To insurgent is to defy. It’s to know that the world as it’s can and must be higher.
So it’s no shock rebels had been all over the place on our film screens in 2025. Filmmakers within the U.S. and overseas depicted the lengths to which individuals will go to face up in opposition to the tasteless (and at occasions violent) imaginative and prescient of conformity they see round them. It’s a theme that comes by way of most organically in these movies’ costume designs.
In “Depraved: For Good,” as an example, Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba Thropp stands aside from the shiny superficiality of the Emerald Metropolis. Paul Tazewell, an Oscar winner earlier this 12 months for the primary “Depraved,” as soon as once more wrapped Elphaba’s defiant spirit within the very cloth of her costumes. As she fights for animal rights and defies the authority of that fraud of a Wizard, the titular witch dons attire and capes (and, sure, even a knitted cardigan that had the web abuzz) that floor her in that land “manufactured from grime and rock and loam” she sings about.
Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba in “Depraved: For Good.”
(Giles Keyte / Common Photos)
Not that each one rebels select to face out. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s politically pressing thriller “One Battle After One other” — costumed by four-time Oscar winner Colleen Atwood — members of the French 75 revolutionary group know higher than to attract consideration to themselves.
“Take Deandra [played by Regina Hall], as an example, who’s at all times lived off the grid,” Atwood tells The Envelope. “They’ve lives, however they’re nonetheless someplace on the wished record, and a few weirdo can all of the sudden know who they’re. So that they actually need to mix in. They need to be not noticeable. That was an enormous aim with everyone’s costume within the film, all of the French 75 costumes — and Leo as properly.”
That’s why DiCaprio spends a lot of the movie in a purple bathrobe, making him each extremely arduous to overlook and likewise decidedly ordinary-looking. “Would you put on it the entire time?” Atwood remembers asking herself: “Would he do away with it? And Paul goes, ‘Why would you’re taking off your garments should you’re operating?’”
Leonardo DiCaprio, left, and Benicio Del Toro in “One Battle After One other.”
(Warner Bros. Photos)
Atwood’s option to put Benicio Del Toro in a gi and a turtleneck was equally pushed by this method: These are all individuals who transfer by way of the world eager to disrupt the system with out making such disruption all that conspicuous. Right here we can also add the off-the-rack fits Teddy and Don (Jesse Plemons and Aiden Delbis) put on in “Bugonia” to face their kidnapped CEO; the beret-and-turtleneck-wearing revolutionary (Richard Ayoade) in “The Phoenician Scheme”; and the trendy, delightfully unbuttoned shirts Wagner Moura wears all through “The Secret Agent.”
Not all cases of revolt are so clearly political. Take Harry Lighton’s deliciously kinky dom-com “Pillion,” which finds shy younger Colin (Harry Melling) coming into right into a BDSM relationship with an enigmatic biker referred to as Ray (Alexander Skarsgård).
“Ray’s an anomaly; he’s the insurgent, you possibly can’t place him,” costume designer Grace Snell says. After we first meet him, he’s carrying a hanging white leather-based biking outfit: “I wished him to be like a light-weight at night time on this bike and a shiny toy for Colin.”
Harry Melling, left, and Alexander Skarsgård in “Pillion.”
(Competition de Cannes)
The leather-based and kink gear that Skarsgård, Melling and the remainder of the “Pillion” solid put on allowed Snell to provide audiences the Tom of Finland fantasy Lighton’s movie clearly calls for. But the movie is a couple of quieter revolt.
“Colin’s type of testing his boundaries and understanding who he’s as a homosexual man, and exploring what meaning for him,” Snell says. It’s why he spends a lot of the movie in uniform, as a site visitors warden, as a member of a barbershop quartet, and later as the brand new member of Ray’s biker gang.
“Pillion” is about self-fashioning at its most elemental: how gear and uniforms, roles and positions, may also help you bloom into your self; how in dropping your self in one other you could find who you need to be.
Mixing such a lesson in methods political and private is Invoice Condon’s “Kiss of the Spider Lady,” additionally costumed by Atwood. The musical is framed by the strain between Valentin (Diego Luna), a righteous revolutionary, and Molina (Tonatiuh), a homosexual hairdresser, who share a jail cell beneath Argentina’s navy regime.
Diego Luna and Jennifer Lopez in “Kiss of the Spider Lady.”
(Roadside Sights)
Together with designer Christine L. Cantella, Atwood aimed to honor the historical past the movie was depicting and the message it embodies. “Not solely is it set in a revolutionary time, however it’s additionally about two folks opening one another’s eyes to the world,” Atwood says, “in a manner that’s such an important message for as we speak.”
Atwood and Cantella needed to steadiness the dingy actuality of the jail — the place Molina finds modest magnificence in his silk robes — and the film musical he loses himself in — the place Jennifer Lopez’s Aurora is dressed like a silver-screen siren all through. Lopez’s huge quantity, the place she dons an ode to the all-white ensemble Chita Rivera wore within the unique Broadway present, together with a fedora to match, is all concerning the lure of escapist Hollywood fantasy: “Flip off the lights and switch in your thoughts,” she sings.
Because the ending of the musical attests, there could also be a method to do each, to be politically engaged and nonetheless take pleasure in the great thing about the world round you. For, as these diversified movies attest, a insurgent doesn’t simply voice their discontent at the established order. They put on it proudly.
