Ruth E Carter’s costumes were a crucial part of establishing the identities of the two identical twins, both played by Michael B Jordan, in multi-Oscar-nominated Sinners. Particularly the hats. One brother, Stack, wore a red fedora. The other brother, Smoke, wore a blue newsboy flat cap. Finding the hats was a critical moment in the film’s backstory. When director Ryan Coogler first saw Jordan try on Stack’s red fedora, bought by Carter in Los Angeles’s Melrose Avenue, “he was like – that’s it. Then he goes up into the rest of the office, and people are coming down, like, ‘Ryan’s talking upstairs about a red hat?’ You know when you’ve hit it – it’s a transformation.”
This is just a small example of the canny period world-building that has made Carter the most-garlanded Black woman in Oscars history, and the owner of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (her family were in attendance, she says, of its Covid-era unveiling, while Oprah and Eddie Murphy dialled in via Zoom). Her work on Coogler’s genre-squashing, Jim Crow-era drama, which has gained a record-breaking 16 Oscar nods, has landed a fifth nomination for the two-time Oscar winner (she is, according to a poll by Variety, a favourite in the category). Among her starry upcoming projects: a biopic of the pioneering Black fashion designer, Ann Lowe – designer of Jackie Kennedy’s wedding dress – which she will produce alongside Serena Williams.
We meet at a plush suite at a London hotel that’s been co-opted by Warner Bros for the Baftas. Carter – painlessly chic in a white T-shirt, high-waisted blue jeans and chunky black glasses – whizzed into town a few hours earlier, but she’s enviably sharp as she unpacks her latest hit. The costumes of Sinners are bold replicas that convey the grit and glamour of 1930s Mississippi.
But on-the-money does not mean on-the-nose. For the character of hoodoo priestess Annie (recent Bafta winner Wunmi Mosaku), Carter was keen not to be too cliche when it came to portraying an adherent of the folk religion. “There’s been a few [similar characters] in movies, and they all seem to wear the same thing – a shawl around their shoulders, a third eye, a turban of some type, and a long floral skirt … I wanted Annie to be a part of the community, because, honestly, the practice of hoodoo is very much in the lives of many people in the south.”
Carter was also able to draw on her own experience of religious believers more broadly. “There were some things that I remembered from people in my community that had some connection to the spiritual world – you go to a bodega and you see candles, and then you see someone who has a cluster of beads around their neck, male or female, and they’re tucked inside the shirt, and they’ve been blessed. So I felt like there were those kinds of things that I could do to make her a real person.”
Annie wears Haint blue, a type of blue that borders on green and which is said to ward off evil spirits. “It’s supposed to look like water,” Carter clarifies. “And Hannah’s [Beachler, the production designer] beautiful set had a lot of Haint blue elements.” Nothing in the world of Sinners was left to chance, down to the cut of the twins’ suits: a more tailored look for the flamboyant Stack, and slouchier fits for Smoke, the more reserved sibling who also needs room to hide his weaponry.
Sinners is difficult to pigeonhole, genre-wise, but its supernatural action – an Irish vampire, Remmick, tries to inveigle his way into Smoke and Stack’s rural juke joint to feed on their clientele – frequently puts it in the realm of horror. Certainly, that element meant that many of the pieces for the film had to be made from scratch. “We couldn’t really rent anything,” Carter says. “In Hollywood, they have all these rental houses, and they might have doubles and triples [of each item] in there, but you still can’t get any blood on them. Get blood on them, pay 10 times the rental price! So I did take some real vintage pieces and use them as samples.”
A lucky coincidence and a reportedly cancelled movie – Marvel’s Blade – meant Carter already had some costumes that fit the bill. “I prepped for a year and a half [on the movie] that took place in 1928,” she says. “At one point Blade was going to Chicago to work with Al Capone, so I made suits and winter coats [Smoke and Stack, too, are returning from Chicago to the Mississippi Delta in Sinners]. Then there was a speakeasy, so I was making dresses for that. Then Ryan Coogler calls me, and he’s doing a vampire film with all of the elements I’d been working on!” She lets out a low chuckle, shaking her head at the kismet of it all and adding that she was able to land crucial costumes for Sinners at “25 cents on the dollar”.
