Costume design and the Oscars: attention to detail for the screen

An area of fashion I have not yet focused on in an article is the art of costume design. While it might not reflect current trends, the thought and care that goes into costume designing is no easy feat. With the Oscars taking place, it felt like a good time to bring up the wonderful art of costume designing and personally talk about my favorites. At the bare bones, costume design is the process of selecting clothing for a person to perform in — think music, stage performances or on the screen. It has been around for decades.

Typically, there are five types of costume design; theatrical design, historical, fantastic, dance and modern. Now, since we all have a vague understanding of what costume design and fashion is, let’s jump in and talk about my favorite usage.

Starting with one of the Oscar nominations, ‘Conclave,’ perhaps one of my favorite movies from 2024, the attention to detail in the costumes really shined. Starting with the designer, Lisy Christl speaks on how they went about choosing the red for the vestments, the more modern color of the vestments would not translate well to screen, so instead she looked back through the 1960s to the 15th century and saw a darker red, since that looked better on camera they opted to use that instead of the brighter red that we see now. Perhaps my favorite detail would be the different crosses that each one of the cardinals wears. Much of the liberal characters are seen to have more a simple silver cross while the more conservative leaning had gold crosses. It is very subtle, but the attention of detail really shines in conveying the type of character that person is in the film.

Moving on to the Oscar winning costume design for the year, that went to ‘Wicked.’ The designer behind the fantastical costuming is Paul Tazewell. Tazewell has been on many different musicals in the past, his talents really shined in this movie. For this movie, they brought in over a hundred of designers, many being couture-level tailors and Vouge mentions in their piece on Tazwell.

The attention to detail was clear, even having a 3D-printing and laser manipulation to get just the right look. While taking home the Oscar for costume design, he was the first Black man to win in that category as well.

I could truly go on and on how much I love costume design and mention all of the shows, movies and plays that I have seen that the fashion made everything feel alive however I have just one column and many other papers to get to.

At the end of the day, if you pay attention to detail to what clothing a person is wearing or not there is a general appreciation that can be held for costume designing and how much thought goes into it.