what are you wearing For a costume designer, the answer might be “me.” IV News

Screenplay by Anna Grace Lee

Last year, their work transported audiences to Paris and Graceland, to an underwater kingdom, to stone-eyed, sausage-fingered parallel dimensions—and to the decrepit depths of 1920s Hollywood.

Throughout his career, five were nominated until this year Wishes for costume design have dressed dozens of movie stars and entire armies of extras, picking up a combined eight Oscars along the way. So what happens when they turn their expert eyes inward and become the main characters of the night?

“There’s a decision we have to make: whether we go out to a big fashion designer or not,” Ruth E. Carter said in a speech from Los Angeles a few days before the ceremony. “Or we say: We have the resources. We have the knowledge. We have the ability to create beautiful fashion that we can actually dress up in and feel good about, and represent ourselves. So that’s what I’m doing. I represent myself.”

In 2019, Carter became the first black designer to win the Oscar for costume design, receiving the award for “Black Panther.” This year, she is nominated for her work on the sequel, “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” Carter said she planned to wear two outfits on Sunday night, and that her second look — a white-toned dress with beading — paid homage to Chadwick Bosemanstar of “Black Panther” who died of cancer in 2020.

“If I were to be themed around who I am on the red carpet, I feel like I’m someone real who represents the Afro future because of who I am,” she said. To realize her vision, she enlisted the help of editors Tamara Cobus and Rory Cunningham. (In the film world, a dressmaker makes patterns and cuts, fits, and constructs garments from a costume designer’s sketches.)

Jenny Beavan – who won last year’s Oscar for “Cruella” – and Mary Zophres took a similar approach with their Oscar outfits, working with friends and industry partners to bring their visions to life, dressing as they might dress a character.

For Beavan, that meant using her Oscar-winning ensemble to pay tribute to her film’s title character, “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” anticipating the kind of award-season uniform. In the film, Mrs. Harris is a London house cleaner whose passion for a Dior dress takes her on a trip to Paris to buy her own designer dress. Beavan’s proposed Oscar outfit, which she also wore to the BAFTAs and Costume designers The Guild Award, is a “homage to a cleaning woman” with a “nod to Dior,” she said, and was won by her friend, the schooner Tim Perkins. It has a polka dot toe and a headband as well as a feather drawer, which she “thought would be a fun accessory, to sort of dust off people.”

Zophres, who is nominated for her work in “Babylon,” said she was going to wear a dress of her own design, cut by José Bello. “That way, you’ll never be wearing something that someone else is wearing on the carpet,” Zophres said. She described her Oscar dress as fuchsia pink, a similar color to the double-breasted suit she wore to the nominees’ luncheon last month. “It’s a fun dress,” she said, adding that it was “danceable and energetic.”

Shirley Kurata and Catherine Martin went in a different direction with their Oscars looks, handing over the reins to fashion designers.

In an email, Kurata said she plans to wear custom Rodarte. Studying Academy Award Looking back over the years, she was particularly drawn to a sequined Arnold Scaasi outfit worn by Barbra Streisand in 1969 and took it as inspiration for her own dress. Kurata added that her dress was hand-stitched and red, a nod to the “dominant color” of her film, “Everything Everywhere All At Once.”

“There is also color in it Chinese culture which represents luck, joy and happiness, which also reflects the feelings I have about the film and my Oscar look,” she wrote.

In an interview, Martin said she and her husband, director Baz Luhrmann, would wear Prada on Sunday. Martin, who is nominated for her work in “Elvis,” said she loves the feeling “on special occasions, not having to make my own costume.”

“It feels like fun, not work,” she said.

“As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more comfortable being part of the party and being happy to be at the dance with everyone else and less self-conscious — less feeling like I’m a backstage person and should just be in a black pantsuit, Martin said. She added that she planned to wear two looks for the evening: an embellished dress for the ceremony and a sequin pajama for the after-party.

“My theory about costumes is that they’re all clothes,” she said. “However fanciful or distant from reality clothing is, even in the movies, it still has to be clothing. I think costumes are clothes and clothes are costumes and in a sense we dress ourselves every day.”

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