The Kiwi creatives nominated at the 2026 Oscars

Costumes made in New Zealand for the latest instalment in the Avatar film series are being recognised at this year’s Oscars.

By Reuben Smith

The costumes were crafted in-house at Wētā Workshop in Wellington by a team led by American designer Deborah Scott, who has earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Costume Design.

It was an eight-year partnership creating and constructing costumes for the saga’s second and third film back-to-back.

Costume art director at Wētā Workshop Flo Foxworthy said it never became a stale working partnership.

"You would think that after eight years we would have run out of ideas, but we didn't."

Deborah Scott said it was an imaginative process, starting with meeting with director James Cameron and the production designers.

"You can take all the tidbits and all the clues and then it's up to me and my department to kind of run with that and that's when I get the pleasure of turning it over to great designers at Wētā Workshop for example."

The film, Fire and Ash, is the third in the franchise set on the fictional planet of Pandora where the natives known as Na’vi are repelling humanity’s attempts to colonise their planet.  

The team was inspired by New Zealand's environment and native wildlife.

"We used a lot of pāua in our costumes, specifically for the Metkayina, they were the reef clan, they lived in the ocean and so we used a lot of pāua in the costumes that we made for them," Flo Foxworthy said.

"It felt really special to us to be able to incorporate elements from cultures that surround us," she said.

She recalled how Scott picked up a shell from a nearby beach and used it as inspiration for a garment.

"We found so much inspiration from the surroundings. All the different environments in New Zealand, the colour palettes around the country. Especially the colours of the waters and the reef, the sunset."

"It was a real treat to be able to just explore colours and textures," Foxworthy said.

Scott said inspiration came from a wide range of cultures.

"It's a little bit of an anthropological research paper really," she said.

"What I always do is look for similarities that can appear from culture to culture to culture on Earth so you don't necessarily have one that sticks out but you find things like, for instance, I always go back to the Na'vi people make their clothing from their environment, so the environments are very important. And then you start to find that's true of indigenous peoples in our world."

It's the second time she's been nominated for the award after she won in 1998 for James Cameron's Titanic.

She's up against costume designers that have worked on films Frankenstein, Hamnet, Marty Supreme & Sinners.

It's not the only New Zealand connection to the costume design award, with Kiwi costume designer Kate Hawley nominated for her work on Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein.

The costume team worked closely with Wētā FX, the company's digital effects and computer generation division, to put the real-life costumes into the film's CGI world.

"To be recognized for its costume design in a nontraditional format is really amazing. Because what they're really looking at, they're not looking at the live action costumes per se. That's part of it. But they're looking at the performance capture, digital version of this movie and saying, those costumes are beautiful," Deborah Scott said.

The Wētā FX division had also been nominated for Best Visual Effects, acknowledging their work in the space.

The awards themselves see American vampire thriller Sinners lead the field with a record-breaking 16 nominations, while box office hits One Battle After Another, Marty Supreme and Weapons were also competing for Best Picture.

The 98th Academy Awards are held today at 12.30pm New Zealand time.