Sentimental Value: Elle Fanning Turned a Givenchy Gown into a Memory on the Oscars Red Carpet

Under the floodlights and the hush of camera shutters, Elle Fanning stood in a white Givenchy bustier corseted tulle gown embroidered with satin-stitch wisteria, Cartier jewels completing the look — a deliberate nod to her past and to sentimental value that shaped how she chose to appear on cinema’s biggest night.

What did Sentimental Value mean to Elle Fanning?

Elle Fanning, actress and Best Supporting Actress nominee, has said she was thinking a lot about her younger self in the lead-up to the Academy Awards. “I think she would feel overwhelmed and overjoyed, ” she said, naming the child who dreamed of this moment. Fanning has described how her childhood home featured a wisteria trellis that bloomed in the spring: “I remember thinking it was the most beautiful thing when the petals would fall and create a lilac cloud on the ground. ” That memory, she has explained, ties directly into her film work and into the motif worn on the red carpet.

Her nomination for her work in Sentimental Value marked a milestone: a first Oscar nod coupled with an outfit chosen to echo the film’s themes. “I immediately looked through books of famous Oscar dresses from the past and my favorites all had one thing in common: they felt true to who was wearing them and have never gone out of style, ” Fanning said of the planning process. For this reason she and her longtime stylist, Samantha McMillen, turned to Sarah Burton, creative director, Givenchy to realize a look that balanced timelessness with personal meaning.

How did the Givenchy gown honor sentimental value?

Susan Burton’s team — led by Sarah Burton, creative director, Givenchy — proposed embroidering wisteria onto the gown and later appliquéing it onto the under layer. The house hand-embroidered each wisteria petal in silk threads of blues, pinks, silvers and lilacs, a level of craft that made the detail feel intimate rather than merely ornamental. Fanning called the finished piece “the prettiest dress I have ever seen, ” saying that Burton and her team “made my dreams come true on a day of dreams realized. ” Cartier contributed a historic wisteria-themed necklace from 1903, originally two brooches which could be worn as a tiara and later reset as a necklace or corsage ornament; Fanning noted she had selected the necklace before the wisteria idea was presented, a coincidence she described as almost fated.

The choice to reapply a childhood image onto haute couture made a public ceremony into a private gesture: a trellis remembered in fabric and jewels. It also continued a relationship between Fanning and Burton. Burton dressed Fanning the previous year as well, and for the 2026 ceremony she dressed both Fanning and Timothée Chalamet in white Givenchy looks. Commentary about Chalamet’s suit this season focused on fit, with particular attention paid to the trousers, while the top half of his look drew a less critical reception.

The human side of the costume is as central as the craftsmanship. Fanning has described a mixture of disbelief and gratitude on hearing of her nomination: “I couldn’t compute [it], ” she recalled of the moment her phone filled with messages. The dress, then, was both an external celebration and an inward reach toward the child who first loved the idea of spectacle.

What is being done to make such moments possible is straightforward: a close collaboration among an actor, her stylist Samantha McMillen, Sarah Burton and the Givenchy atelier, and an institution of jewelry that can lend historic pieces. Those actors and teams chose to foreground memory and workmanship rather than trend, and the result was a dress conceived and executed as a direct link between life and art.

Back beneath the lenses and the crowd’s murmur, the wisteria appliqué read like a tiny reconstruction of a backyard trellis. In that frame, the concept of sentimental value was not an abstract label but a tangible design choice — a way of carrying a remembered spring across a room full of strangers and peers, and of making a private past visible on a public night.