Clothing Damage / Film

Older Than Television: Buster Crabbe in Flash Gordon (1936).

Clothing Damage in Film.

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Animation

• Anastasia: In the final battle, Rasputin gets his minions to rip and tear Anya's ball gown.
• The Animatrix short "Final Flight of the Osiris" opens with a blindfolded swordfight with nothing but Clothing Damage, until both man and woman are almost naked. Mind you, it was intended as foreplay.
• Astro Kid: When his Escape Pod lands on an alien planet, Willy has no other clothes with him besides the suit he is already wearing. After 10 months on the planet, all that is left of said suit is a pair of shorts.
• Batman: Mask of the Phantasm - Batman's costume gets torn up midway through the movie when he is caught in a propane explosion. During the climax, Batman's outfit again takes damage getting cut up by some remote control planes the Joker summons to attack him; later when he grabs ahold of Joker's jetpack and forces him to crash, both of their outfits take damage.
• Disney's Cinderella:
  • The scene where the evil stepsisters tear Cinderella's ball gown to shreds in anger.
  • In Cinderella III: A Twist in Time, Cinderella in a white gown gets transported inside a pumpkin carriage by Lady Tremaine. Once Cinderella is inside the pumpkin, her dress somehow gets all torn up, and she's now barefoot.
• In the initial Filmation film, Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure of All, Flash, Dale and Zarkov are captured by Beastmen soon upon crash landing on Mongo and dragged to their mountain settlement. Along the way, their clothing disintegrates with Dale following the Theiss Titillation Theory so alluringly that when the film was reedited into the Saturday-Morning Cartoon TV series instead, the gang had to be redrawn into their usual costumes to avoid imagery the NBC network could never allow in that timeslot.
• The Great Mouse Detective:
  • During the climax, Professor Ratigan's suit is severely torn as his races through the gears of Big Ben after Basil. It helps to make his Villainous Breakdown even more frightening.
  • Basil's clothes are also heavily damaged after Ratigan's vicious beatdown on him.
• Hercules: During his fight with Hydra, Hercules' cape gets snagged when leaping away as the Hydra lunges at him. By the end of the battle, his tunic and cape get shred, with one of the tunic's straps even being ripped off. The similar state happens during the Cyclops battle later.
• Quasimodo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney) suffers one, when his humped back rips through his tunic whilst he is being tied down by ropes and pelted at the same time.
• In The Incredibles, the hole that the Omni-droid tears in Bob's old super-suit becomes plot-significant, as Helen discovering the patch clues her into his clandestine superhero work and Edna decides to make new super-suits for the whole family after patching it.
  • In Incredibles 2, Elastigirl gets her super suit ripped on the shoulder. Fortunately her red Incredibles costume is immediately made available.
• Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid (1989). Twice in the film, from being in the ocean his boots come off, and his pant legs get ripped.
  • A similar thing happens to Gepetto from Pinocchio. When Monstro destroys the raft he loses his shoes and socks and his pant legs rip.
• Peter Pan: Captain Hook's clothes get destroyed in his encounters with the crocodile. It's really incredible how the crocodile can eat up most of his clothes without harming him at all, especially considering harming him is presumably what the crocodile is trying to do. Also interesting how later on Hook wears the same outfit which got destroyed.
• Robin Hood (1973): When Robin Hood and Little John steal Prince John’s treasures, taxes, crown and best royal robe, he falls out of his carriage into a muddy puddle and his soldiers and bodyguards run over him with his broken carriage as he ordered them to catch Robin Hood and Little John, leaving Prince John in nothing but medieval long blue underwear.
• Tarzan: Jane has this happen to her yellow dress during the very start of the baboon chase. As she runs from the baboons, a low branch snags the skirt of her dress and tears a piece off.
• In Turning Red, Mei's attack on Tyler leaves his jersey with several tears.

