Ruth E. Carter On Creativity As Restoration
As Sinners makes Academy Awards history with a record-breaking 16 nominations, legendary costume designer RUTH E. CARTER marks her own milestone as the most Oscar-nominated Black woman of all time. Here, she reflects on her lifelong commitment to telling African American stories through film. From Jim Crow-era Mississippi to imagined worlds of non-colonialist freedom, Carter writes about costume as celebration and cultural restoration
I have spent my life telling stories through clothes. Not just dressing characters, but honoring where they come from: their survival, their joy and their contradictions. I’ve always believed that costume design carries responsibility. I want to entertain you and show you something interesting and pleasing to the eye, but I also want to take the time to give you something authentic and real.
With Sinners, by filmmaker Ryan Coogler, I found myself once again depicting an American story – rooted in Black experience, yet essential to understanding this country as a whole, which has been a through-line for much of my work. This time it was in the Mississippi Delta in 1931, during Jim Crow, at the tail end of Prohibition. It’s a moment filled with pressure and fear, but also with resilience and creativity.
I was so eager to tell the story of the Delta blues and the Black contribution to music, I forgot at first that it was a vampire film. I suddenly remembered, ‘Oh, that’s right, we need 14 of those pink dresses for Mary, because it’s going to get bloody.’
I see myself as something of a keeper of Black American history. I went to an HBCU* in Virginia and I spent time at Colonial Williamsburg performing as a character on the streets, really studying what life would have been like for the person I was portraying. I wrapped my hair in a gele. I walked barefoot. I learned about the Black Renaissance and the Great Migration, understanding why those movements existed in the first place. Those experiences groomed me as a storyteller.
When I came into the film industry, I was fortunate to work with filmmakers like Spike Lee on Malcolm X and John Singleton on Rosewood. Through those collaborations, I realized that as I was designing costumes, I was also visually defining the stories of African Americans in film. The struggle, the nuance, but also the color, the culture, the traditions and the joy.
Sinners sits very clearly within that canon. Unlike designing for Black Panther, which imagined Wakanda as a place untouched by colonization and where people in the African diaspora could express themselves abundantly, Sinners exists in a world where expression was shaped by restriction. Publicly, clothing had to help Black people assimilate. It had to protect. It could not draw attention. Survival dictated everything.
“I feel like it is my life’s purpose to tell these stories authentically. I want to be the person who can show you some of our history as Americans, as Africans, and how rich it is
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The costumes in Sinners, at least in the daytime scenes, are intentionally restrained. The shapes are simple. The necklines are consistent. These are sharecroppers who learned how to make something out of nothing, who passed hand-me-downs through generations, who carefully patched things up and turned up the cuffs to keep things in rotation.
Color, when it appears, mostly in the juke joint scenes, is deliberate. The red, white and blue palette was something that evolved as Ryan and I worked together, but it became so important in asserting something larger. This is an American story. The African American experience is not separate from American history; it is central to it. The church, dressed entirely in white, speaks to purity, religion and tradition. These are all part of the American journey that Black Americans took.
The two main characters, Smoke and Stack, are separated visually through red and blue. When Michael B. Jordan came into my fitting room, we tried several ideas. We decided that one brother would lean into workwear and utility, the other into refinement and aspiration. Their story of returning to the South after finding success in Chicago is like a reverse migration. They are entrepreneurs chasing a version of the American Dream that has always been complicated for people who look like them.
One of the ideas I was most drawn to in Sinners is the notion of wearing your trauma. You see it in sun-faded shirts, frayed ties, clothes that have lived hard lives. But you also see survival stitched into them, literally. I learned a great deal about patching clothes for this film. When people patched their garments, they weren’t making a fashion statement. There was a pride in not feeling tattered. The patches often matched the fabric above them and the stitches were subtle enough to be invisible. That detail matters.
The juke joint is the place for release. Hidden in the woods, it’s where people could let go for long enough to sweat, to dance and to feel desire. It draws you in, like a safe space to be provocative. The buttoned-up collars are gone. Mary looks like she’s wearing the underslip of the dress we saw her in before. The same goes for the men, too. Michael B. Jordan as Stack is this great, beautiful character and you see him take his shirt off and he’s wearing this vest. That change, the sweat at the seams, supported his performance but without distracting you too much. The clothes are sensual and vibrant, but also stained and lived in.
Music was one of the few ways Black Americans could earn money independently, traveling from place to place, covertly. The surreal montage in the film allowed us to honor blues music in its entirety, looking back to its African roots and its origin, and forwards to how Black America shaped the music we listen to today.
Across all my work, my philosophy remains the same. We cannot fake the history of the building of this country. I feel like it is my life’s purpose to tell these stories authentically. I want to be the person who can show you some of our history as Americans, as Africans, and how rich it is.
Costume design is emotional architecture. It allows people to see themselves reflected back. It asks people to relate to and feel empathy for characters. When an actor puts on a costume, something shifts emotionally. That’s where the story begins.
*Colleges and universities originally founded to educate students of African American descent
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