Joe Skinner: Congratulations on the nomination.
Ruth E. Carter: Thank you. I’m thrilled. It’s so funny how I have four nominations. It’s hard to even fathom that.
Joe Skinner: Ruth E. Carter is a costume designer who now has four Oscar nominations under her belt, and one of those came just recently with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. It’s a franchise that won her her first Oscar in 2019 for her work on the first film, Black Panther.
Academy Awards Ceremony (Archival): And the Oscar goes to… Black Panther, Ruth Carter. This is the first Oscar and third nomination for Ruth Carter…
Ruth E. Carter (Archival): Wow. Wow. I got it. Wow. This has been a long time coming. (Laughs)
Joe Skinner: It’s such a good speech.
Ruth E. Carter (Archival): Marvel may have created the first Black superhero, but through costume design we turned him into an African king. It’s been my life’s honor to create costumes. Thank you to the Academy. Thank you for honoring African royalty and the empowered way women can look and lead on screen.
Joe Skinner: I remembered watching it live, because I always watched the Oscars, and it stood out to me even then.
Ruth E. Carter: Luckily I have a really good writer who, we bounce back and forth, and kind of figure it out together. It takes a little bit of the edge off.
Ruth E. Carter (Archival): Spike Lee, thank you for my start. I hope this makes you proud.
Joe Skinner: Ruth got her start designing costumes on many of the Spike Lee joints of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Movies like Do The Right Thing, Clockers, and Crooklyn, and she received her first Oscar nomination for her costume designs on Malcolm X.
Malcolm X (Film): These are the questions you and I have to ask. How did we get this mind? You’re not an American. You’re an African, who happens to be in America. You have to understand the difference. We didn’t come over on the Nina, the Pinta, the whatcha-ma-call-it. We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on us.
Joe Skinner: It was here that she first gained attention for her detailed work on period designs.
Ruth E. Carter: In Malcolm X, I got to explore a lot of the photographers of the different times. We went from the ‘20s all the way to the ‘60s. You want these images to just kind of emerge off the page. But there comes a point where you have to actually use the research as a resource and then gather the fabrics and realize it.
My advice is that you get a strong foundation of how you go about coming up with ideas and I think it’ll stay with you for the rest of your career. My foundation was research. I love to research.
Joe Skinner: I’m Joe Skinner and this is American Masters Creative Spark. In each episode, we bring you the story of how artists bring their creative work to life. Today, costume designer Ruth E. Carter shows us the attention to detail and reverence for history that she channeled into her Oscar-nominated work on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
Ruth E. Carter: It’s nice to be able to talk about process and costume design because when I first started for a long time, nobody really gave costumes their just due. When I did my first costume for a play, I actually auditioned for the play and I didn’t make it. So the professor who was the director said, “you know, hey, you know, we don’t have anybody to do the costumes. You wanna do that?” And I was like, “okay…” But I realized that it was an artistic medium. And I got to see my work on stage and look at color balance and relationships between people by what they were wearing, and it allowed me to step outside of my desire to be on stage and inside the story, it allowed me to step outside the story and orchestrate what I was doing with all the characters. And that’s how I fell in love with it. I thought this is big. It felt bigger than just playing the one character.
Joe Skinner: Carter went on to design costumes for over 60 film and televison projects, with a portfolio that shows a deep commitment to sharing the past, present and future of Black culture. She was a natural fit to get involved with a film adaptation of the first mainstream Black superhero, who was originally printed in comics back in 1966 in Fantastic Four #52. He’s the king of the fictional nation of Wakanda – the Black Panther.
Black Panther: I am not king of all people, I am king of Wakanda. And it is my responsibility to make sure our people are safer.
Ruth E. Carter: I got a call from my agent, and, I was like, wow, the Black Panther Party, this is great. And then I got a little bit of material, a few pages from a comic book, like a synopsis, not very much. And I was like, this is not the Black Panther Party at all. This is the Black Panther from the comics.
Joe Skinner: Believe it or not, creator Stan Lee claims his Black Panther has no relation to the Black Panther Party, and in fact, that Black Panther Party came into existence after the comic book superhero.
Ruth E. Carter: I immediately started to research and read the material. I boarded a plane from New York to LA. Going into marvel Studios is like entering the CIA. and I kept thinking, you know, like, this is like a really important place. This is like, I Spy, back in the day… I got an ID with my picture on it, and I sat in front of Ryan Coogler and Nate Moore and I had amassed so many Afrofuture images that was coming into vogue. All these images of Afrofuture were beginning to emerge.
Joe Skinner: Nate Moore served as executive producer on Black Panther, and Ryan Coogler as director.
Ruth E. Carter: Nate came in and I was able to share images of Afrofuture with Ryan and I, I think that’s what sealed the deal because later he gave me a little tour of the offices where all of these people were working on their computers on different production designs and vehicles and you know, it was pretty intimidating. But when I walked into Ryan’s office, he had some of the same images on his wall that I had shown him in my folder.