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Live-Action

• In The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother, Sigerson Holmes and Sergeant Sacker escape from a Death Trap, unknowingly leaving behind all the cloth that covered their bottoms.
• Barbarella: This fanservice-heavy movie frequently shows Barbarella getting her clothes torn during her adventures, usually exposing her legs and navel.
• Strangely subverted in the first Batman film (1989). The clothes of Jack Napier (the man who becomes The Joker) are almost completely intact after he is dropped by Batman into a vat of green acid and washed out into the river (although he never wears them again after that night, moving on to his trademark purple coat and plaid pants). Any substance capable of burning a person's skin chalk-white and his hair green should, by all logic, disintegrate all his clothes, leaving him naked (not to mention dead). All Napier loses is a good portion of one of his gloves (which, being made of leather, you'd think would be the least likely to be destroyed), and this is just so we can get our first glimpse of his whitened hand and greenish fingernails as he reaches out of the water.
• Batman Returns. Catwoman's catsuit gets gradually more and more torn as the movie goes and her psyche is more damaged.
• In Body, Cali rips holly's top (exposing a generous amount of cleavage) to make it look like Arthur attacked her.
• In Cape Fear Max Cady's shirt is damaged when Danielle sets him on fire.
• In Coffy, a Blaxploitation movie starring Pam Grier, the title character gets into a Cat Fight with a bunch of call girls, "accidentally" ripping the top off each and every one of them and exposing their bare breasts. Her own top is not ripped off, but her breasts pop out on their own a couple of times.
• Crank features Eve's already form-fitting dress being torn by Chev from the left end before their sex scene in Chinatown. This has the effect of making her outfit much more revealing for the rest of the movie.
• In the film The Creeping Terror, a lady tries to escape when the titular monster appears at a dance party. A man rushes over to her... only to pull her away, tearing her top off. Surprisingly, this was left in in the episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and while it was too far away of a shot to really notice, Tom's reaction probably hints that they knew about it, but left it in.
• Dark Was the Night: Most noticeably when the sole survivor of the hunting party stumbles up to Paul. His orange vest has been clawed to shreds
• In Dead Air a female victim of the Technically-Living Zombie infected gets her shirt torn during the attack, exposing a breast. This can go into Fan Disservice for some as she soon rises as a zombie herself, snarling and bleeding from her eyes and mouth.
• The heroine in Der Clown ? Payday is shown with clothing damage as she is tied to the front of a tractor-trailer. There isn't even a logical explanation as to where this damage may come from.
• Desktop Desperadoes: A rare subversion of this occurs during Linda's brief struggle with the shark. It's miraculous how anyone can be chewed up by such a predator, yet upon emerging, not a single tear can be found in their clothing. It's also worth noting how fragile her body is revealed to be when her body is shattered into a million pieces from the volleyball travelling at an insane velocity earlier. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc1tr1cwiZs
• Lampshaded in Diary of the Dead. While filming a B-grade horror movie an actress objects to the cliched idea of the mummy yanking down her dress to expose her breasts, saying that it's just not going to happen. Later on, when the actor playing the mummy gets turned into a zombie this happens for real, whereupon she shouts at the DOP (who's been filming all this instead of helping her): "I hope you're happy, you son-of-a-bitch!"
• A staple of the Die Hard series. By the end of each movie, John McClane's clothes get ripped up, torn, and bloodied so much that they aren't much more than rags.
• The 2017 Filipino action-comedy film Extra Service features a sword fight between one of the heroines, Aw, and a man in a balaclava (her ex-boyfriend Moe, unbeknowst to her). With a few lightning-fast sword-strokes she slashes off all of his clothes Zorro-style, leaving him in nothing but his boxer shorts (which doesn't stop him from continuing the fight).
• In Doctor in Distress (1963), Sir Lancelot rips his trousers when he tries to exit his car through the sunroof.
• Evil Dead
  • In The Evil Dead (1981) when Cheryl ventures out into the woods, she gets attacked by a flurry of tree branches that tear off her bathrobe and lash at her nightshirt, leaving her in nothing but a tattered shirt.
  • By the end of the first sequel Ash's shirt mostly gets ripped off during the climax.
• Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer:
  • Susan Storm (Jessica Alba) suffers the extreme form of this. When she accidentally swaps powers with the Human Torch, she immediately lights up in flame, burning off her non-fireproof clothes, leaving her in the buff on a crowded street. Note that when the same thing happens to Ben Grimm, he doesn't suffer from the same problem, only burning minor holes in his shirt rather than being covered in flame. She even lampshades it by quipping "Why does this always happen to me?"
