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The Wizard of Oz (1939)
8.1/10on IMDb
Released
Dorothy's blue and white gingham pinafore, worn by Judy Garland
MGM's costume designer Adrian put Dorothy in a checked pinafore over a cream blouse with puffed sleeves, and the plainness is the point. She is a Kansas farm girl dropped into a world of saturated color, and the gingham keeps her readable as the outsider in every Technicolor frame. No dress on this list asks less of its wearer and gives the film more. Several identical copies were made for the shoot, and accounts still disagree on whether there were seven or ten.
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Gone with the Wind (1939)
8.2/10on IMDb
Released
Scarlett O'Hara's green curtain dress, worn by Vivien Leigh
Walter Plunkett's design turns a plot point into a costume. Broke after the war, Scarlett has a gown made from the drapes at Tara so she can face Rhett looking prosperous, and the dress has to read as an act of desperate pride rather than a couturier's work. That tension is what makes it memorable. On screen it was not real curtain fabric but green velvet treated to look aged and sun-worn, and it was built to last only as long as filming, which is why the surviving dress later needed restoration.
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Gilda (1946)
7.6/10on IMDb
Released
Gilda's black strapless satin gown, worn by Rita Hayworth
Jean Louis designed the sheath Hayworth wears to sing "Put the Blame on Mame", with the long black gloves, one of which she peels off during the number. The scene removes almost nothing, yet the dress makes it feel daring: bare shoulders, one unbroken column of black satin and no visible means of support. Later screen bombshells borrow from it constantly. The gown has turned up at auction more than once, but no sale has ever been confirmed.
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Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
7.1/10on IMDb
Released
Lorelei Lee's pink gown for "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend", worn by Marilyn Monroe
This was William Travilla's backup. His first design for the number was dropped when a scandal broke and producers insisted he return to the drawing board, and the fitted pink silk gown he made instead became the one everyone remembers. Its simple strapless shape leaves the staging, the chorus and Monroe's comic timing to do the work, which is exactly why it photographs so cleanly. One version sold at auction in 2010 for over $300,000.
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Rear Window (1954)
8.4/10on IMDb
Released
Lisa Fremont's entrance gown, worn by Grace Kelly
Edith Head dressed Kelly for Hitchcock, and this is the gown that introduces her: a black V-neck bodice and sheer white shawl over a full white chiffon tulle skirt, with black beading running down its layers. Lisa works in fashion, and the dress tells the laid-up photographer, and the audience, exactly who she is before she has said much at all. Few screen entrances are carried so completely by one costume.
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Sabrina (1954)
7.6/10on IMDb
Released
Sabrina Fairchild's Givenchy evening gown, worn by Audrey Hepburn
This is the dress story where the credit went to the wrong person. Billy Wilder sent Hepburn to the young Hubert de Givenchy for the elegant wardrobe Sabrina brings home from Paris, while Edith Head provided only her everyday clothes. Head still won the costume design Oscar, the film's only win, and accepted it without mentioning Givenchy, who went uncredited. Watch the gowns after Sabrina's return: they do the storytelling, showing a chauffeur's daughter transformed before anyone says so.
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The Seven Year Itch (1955)
7.0/10on IMDb
Released
The Girl's white halter dress over the subway grate, worn by Marilyn Monroe
William Travilla made the cocktail dress from rayon-acetate so it would hold sharp pleats, and those pleats are what make the scene. When the air from a passing train lifts the skirt, the fabric flares in a shape the camera can read from across the street, and the image has outlived the film around it. When Debbie Reynolds sold the dress at auction in 2011, it went for $4.6 million.
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Some Like It Hot (1959)
8.2/10on IMDb
Released
Sugar Kane's sheer beaded dress for "I'm Through with Love", worn by Marilyn Monroe
Orry-Kelly's cocktail dress for Monroe's torch song looks almost like nothing at all: a sheer, nude-toned base worked with beading, so that in black and white the effect is of sparkle and skin. It turns a sad ballad sung at a piano into the most talked-about image in a comedy full of men in dresses. Orry-Kelly won the Oscar for the film's costumes, and the dress sold at auction in 2016 for well over $400,000.
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La Dolce Vita (1960)
8.0/10on IMDb
Released
Sylvia's black strapless gown in the Trevi Fountain, worn by Anita Ekberg
The credit is disputed. The gown is often attributed to the Rome atelier of the Fontana sisters, while Piero Gherardi was the film's costume designer and won the Oscar for its costumes. Either way, its simplicity is why Ekberg wading into the fountain at night became the image of the film, front and center on its poster: one dark, uncluttered shape against pale water and stone. The film helped put Italian fashion on the world map, and this is the dress that makes the case.
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Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)
7.5/10on IMDb
Released
Holly Golightly's long black Givenchy dress, worn by Audrey Hepburn
The opening shot of Hepburn at a jeweler's window at dawn depends on this dress: a long black sheath by Hubert de Givenchy, made of Italian silk, that makes a party girl look untouchable on an empty Fifth Avenue. It is the reason the little black dress is so often credited to this film, even though the one on screen reaches the floor. Three versions exist. The one Givenchy gave to the writer Dominique Lapierre sold at auction in 2006 for a record £410,000.
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My Fair Lady (1964)
7.7/10on IMDb
Released
Eliza Doolittle's Ascot dress, worn by Audrey Hepburn
Cecil Beaton's black and white dress, with its huge matching hat trimmed in red and pink flowers and white feathers, is pure costume theater. It makes Eliza look every inch the lady at the races moments before her conversation gives her away, and that gap between the picture and the voice is the joke the scene runs on. Beaton won the Oscar for the film's costumes, and the look was still being reworked for red carpets nearly half a century later.