Joe Skinner: Afrofuturism is a cultural aesthetic that combines sci-fi and fantasy to explore the Black experience. Ruth Carter defines it as “using technology and intertwining it with imagination, self-expression, and an entrepreneurial spirit, promoting a philosophy for Black Americans, Africans, and Indigenous people to believe and create without the limiting construct of slavery and colonialism.”
In Black Panther, the people of Wakanda use their natural resources to create advanced technologies. So naturally, Afrofuturism would become a guiding principle for Carter and for the rest of the Black Panther film team, as they worked to evolve the Black Panther onto the big screen for the first time.
Ruth E. Carter: Those little boxes in the comics can only give you so much. And so the ability to expand on that and elevate that was exciting. And some things were departures, the Dora Milaje in the comics, you know, overly sexualized women of power, you know, very powerful, very strong. Fan favorite. Everybody was wondering what the Dora Milaje would look like, and it was Ryan Cooler who said, you know, I want them to be taken seriously. I need them in a uniform. They’re the highest ranking female fighting force of Wakanda. They protect the king. They need to be in flat boots. They need to be in martial arts boots, not high heels, no cheerleader skirts, no triangle tops.
Scene from Black Panther plays.
Dora Milaje: Drop your weapon.
W’Kabi: Would you kill me, my love?
Dora Milaje: For Wakanda, without question.
Joe Skinner: The Dora Milaje are essentially Black Panther’s bodyguards – and their powerful red uniform has become one of the most iconic in the film franchise.
Ruth E. Carter: The illustrators that are at Marvel, and also I have a bank of illustrators, everybody weighs in and we sit in a boardroom together and we look at these characters and we tweak what we like and they go back and they re-illustrate ‘til we find the right mix. You could travel all over Africa with the Dora Milaje costume. We put neck rings on them from the Ndebele tribe of South Africa. And then as we create, we say, well, we want the neck rings and the arm rings to feel like jewelry. So we plated them with a bright sheen and there were ways that we made that costume honor the female form just as the comic books did, but not overly sexualizing it as a look, but still making it quite beautiful. I up the red color to honor the Maasai tribe of Africa. I gave them a leather skirt that I stretched the edges of and made it feel very much like the Himba skirts that they use with the calf skin. So there’s storytelling laced into the construction of that suit, and I feel like when it’s done, you would actually see a uniform that’s beautiful, that’s protective. That’s Wakanda. Everything has layers and layers and layers of storytelling. And that’s how we make our decisions as we go through the process of building from a base layer sketch. Because a sketch is only gonna be 2-D, it’s only gonna give you so much, you really have to make decisions about every angle of a costume. The way it fits under the arm, the way it attaches, the way it moves, how heavy it looks, is all a part of storytelling decisions.
Joe Skinner: In the sequel, Wakanda Forever, the Dora Milaje return, alongside two other main characters, Shuri, the Black Panther’s sister, and Ramonda, the Queen of Wakanda.
Ruth E. Carter: I like to talk about the womens’ clothing with regards to the throughlines and hidden gems that you may not notice, but there’s something about it that impacts you.
Joe Skinner: Carter stresses the impact costume design can have on understanding character, through a subtle motif that she developed across these strong women characters while they’re in mourning. It first appears during the Black Panther’s funeral at the beginning of the film; a plot line that coincides with the tragic passing of Chadwick Boseman, who originated the title role.
Ruth E. Carter: The Dora Milaje have one shoulder out of these white dresses that they’re wearing, and the arm they’re using is the bare arm that carries the casket. Ramonda has a dress with a bare arm and it’s Vibranium silver. When we first see Shuri coming into the lab, she has one shoulder exposed in her dress. And I think as these images are presented in the storytelling, it’s not drawing your attention to it right away. It’s kind of a collected feeling and that’s the difficult balance of costume design to be able to evoke a passion or an emotion, with the audience without their knowing, without being too outlandish or coming too far forward with it. So it distracts from the dialogue or the purpose of the scene. And so that exposed arm on those three very important women in this story. Sure. Ramonda. The Dora Milaje. Has a metaphor attached. That’s the beauty of the skin and the color of the skin. The skin exposed, being vulnerable, but also being powerful. And also beautiful.
Joe Skinner: In order to look into the future with her costume designs for Black Panther, Ruth E. Carter needed to look into the past. One of the tenets of Afrofuturism deals with imagining characters and cultures that are free of colonial influence. For Carter’s work, she took careful considerations of this fashion history.
Ruth E. Carter: You’re nervous all the time about, you know, how to present something that looks pre-colonialized because so much was, like, Ankara fabrics were brought in from the Dutch and with the first Black Panther film, I said I wasn’t going to use much Ankara because I wanted Wakanda to have its own language of prints, but also because of that knowledge of how the Ankara fabric came to be beloved in West Africa.
Joe Skinner: Ankara prints were introduced to West and Central Africans by Dutch merchants during the 19th century, merchants who had taken the design from Indonesians during the Dutch colonization of Indonesia.