  • When Sue and Reed's wedding is beset by the Surfer's arrival, Reed tells Johnny to follow him, much to Johnny's chagrin since he didn't want to incinerate his tux. He was wearing his uniform beneath the tux, though.
• Flash Gordon (serial): The 1936 serial is certainly close to an Ur-Example for Sci-Fi. Clothing Damage happens in the very first installment to Flash (as seen in the page image), leading to him Dressing as the Enemy.
• In Future War, we are supposed to believe that the male kickboxing lead gets his shirt knocked off in the final battle, even though we can clearly see him quickly slip it off despite it being tucked in and fully buttoned to the collar in the previous shot. We don't know how he did it, either.
• Galaxy Quest:
  • Happens gradually to Sigourney Weaver's character, Gwen DeMarco. Surely this is a lampshading of the trope, considering her character's stated purpose in the "original" show is simply to repeat computer instruction, i.e. no real purpose except looking pretty and occasionally having Clothing Damage. A rare example of a Defied Trope, as her movie-character despises her show-character being treated as a sex object. Of course, one of the themes of the movie is the various characters end up becoming like their show-characters.
  • This is also parodied with Tim Allen's character, Jason Nesmith. Captain Taggart's clothing damage is also lampshaded. This is fitting since he's a Kirk parody and Clothing Damage was always happening to Kirk in fights that didn't even muss other character's hair.
    Sir Alexander Dane: I see you managed to get your shirt off!
• The first Get Smart film (which would probably be considered Fanon Discontinuity if it were more well-known) is titled The Nude Bomb. Guess what the bad guys have, and use. Being a PG film from 1980 you don't see much.
  • Then in the 2008 Get Smart film, the pants damage done to Max during the SUV/train/plane chase.
• In Gun Fury, Slayton rips the sleeve off Jennifer's blouse while attempting to force her to change clothes.
• The Hazing: The possessed Marsha uses her Wolverine Claws to shred the white corset of Delia's Playboy Bunny suit at a distance.
• Hell in the Pacific: Both Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune's characters have several articles of clothing ruined during the film, with the Marvin having a pair of khakis reduced to a loincloth.
• A male, and hilariously gratuitous, version occurs in The Beatles' film Help! The villains attack the boys with a booby-trapped hand dryer that starts sucking away their clothes.
• In Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, Harry's coat collar is charred after he soaks his burning head in a toilet filled with kerosene, blowing the house up.
• Parodied in Hot Shots! Part Deux. Ramada rips part of her shirt off to make a bandage for one of the male soldiers, then the other soldiers start faking nonexistent injuries to get her to rip more of her clothes off.
• Zhang Ziyi's character in House of Flying Daggers gets her clothes partially ripped off quite frequently.
• In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the right sleeve of Indy's shirt gets torn off by the big Thugee as he's pulled into the rock crusher.
• Johnny Reno: While attempting to force Nona to scream, Yates rips her gown, exposing an expanse of shoulder and breast.
• Downplayed in Jurassic World where Claire Dearing's shirt has a rip on her sleeve and few rips on her skirt.
• Happens to Fay Wray in the original King Kong (1933), after Kong peels off most of her dress.
• Kung Pow! Enter the Fist:
  • Near the beginning, Chosen One attacks a henchman, ripping his outfit until his torn clothing takes the appearance of a bikini.
  • Another scene has the Chosen One just casually tear off his shirt to fight a set of henchmen.
  • Master Betty hates it when you tear his shirts.
    "Shirt ripper!"
• A Man Called Horse: After passing out during his Initiation Ceremony, John hallucinates his European clothes being blown away, leaving only a loincloth.
• Used in The Mask of Zorro, where Zorro fights Elena and manages to, essentially, cut her nightshirt off, though she still had pants (and Godiva Hair). In fairness, she attacked his clothes first.
• In Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie, one of the guardians of the Great Power takes Tommy off-guard, slashing away at him. When Tommy leaps back to the other Rangers, he takes a look at his ninja uniform and notices there are two slash marks on his shirt.
• In the 1930's movie version of The Most Dangerous Game the male main character's shirt became unbuttoned and ripped up.
• Muppet Treasure Island: During the final battle against Long John Silver and his crew, Kermit ruined Silver's red frock jacket by showing off his swordsmanship.
• In Mystery Men, a gang of female furriers is taken down by use of a fabric-adhesive liquid projector, shrinking their clothing sizes "from junior to missy petite". The fanservice is lampshaded by spectator Ben Stiller: "My pants feel like they're shrinking, too."
• Your Mileage May Vary on if it qualifies as Fanservice, but Duncan vomiting on Kelly and Jason in Mystery Team. Parodied with Charlie, who thinks they're just taking off clothes.
• Will from No Kidding often wears a striped T-shirt with holes in it.
