To insurgent is to defy. It’s to grasp that the world as it’s can and ought to be higher.
So it’s no shock rebels have been in every single 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 means of most organically in these movies’ costume designs.
In “Wicked: For Good,” as an illustration, Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba Thropp stands aside from the shiny superficiality of the Emerald Metropolis. Paul Tazewell, an Oscar winner earlier this yr for the primary “Wicked,” as soon as once more wrapped Elphaba’s defiant spirit within the very material of her costumes. As she fights for animal rights and defies the authority of that fraud of a Wizard, the titular witch dons clothes and capes (and, sure, even a knitted cardigan that had the web abuzz) that floor her in that land “made of dirt and rock and loam” she sings about.
Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba in “Wicked: For Good.”
(Giles Keyte / Common Footage)
Not that each one rebels select to face out. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s politically pressing thriller “One Battle After Another” — 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], for instance, who’s always lived off the grid,” Atwood tells The Envelope. “They have lives, but they are still somewhere on the wanted list, and some weirdo can suddenly know who they are. So they really have to blend in. They have to be not noticeable. That was a big goal with everybody’s costume in the movie, all the French 75 costumes — and Leo as well.”
That’s why DiCaprio spends a lot of the movie in a crimson bathrobe, making him each extremely laborious to overlook and likewise decidedly ordinary-looking. “Would you wear it the whole time?” Atwood remembers asking herself: “Would he get rid of it? And Paul goes, ‘Why would you take off your clothes if you’re running?’”
Leonardo DiCaprio, left, and Benicio Del Toro in “One Battle After Another.”
(Warner Bros. Footage)
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 means of the world eager to disrupt the system with out making such disruption all that conspicuous. Right here we might 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 fashionable, delightfully unbuttoned shirts Wagner Moura wears all through “The Secret Agent.”
Not all situations 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 rebel, you can’t place him,” costume designer Grace Snell says. After we first meet him, he’s carrying a putting white leather-based biking outfit: “I wanted him to be like a light at night 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” forged put on allowed Snell to present audiences the Tom of Finland fantasy Lighton’s movie clearly calls for. But the movie is a couple of quieter revolt.
“Colin’s kind of testing his boundaries and understanding who he is as a gay man, and exploring what that means 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, might help you bloom into your self; how in shedding your self in one other yow will discover who you wish to be.
Mixing such a lesson in methods political and private is Invoice Condon’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” 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 army regime.
Diego Luna and Jennifer Lopez in “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”
(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 only is it set in a revolutionary time, but it’s also about two people opening each other’s eyes to the world,” Atwood says, “in a way that is such a great message for today.”
Atwood and Cantella needed to stability 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 massive 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: “Turn off the lights and turn on your mind,” she sings.
Because the ending of the musical attests, there could also be a strategy to do each, to be politically engaged and nonetheless take pleasure in the great thing about the world round you. For, as these different movies attest, a insurgent doesn’t simply voice their discontent at the established order. They put on it proudly.
