Born in Nagasaki, Japan, but raised in leafy Surrey, England, Mr Kazuo Ishiguro’s outsider perspective perhaps allowed him to pen his most celebrated work, The Remains Of The Day, and with it provide a deft deconstruction of the British class system. Questions of identity run through his output, notably in Never Let Me Go, but if the Ishiguro experienced impostor syndrome while collecting his Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, it did not show in the way he presented himself. His full evening dress suggests he not only knew the protocol, but treated the occasion with the reverence it required. Having won the Booker Prize in 1989, he was no stranger to such ceremonies. Many of us would be wandering around in a fuggy daze, much like his protagonist in The Unconsoled, but Ishiguro is in complete control.

Although South Africa’s first multi-racial election would not take place until later that month, with Mr Nelson Mandela inaugurated as president on 10 May 1994, you could argue that by early April, when this photo was taken, the great political leader had already won. Freed in 1990 after serving 27 years in prison, Mandela oversaw the dismantling of Apartheid, the vicious system of racial segregation imposed by the ruling National Party in 1948. In such circumstances it seems almost trivial to comment on the clothes Mandela wore during his election campaign, but history was being made, and the lawyer turned activist dressed with similar purpose. The more sober suits came later, but Mandela always looked most at ease in a printed shirt – a sartorial slant that he retained in office.

“There was a Beatle to suit every taste,” Mr Craig Brown notes in One Two Three Four, his thoroughly readable account of the Fab Four. It’s a marketing ploy that BTS – or their stylists – understand. By 2018, the K-pop wave was already riding high and the seven-man supergroup was collecting a Billboard gong for the second year in a row. They deployed a breadth of style choices, from a Gordon Gekko-like contrast shirt collar to the piped blazer and jaunty cap of an errant schoolboy. The group’s attitude, too, was a mixture of confident swagger and humble gratitude. For the event, the band had their own self-imposed rule: no drunk tweeting. Asked if any member had broken this commandment, RM, in an eye-grabbing aloha shirt, replied with a very Beatlesque refrain: “Not yet, not yet, sir!”

Arguably, Mr Jack Nicholson’s first Oscar triumph should have come sooner – the actor was already onto his fifth nomination, and, to date, is among the most decorated with three awards off the back of 12 nominations. “With my sunglasses on, I’m Jack Nicholson. Without them, I’m fat and 60,” he famously quipped several decades later and, as the nominations were listed on this night in 1976, Nicholson could be seen hiding behind his trademark shades. But as soon as his name was read out, he quickly whipped them off while reaching in to kiss his date, Ms Anjelica Huston, before striding up to collect his award. Here holding his award aloft, the sunglasses are back on his face. The tuxedo and bow tie ooze with old-school Hollywood glamour, but the dark glasses, like the win, are all Jack Nicholson.