Carter says that’s one of the stories she will elaborate on in her memoir one day – and what a memoir it will be. Hollywood film sets are a long way from her humble childhood in Springfield, Massachusetts, where her single mother raised her as one of eight, and where “my little sewing machine was a creative hub”. Her mother tried to keep her daughter occupied with camps and drama clubs. Even so, she adds, people didn’t tend to take her artistic side seriously. Not that Carter was troubled: she was independent and adventurous, she says, going off to friends’ houses for days at a time and getting lost in art. In 2021, she was awarded the key to Springfield. “So my city now knows you could be a creative kid and have a career.”
Making costumes for student productions at college (she attended Virginia’s historically Black Hampton University) got Carter hooked. Then an early job with a dance company in LA put her on the radar of one Spike Lee, then 29 (Carter was 26) who invited her to see his debut feature, She’s Gotta Have It. “I saw Nola Darling walking down the street in Brooklyn and having her little escapades with all her boyfriends,” she says. “And I was like, I’ve been doing Molière and Shakespeare – what is this?! But I was like, I could totally do this …”
She quit her job immediately and began working with the rising director, going on to costume films such as Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X. Carter landed her first Oscar nomination via the latter’s loud zoot suits and faithful Islamic dress and, incredibly, later recycled the wire specs Denzel Washington wore to play the African American revolutionary for Jason Alexander’s George Costanza in the Seinfeld pilot.
Carter’s costumes are thoroughly researched and accurate – for Malcolm X she even read letters he sent from a Massachusetts prison, while, for Sinners, production drew on evocative photography from southern writer Eudora Welty. But they’re also fun: there’s a reason why the US store Spirit Halloween created an entire Sinners collection.
While she has gone on to work with other renowned directors – among them Steven Spielberg and Ava DuVernay – her other enduring partnership, apart from Lee, has been with Coogler. She is responsible for masterminding the costumes for his Afrofuturist superhero hit Black Panther and winning her first Oscar in the process, as well as Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which led to Carter’s second Oscar.
Unbelievably for a film that went on to have the cultural and economic impact that Black Panther did – grossing more than $1bn worldwide – she says it was initially “hard to motivate people to care – I was walking around saying: ‘This is not the Lion King, this is not Coming to America. There’s no comedy.’ Because that’s all that we had before Black Panther.” For the setting of the fictional, technologically advanced kingdom of Wakanda, she drew on the beauty of African traditional dress, channelling what she calls “the melting pot” of the continent, via Maasai patterns, Zulu wedding hats, and King T’Challa’s (Chadwick Boseman) cut-out McQueen sandals. For the Dora Milaje warrior women – led by Danai Gurira’s Okoye – Coogler was keen to avoid too much nudity. “He was serious about them being taken seriously,” Carter says. “There’s no objectification in Ryan’s movies, and that is so rare in this industry.”
While Black Panther might have been future-facing, Sinners lands at a time when a debate swells elsewhere about how anachronistic costume design should or shouldn’t be (see: Wuthering Heights). Even in a post-credits scene, Sinners maintains accuracy: we flash forward to the 90s, where Jordan wears a vintage Coogi sweater à la rap icon Biggie Smalls, as requested by Coogler. “Ryan knows the 80s [and 90s] fashion so well,” says Carter. “I’m telling you, this guy who was born in 86 knows the 80s better than I do.”
You can imagine it was also something of a full-circle moment for Carter, who has been a mainstay not just of Black Hollywood but of Hollywood at large ever since that era, and now finds herself at the top of her game. Having “pulled myself up by the bootstraps” and made many personal sacrifices for her craft, “[I decided], come what may, I really want to do this. And now we’re here and I’ve done it, and I’m being rewarded for it, so it feels great.”
