Dressed for Dystopia: A History of Sci-Fi Fashion in Film and TV

The most enduring fashion lives on the cutting edge. And what’s more forward-thinking than space travel, techno dystopias, and explorations of the distant future? Science fiction has given cinema many of the most iconic costumes in the medium’s history, and these garments have a distinct connection to high fashion, with the approaches to wardrobe influencing each other in equal measure.

Sci-fi is, of course, a vast designation, but the films (and TV projects) over the last forty years with the strongest connection to high fashion fall into a few subgenres: maximalist space stories (The Fifth Element, Avatar), fantasy adjacent (Marvel’s Agatha All Along), cyberpunk (the Matrix franchise), the uncanny near-future (The Lobster, Her), and the post-apocalyptic and dystopian (the Blade Runner films, The Creator). The last subgenre includes what is arguably the most important film franchise for science fiction wardrobing: Mad Max. The Mad Max costume designers, including Clare Griffin, Norma Moriceau, and Jenny Beavan, have influenced fashion through leather, metal, and an emphasis on asymmetrical cuts for decades.

Beavan, the designer for Mad Max: Fury Road and its prequel Furiosa, describes director George Miller’s approach to costuming as “very different to every other post-apocalyptic science fiction film, because it's based in truth.” Although heightened for cinematic effect, the punk aesthetic spread by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren through their boutique Sex and individual lines was employed by Moriceau in Mad Max 2 and Beyond Thunderdome. Moriceau was actually a friend and collaborator of Westwood and McLaren, and her approach, as well as Miller’s emphasis on pragmatism, helped shape Beavan’s approach.

“It's not like Spandex, because it looks good or [is a] funny sort of spacesuit. It's actually what they can find in the wasteland, and they have incredibly little. Everything's rotting, everything's toxic, and they're working with what they've got,” Beavan says of the clothes the inhabitants of the Mad Max universe wear. “Which doesn't mean it can't be inventive, but it has to have had a purpose.”

Practicality was a core tenant of Sarah Blenkinsop’s work on The Lobster, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Though she says she didn’t draw explicitly on fashion, Blenkinsop explains that “mainly we looked at uniform,” and that rigid consistency is present in some of the most haute designers of fashion, including Carolina Herrera, Yohji Yamamoto, and Molly Goddard.

“When you look at decades in the past, clothes don't really change that drastically,” says Blenkinsop. “You look back to the 1960s, and I know there were mini skirts and stuff, but you look at men's fashion in the ‘60s, and you might have slightly thinner trousers or ties, but the actual items don't really change.”

The connection between high fashion and this branch of cinema has been even more formally codified through designers like Jean Paul Gaultier and Paco Rabanne working on sartorially iconic sci-fi films The Fifth Element and Barbarella, respectively. Working on these films allowed both designers to fully indulge in the futuristic streak present in both their couture and ready-to-wear garments, and the movies are enduring cult favorites in part because of the over-the-top wardrobe of Chris Tucker’s Ruby Rhod and the shimmering, suggestive outfits worn by Jane Fonda’s Barbarella. You can still see the sci-fi influence in Gaultier’s 2024 releases and Julien Dossena’s Spring-Summer 2025 “Material Girls” collection for Rabanne, both of which include aggressive angles, a tight color palette, and pieces that look like they should be worn to Arrakis’s equivalent of the Oscars.

In recent years, as ambitious, glossy sci-fi has made its way to television, and projects like WandaVision spin-off Agatha All Along have employed high-fashion concepts into their costuming. To capture the blend of sci-fi and fantasy that’s core to Agatha’s coven of witches—particularly Aubrey Plaza’s character Rio Vidal—costume designer Daniel Selon drew inspiration from designers like Gareth Pugh, Craig Green, and Alexander McQueen. “These witchy, spooky creators who always have an air of darkness. There’s a thread of life [and] death,” he says. 

Elsewhere in the series, Selon crafted Lilia Calderu’s wardrobe, the 450-year-old Sicilian witch and tarot card reader played by Patti LuPone, by employing “the actual garment choices and fabrication techniques of that time,” including fine hand embroidery, linens, and period-accurate silhouettes. Ali Ahn’s character Alice Wu-Gulliver was inspired by Japanese street fashion and cyberpunk aesthetics, while Sasheer Zamata’s Jennifer Kale, a beauty influencer and potion maker, was dressed in four-ply silk and metallic pieces, which Selon says came from the idea of “[distilling] down the elements that maybe she would be using in some of her skincare and also her magic.”

For Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney, writer/directors of the acclaimed 2021 film Strawberry Mansion, costuming was key to successfully realizing their ambitious vision on a modest indie budget. “People always said that it was a $20 million script,” Audley explains, though the pair were able to make the warm, surrealist flick about dreams and human connection for just $200,000. From the old-school wardrobe of Audley’s buttoned-up government agent James Preble to the DIY-inspired helmet that allows Penny Fuller’s character to keep the sanctity of her dreams, the directors and their costume designer Mack Reyes crafted a world that felt both homespun and vast. Movies like Strawberry Mansion capture a unique mix of progressivism and nostalgia that we’ve seen in the output of designers like Pierre Cardin, André Courrèges, and, of course, Rabanne.

Beyond their own work, Audley and Birney cite films from Gattaca to The Matrix to The Fifth Element as science fiction movies that really created worlds through wardrobe, with the last being a particular landmark achievement. “In our teenage years [we didn’t] realize how much of the world-building was through the costuming, and how much of the spark to watching was the spectacle of seeing what everyone was wearing, how they moved through the spaces, and what the alien species were wearing and how that was differentiated,” says Birney.

Despite these movies influencing fashion and filmmaking, genre films are historically under-acknowledged at the Academy Awards. That extends to the Best Costume Design category, where only two science fiction movies have won the award: Star Wars in 1977 and Mad Max: Fury Road in 2015, though there have been high-profile nominations for Dune (2021), 12 Monkeys (1995), and Tron (1982). (Plenty of sci-fi-tinged films have earned nominations in recent years, including Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.)

But sci-fi films and shows are arguably more popular and ubiquitous than ever. Projects like Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17, Lanthimos’s Bugonia, and the Russo Brothers' The Electric State are among 2025’s most anticipated movies in any genre, while a new entry in the Matrix franchise promises to keep bringing futuristic fashion to the big screen.

Science fiction has given cinema many of the most iconic costumes in the medium’s history.