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Dirty Dancing (1987)
7.1/10on IMDb
Released
Baby's pale pink dress for the final dance, worn by Jennifer Grey
Hilary Rosenfeld's costume for "(I've Had) The Time of My Life" is deliberately simple: a light, flouncy pink dress that leaves the lift to be the spectacle. It is the dress in which Baby finally dances in front of everyone, and its soft skirt swings with every turn, so the costume shows how far she has come without a word. Anything grander would have fought the choreography.
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Pretty Woman (1990)
7.1/10on IMDb
Released
Vivian Ward's red opera gown, worn by Julia Roberts
The producers initially wanted this dress black. Costume designer Marilyn Vance convinced them red was the way to go, and she was right. The off-the-shoulder gown is elegant enough for the opera and still bold enough to show that Vivian has not been made over into somebody else, which is the whole argument of the film in one costume. A black version would have been tasteful and forgotten.
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Basic Instinct (1992)
7.1/10on IMDb
Released
Catherine Tramell's white interrogation dress, worn by Sharon Stone
Ellen Mirojnick's white, high-necked, sleeveless minidress is a lesson in costume as strategy. She designed it so Stone could sit like a man under interrogation, and the scene turns on exactly that: one cool white figure in a room of suited detectives, entirely in control. It is the most adult dress here, and the film is an erotic thriller for grown-ups only. Stone had it written into her contract that she could keep her clothes, and she kept this one.
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Titanic (1997)
8.0/10on IMDb
Released
Rose's red and black beaded evening gown, worn by Kate Winslet
Deborah Lynn Scott designed the sequined gown Rose is wearing on the night she considers jumping from the stern and first meets Jack, and its weight works on screen: a girl so heavily beaded and wrapped in finery that she looks trapped by it. That is the costume doing the character's work. Several copies were made for the stunts, and one sold for $330,000 at a movie memorabilia auction in 2012.
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How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003)
6.6/10on IMDb
Released
Andie Anderson's yellow evening gown, worn by Kate Hudson
The usual shorthand is "the Carolina Herrera dress", but the film's costume designer, Karen Patch, worked with the Herrera team to create it, aiming for something timeless, classic and clean. She took its color from the film's yellow diamond, the Isadora, so the gown and the necklace read as one idea. That restraint is why it still looks right more than two decades on, and why Hudson's full turn on the staircase lands as the film's big entrance.
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Atonement (2007)
7.8/10on IMDb
Released
Cecilia Tallis's green evening dress, worn by Keira Knightley
Jacqueline Durran's dress is a fluid, backless green slip, made with the director Joe Wright, and it carries a whole hot summer evening: effortless at dinner, devastating in the library and haunting in memory, which is exactly what the story needs it to do. It was voted the best film costume of all time in a poll by Sky Movies and InStyle, and designers are still making their own versions of it.
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Sex and the City (2008)
5.7/10on IMDb
Released
Carrie Bradshaw's Vivienne Westwood wedding gown, worn by Sarah Jessica Parker
The wedding never happens, but the enormous Westwood gown stuck in audiences' minds anyway. It is a runway dress in a story about whether Carrie wants the spectacle or the man, and its sheer scale makes the question visible at the New York Public Library, where she wears it for a groom who loses his nerve. Its pull went beyond the cinema: a cheaper copy reportedly sold out within hours of going on sale.
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Cinderella (2015)
6.9/10on IMDb
Released
Ella's blue ball gown, worn by Lily James
Kenneth Branagh's live-action Cinderella needed a gown that could hold its own against the cartoon everyone already knows, and Sandy Powell answered with layer upon layer of fine fabric in shades of blue, meant to move like a watercolor painting. Swarovski supplied crystals for the film's costumes, so the skirt catches the light as Ella flees the palace at midnight. It is a fairy-tale dress built to be seen in motion, and that is how audiences remember it.
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La La Land (2016)
8.0/10on IMDb
Released
Mia's canary yellow dress for "A Lovely Night", worn by Emma Stone
Mary Zophres had every costume in the film custom made, and this one is built to dance in: a canary yellow dress with hand-painted pattern detail and only slight volume in the skirt, so it moves with Stone through the tap number above the city lights rather than billowing over it. The color is deliberate too, part of a palette planned as a tribute to the Technicolor musicals of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
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Barbie (2023)
6.8/10on IMDb
Released
Barbie's pink gingham dress, worn by Margot Robbie
Jacqueline Durran, the designer behind Atonement's green dress, put Robbie in an early-1960s style pink gingham dress for her first look in Barbie Land, a nod to the doll's 1959 origins. It is sweet, crisp and slightly too perfect, which is exactly the joke: a woman who looks like a toy, right down to the daisy jewelry, before the real world starts to crease her. Durran has named it one of her favorite looks from the film.
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Wicked (2024)
7.3/10on IMDb
Released
Glinda's pink bubble dress, worn by Ariana Grande
Paul Tazewell went back to the 1939 film for this one, to the pink of Billie Burke's gowns as the good witch, and carried that color through Glinda's whole wardrobe. The bubble dress is its purest form: a structured, engineered confection, nostalgic in silhouette, that announces her before she has sung a note. It is the newest dress here with a real claim to recognition, and it helped make Tazewell the first Black man to win the Oscar for costume design.
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