• On the Buses films:
  • Mutiny on the Buses:
    • Olive and Nymphy Norah rip each other's dresses during their Catfight.
    • Nymphy Norah rips her tights while making out with Mr. Jenkins.
    • The lion that gets on the safari bus rips Stan's trousers with its claws.
  • Holiday on the Buses:
    • While Blakey shows Wally how to waltz, Stan mocks him by warning him that he'll damage his tights.
    • When Olive's bracelet gets caught on Arthur's cufflink, she pulls away from him too fast and tears off his sleeve.
    • When Joan tries to restrain Blakey to stop him chasing after Stan, he rips her top open trying to get her off him.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians: In Sea of Monsters, when Annabeth is stabbed by the Manticore, her jacket, shirt, and top are naturally ruined. Later, she is seen dressed in a bloodied shirt with a hole, while her jacket is discarded.
• Pocketful of Miracles: A fight between Dave and Queenie ends with Queenie's clothing getting torn in a very fanservice-y way.
• Nicole Carrow from Rest Stop rips apart her spaghetti strap tank top in order to use it on a Molotov cocktail in order to kill her attacker.
• Most of The Return of Captain Invincible features the title character struggling to control his magnetic powers, causing metallic buttons and zippers to randomly tear loose of the items they are supposed to hold closed.
• Buster Keaton loses his shirt and trousers (though not his shoes, undershirt, or boxers) to a threshing machine in The Scarecrow.
• This happened several times in the Stephen Chow movie Shaolin Soccer, generally to comedic effect (or unfunny effect, depending on how one felt about the movie).
• In Spiders As Marci tries to get out of the giant spider web the sleeve of her red overshirt gets torn a bit.
• This has happened to Spider-Man in all three movies of the Spider-Man Trilogy.
• Split: Done as an important plot development. Dennis requests the girls remove their clothes after they get dirty making certain escapes. As Clair and Marcia are quickly left in their underwear, Casey had on more layers to stay covered up. As the Beast is chasing her at the end, she gets her outerwear torn up and she is left in a tiny tank top, revealing that she has many scars on her shoulders and stomach (implied to be from self-harm).
• Star Wars:
  • In Attack of the Clones, a Nexu beast attacks Padme, tearing her shirt to expose her midriff and one arm.
  • Non-fanservice example: During the final battle in Return of the Jedi, Luke gets the collar of his black suit torn open, showing the light gray lining of his jacket underneath. This is to show us that he's overcome the Dark Side that was building up since the beginning of the movie.
• In Swashbuckler, Jane starts off in a fairly modest and proper outfit. Then her clothing gets ripped in her Cat Fight with Alice. Then she gets soaked during her plunge into the ocean to escape the soldiers, which leaves her in her chemise while her outer clothes dry. Finally, Captain Lynch cuts the top of her chemise open, exposing her cleavage, during his fencing 'lesson'.
• In Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen the left side of Sam's shirt is damaged after being shot by Megatron.
• Harry Trasker from True Lies shirt gets damaged during his firefight with Salim Abu Aziz's men and receives further clothing damage a little later after Aziz fires a bazooka at him, strangely enough, the Secret Service doesn't provide him with a new outfit after they come to his aid.
• Parodied in Undercover Brother after a catfight breaks out between Sistah Girl and White She-Devil. When the two ladies start ripping each other's clothes off, Undercover Brother (who is fighting two male mooks) immediately draws their attention to it, whereupon they sit on the couch eating popcorn and enjoying the Fanservice.
• Up the Front:
  • Groping rips Fanny's maid outfit as he tries to have his way with her.
  • The goat Lurk has been tasked with keeping an eye on rips his battledress trousers.
• Wolverine gets caught in a disintegrating attack in X-Men: The Last Stand. His body regenerates; his shirt does not. (And his Magic Pants remain invincible throughout.)
• In the 1962 film Zotz!, Virginia gets stripped naked by lightning in a storm, leading to her turning up at the protagonist's house for a Naked First Impression.
• In Serving Sara, when Sara's pant leg gets caught while she's on a conveyor belt, Joe tears up her pants in order to free her.

  Sara: "Jesus Christ, I said 'help me', not 'undress me'!"

  Joe: "Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't hear you over the big machine that was gonna to rip you into little pieces!"

• In the Italian movie Le Comiche 2:
  • The lawyer character is catapulted into an animal shop. When he runs out of it he is chased by a pack of dogs that already reduced his suit into shreds.
  • The same lawyer character opens the toilet on a plane unknowingly it was previously destroyed. His clothes are instantly reduced to shreds revealing he has female breasts (due to an accidental surgery earlier in the movie) and he is wearing a bra.
• In The Idolmaker, Teen Idol Caesare gets mobbed by fangirls who rip his shirt. Vinny sends him back onstage in the same shirt, which he rips even more while he sings.

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