Two of this year’s Oscar nominees for best costume design are firmly rooted in 20th-century fashion: Carol and The Danish Girl. Fashion and costume are not the same thing—the objective of the latter is to enhance a specific character—but the clothes seen in those films are, in some ways, a primer on the history of the last 100 years. The Danish Girl is set in 1920s Copenhagen and Paris, and Carol in 1950s America.