2025 Oscars: Best Costume Design Predictions

Final voting is February 11-18. 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 Best Costume Design nominations are “A Complete Unknown,” “Conclave,” “Gladiator II,” “Nosferatu,” and “Wicked,” which is the favorite. However, “A Complete Unknown” the surprise entry, could be a dark horse.

Jon M. Chu’s “Wicked” tells the origin story of Elphaba/the Wicked Witch (Oscar-nominated Cynthia Erivo) and Galinda/Glinda the Good Witch (Oscar-nominated Ariana Grande). Costume designer Paul 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.

“A Complete Unknown,” James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic starring Best Actor nominee Timothée Chalamet, chronicles the folk star’s rise in New York’s West Village in 1961 to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he turned electric. Costume designer Arianne Phillips was responsible for dressing Chalamet as the freewheelin’ Dylan with around 67 costume changes, as well as the large ensemble. She was on the project for four years but was helped by a six-month delay due to COVID and waiting for Mangold and Chalamet’s availability. Her research led to the discovery that Dylan was a meticulous dresser who modeled himself after folk star Woody Guthrie with dungarees and Pendleton shirts.

‘A Complete Unknown’Macall Polay

“Nosferatu,” director Robert Eggers’ vampire film, is a new take on the pre-Victorian tale of gothic horror. It stars Bill Skarsgård as 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.

“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.

“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. 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 Lucilla (reprised by Connie Nielsen), whose costumes pay slight nods to 20th-century designers Halston and Courreges.

Nominees are listed below in order of likelihood they will win.

Contenders

“Wicked”
“A Complete Unknown”
“Nosferatu”
“Conclave”
“Gladiator II”