A pair of Nike Air Revolutions like the ones worn by Radio Raheem in “Do the Right Thing”; purses and starburst earrings for Coretta Scott King, in “Selma”; and Tina Turner’s pumps, from “What’s Love Got to Do with It.”
RUTH E. CARTER’S THREADS OF HISTORY
Throughout her career, the costume designer for “Black Panther” has created visions of black identity, past and future.
Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther” is a rare thing: a big-budget superhero movie that is unabashedly serious about great clothes. The film’s costume designer, Ruth E. Carter, evoked the fictional African kingdom of Wakanda by melding sci-fi with global fashion history, drawing influence from sources including the color symbolism of the Maasai people, samurai armor, and the jewelry of Ndebele women. She realized her vision with the help of an international team of researchers, buyers, tailors, beaders, and engineers, and by exploring the possibilities of 3-D-printing technology. For her efforts, she has been lauded as one of the essential visual storytellers of Afrofuturism.
The zoot suit and hat that were worn by Denzel Washington in “Malcolm X,” and replicas of the dress and tights that Rosie Perez wore in her opening-credit dance sequence in “Do the Right Thing.”
From “Selma,” a beaded dress for Coretta Scott King and a dark suit for Martin Luther King, Jr.
It’s only recently that Carter’s work has received this level of public attention—a travelling exhibition of her work, “Heroes & Sheroes,” just opened at the Heinz History Center, in Pittsburgh—but her film career has spanned three decades and sixty film and TV projects. She has been nominated for two Academy Awards and an Emmy. Her achievement is rooted both in an understanding of fashion as a crucial component of the construction of the black self and in meticulous realism and historical research. Her costumes have brought to life such figures from black history as Joseph Cinqué, the West African leader of a slave-ship revolt, played by Djimon Hounsou in Steven Spielberg’s “Amistad,” and Malcolm X, played by Denzel Washington in Spike Lee’s bio-pic. To transform David Oyelowo into Martin Luther King, Jr., for Ava DuVernay’s “Selma,” she made the actor’s shirt collars a little tight—“so that he would have the same fleshy roll that King did,” she told me.
T’Challa’s Black Panther suit, from Ryan Coogler’s movie, and Carter herself wearing a replica of Radio Raheem’s knuckle ring.
Carter, who was raised by her mother in Springfield, Massachusetts, briefly considered acting but turned to costume design as a student at Hampton University. After working at the Santa Fe Opera, she moved to Los Angeles and took jobs on theatre productions and at a dance studio. One evening, she met a young filmmaker named Spike Lee. In 1987, he gave Carter her first film job—on his second feature, “School Daze,” a “West Side Story”-inflected musical set at a historically black college. She has worked with Lee on fourteen films, including “Do the Right Thing,” his barn-burning commentary on racial tensions in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Her costumes—high-tops, jerseys, graphic tees, Afrocentric accessories—captured a generation negotiating a path between materialism and political consciousness.
Replicas of the Dodgers jersey (with Jackie Robinson’s number) worn by Mookie, Spike Lee’s character in “Do the Right Thing,” and of Radio Raheem’s “Bed-Stuy Do or Die” T-shirt. The boom box pays homage to the Promax Super Jumbo from which Radio blasts Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.”
From “Selma,” the costumes for the four black girls—Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, and Carol Denise McNair—who were killed when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan, in 1963.
Carter has long associations with a number of great black actors. She previously outfitted Angela Bassett (Queen Ramonda, in “Black Panther”) as Dr. Betty Shabazz, in “Malcolm X,” and as Tina Turner, in Brian Gibson’s “What’s Love Got to Do with It.” For that film, one of Carter’s brothers showed her how to make screen grabs from a VHS tape of Turner singing “Proud Mary,” so that she could zoom in and count the layers of beading on her iconic dress.
From “Amistad,” Steven Spielberg’s movie about the 1839 mutiny aboard a Spanish slave ship, two of Queen Isabella’s dresses, and the clothes that the slave-revolt leader Joseph Cinqué wears during his Supreme Court trial. Carter wanted Cinqué’s clothes in this scene to have a slightly baggy fit for the actor who played the role, Djimon Hounsou; she imagined that Cinqué might have been lent European attire for the occasion by a lawyer or a financial backer sympathetic to the abolitionist cause.
The instinct in theatre costuming is to “preserve, preserve, preserve,” Carter said. Not so in film, and especially not in the indies that she worked on in the eighties and nineties. She kept some treasured pieces at home, but many of her costumes were lost or sold, and an archive that she maintained at Lee’s studio in Brooklyn was dispersed. A few years ago, in Orlando, Carter spotted the Tina Turner dress in the window of a Hard Rock Café; it is the only surviving costume from the film. She came across pajamas from the pajama party in “House Party 2” on eBay and bought them for a hundred dollars.
For the Tina Turner bio-pic “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” Carter hired a beader to help her replicate Turner’s golden “Proud Mary” dress. Carter made the dress shorter than the one Turner actually wore, to lend Angela Bassett, the actress who played the role, Turner’s famously long-legged appearance.
Another of Queen Isabella’s dresses. For the “Amistad” costumes, Carter studied nineteenth-century etchings from a London flea market, costume archives in Italian opera houses, and David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,’s multivolume work “The Image of the Black in Western Art.”
An orange dress for Gloria Gaines, Oprah Winfrey’s character in “The Butler.” Carter also costumed Winfrey for her role as the civil-rights activist Annie Lee Cooper, in “Selma.”
To shoot Carter’s costumes, which here include both originals and reproductions, the photographer Awol Erizku brought with him items from his personal collection, along with flowers and a parrot. He and Carter hit on the idea of obscuring the models’ faces, using clothing, props, and African masks. The effect is of movies talking to one another across time and genre. In one photo, a model wears the dress that Anna Paquin wore as Isabella II, the slave-owning Spanish queen in “Amistad”; her hot-pink nail polish is an electric anachronism. “That’s what we’ve been doing this whole time,” Carter said. “Exploring our past in our present.” ♦
Ruth E. Carter seeks out details to tell stories through clothes.
Dresses worn onstage by the girl group in “Sparkle,” the 2012 remake of the 1976 cult film of the same name. The group’s fortunes are loosely based on the story of the Supremes, but, in both movies, the three singers are sisters. In the remake, Whitney Houston played their mother—her final film role.
From “Malcolm X,” two embroidered kufis for Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X’s sometime mentor, and one kufi for an assistant of Muhammad’s.
A still-life of accessories from various films that Carter has worked on: the headpiece of Queen Ramonda, in “Black Panther”; cufflinks for Martin Luther King, Jr., in “Selma”; and the dancing shoes worn by Shorty, a character in “Malcolm X,” who was played by Spike Lee.
Styling by Jendayi Luck and Julia Long
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