courtesy of Focus Features / © 2024 FOCUS FEATURES LLC

“Conclave,” director Edward Berger’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning “All Quiet on the Western Front,” is a religious thriller adapted from the Robert Harris novel about a Cardinal (Ralph Fiennes) tasked with finding a successor to the deceased Pope, who harbored a dangerous secret. Costume designer Lisy Christl (“All Quiet on the Western Front”) dresses the papal trappings for a cast that includes three other Cardinals (played by Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and Lucian Msamati). Christl got creative with different fabrics, sewing, and deeper colors. Since so many of the characters are dressed in identical red robes, she differentiated through such details as crosses, rings, shoes, and overcoats.

“Emilia Pérez,” the musical crime thriller from Jacques Audiard, stars Zoe Saldaña as a disgruntled lawyer who assists the titular Mexican cartel leader (Karla Sofía Gascón) in undergoing gender confirmation surgery. Selena Gomez plays the wife of the cartel leader. The director audaciously offers an operatic fever dream about the hope of a new life through song and dance — but it’s also about the difficulty in leading double lives. Virginie Montel designed the costumes with a theatrical flair that expresses the characters’ fantasies during the musical sequences.

“Maria,” Pablo Larraín’s biographically-inspired drama about opera singer Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie), takes place during the final week of her life in Paris in the ’70s. Costume designer Massimo Cantini Parrini took inspiration from Callas’ original wardrobe; however, no new fur was sourced for Jolie’s garments.

In “Dune: Part Two,” costume designer Jacqueline West focused on the Harkonnen of Giedi Prime and Arrakis while introducing the Imperial world. This entailed creating looks for a whole new set of groups. In addition, the team came up with new costumes for the Bene Gesserits, particularly the southern Reverend Mothers of the Fremen, and a new color palette for the cave-dwelling Sietch, joined by Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson).

Egyptian art was the inspiration for the southern Reverend Mothers, which was ornate in a warm, sandy, organic color palette, with light olive greens, silver, and gold. The Sietch clothing contains simple organic fabrics fashioned into loose outfits, almost like pajamas. For Christopher Walken’s Emperor, West was guided by Mongol ruler Kublai Khan sitting on a throne. Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), like all Bene Gesserits, is based on medieval nuns. Her headdress was more ornate, and she had a close-fitting chainmail hood with a mesh-like metal grille.

Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” (Warner Bros.), the sequel to his horror comedy, sees Michael Keaton’s foul-mouth ghoul return from the afterlife to torment the Deetz family 36 years later. Oscar-winning go-to costume designer Colleen Atwood gets her first crack at costuming Keaton’s Beetlejuice and happily puts him back in the iconic black-and-white striped suit with her own stylish modifications, and the burgundy tux finds its way back as well. Dressing the rest of the cast, including the underworld, offered a gallery of goth, Victorian, and grunge.

In “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” costume designer Jenny Beavan expands on her Oscar-winning “Fury Road”: Anya Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa tattered wardrobe is a mix of leather, metal plating, and materials that she’s scavenged in the Wasteland. Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus is a motorbike showman with a white parachute cloak, but the teddy bear was an added touch to show off his damaged childhood.

As for the rest: “Blitz” (Apple TV+), from British director Steve McQueen, concerns Londoners during the Blitz of World War II in 1940. The harrowing drama focuses on a young biracial boy (Elliott Heffernan) attempting to reunite with his mother (Saoirse Ronan) and grandfather (Paul Weller) in London. Oscar-winning costume designer Jacqueline Durran (who previously worked with McQueen on “Small Axe”) used London as a character in her approach as a sprawling city devoid of cliche and repetition. Despite the harrowing circumstances, people still dressed up and created a look for themselves that reflected their personality. Ronan and the other female munitions workers differentiated themselves through head scarves and heels and the way they accessorized their suits.

“Saturday Night,” from director Jason Reitman, chronicles the lead-up to the premiere of NBC’s iconic late-night sketch comedy show, starring Gabriel LaBelle (“The Fabelmans”) as “SNL” creator/producer Lorne Michaels. Costume designer Danny Glicker (“Ghostbusters: Afterlife”) creates the period wardrobes for these comic legends that come together for this momentous show.

“A Complete Unknown” (Searchlight Pictures), James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet, chronicles the folk star’s rise in New York’s West Village in 1961 to the controversial 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he turned electric. Costume designer Phillips was responsible for dressing Chalamet as the freewheelin’ Dylan.

Potential nominees are listed in alphabetical order; no film will be deemed a frontrunner until we have seen it.