Ruth E. Carter: History is like your friend. You learn so much from the history of dress. It becomes like the roadmap and resource for ideas. So I love the element of research and bringing it into futuristic times. We explored 12 tribes for Wakanda and I had to actually go into research books and look at the Indigenous tribes of Africa in order to actually see the details and I did have a shopper that went throughout the continent and collected antiques for me. I wanted to see the actual color of the shea butter and red ochre that the Himba women mixed together and put all over their skin and in their hair. I actually wanted to see it with my own eyes, so I could replicate that. I needed to see antique beadwork, not contemporary beadwork, just to see how irregular the beads were. The research of costumes or the research of dress, actually does have its own story because it lived in a different time. It tells you about fabric choices and maybe old techniques, old style techniques. And when you bring some of the history into the future and you create it with modern technology, whether it’s 3-D printing or any other kind of way that we might make things today, it keeps the integrity together, but it also reignites it, it reintroduces it to a new audience and a new story.
Joe Skinner: Just as Carter and the team brought pre-colonial African ideas into Black Panther’s costume design, she did similar research on Mesoamerican history for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
Ruth E. Carter: We do have the historical anchor of the film, and that is the Maya and we see them early on.
Joe Skinner: The screen reads “1571 AD, Zama Yucatan,” in a flashback to Mesoamerica. It’s part of the origin story of a new anti-hero introduced in the sequel – Namor – the leader of the Talokan people, an underwater culture grappling with Spanish colonization.
Namor: My mother and her village were driven from their farms by Spanish conquistadors who brought the smallpox, a hateful language and dogma from another world.
Ruth E. Carter: A lot of research went into, what this small village, this small community looked like they were coastal. It was hot. It’s post classic Maya, so it has certain artifacts and the pottery that told all these wonderful stories about this community. And they weren’t as grandiose as the Aztecs. We had so much to learn, that, once I got it, you know, and I knew the materials I could use to create this subculture that went into the water, and live there for hundreds of years, I could use the jade, the ear spools. The Spondylus shells. I knew that they had usage of like rubber, but it was a difficult balance because we really wanted to be big with headpieces and feathers and stuff. And the historians, Dr. Gerardo Aldana being one of them, told us that, you can’t use feathers. But we also had the underwater world, which were fins, fish fins.
Joe Skinner: Carter and her team reveled in the creative license afforded to them by this combination of pre-colonial influence with the influence of this fantastical underwater world that the fictional Talokan people lived in. The cousin of their leader, Namor, is Namora, who bore a particularly stunning rendering of this inspiration.
Ruth E. Carter: When you see Namora and she emerges and you have this beautiful headdress and this costume that is of the lionfish. You can create this world and you can do departures because they’re living within the ocean world of fish with fins. And you know, the lionfish is only about the size of your hand.
I think they only get as big as like eight or 10 inches. And, you know, we didn’t want to have that costume look like they had harvest from fish around and made a costume, so because of their ability to use the rubber and to create, and because they were a forward community, then we could honor the lionfish by creating this costume and it was so perfect for this actress, because she was a small little dynamo. She was a lionfish. So right away, we went into creating this underworld that was really beautiful and inspired by the Mayan culture and also combining the ocean and the water with this look.
Joe Skinner: The Talokan’s leader, Namor, is a mutant in the film, he doesn’t age, and he’s lived for hundreds of years. So how do you design a costume for a character like that?
Ruth E. Carter: He has seen everything from his childhood and going through, you know, many, many, many years and never aging. So with that concept, we had even more latitude with his costume, but we also wanted to anchor him, as this, Mesoamerican, Indigenous culture. We wanted the Latinx community to embrace this community and see themselves. And Anthony Francisco, he was the concept artist that created this image and the image was of the history of Mesoamerica. So you can look at his neck piece and see that there are two serpents traveling around the neck piece and they are open-mouthed and between their heads is a large pearl and there is a pyramid in Chichen Itza that has a staircase. And on the sides of the staircase is this serpent that squiggles all the way down to the bottom level. And on both sides there’s an open mouth serpent head, and it’s pointing towards a cenote. So this neck piece that Namor is wearing is of the Chichen Itza pyramid that has these two-headed serpents facing the water and the pearl in the middle represents the water.
Joe Skinner: The serpent at the base of the Chichen Itza pyramid is one of many real world elements that Carter’s costume designs reference. While the worlds of Wakanda Forever are fictional, there is a dedication to authenticity and reality that is a palpable part of her creative process.
Ruth E. Carter: It’s fascinating, all of these elements are put into the making of the costumes.
Joe Skinner: Do you feel a strong sense of responsibility for the work you do as a costume designer?
Ruth E. Carter: I do because I want my work to stand the test of time. I want you to look back at it 30, 40 years from now and say, wow, I still love this. I think that most films will have some kind of way of dating themselves. But I think the more honest you are, you know, we’re not making documentaries. We are making entertainment. So, you know, we bring color balance and all that stuff into the fray. But, I feel like the part that anchors you into the past or history helps anchor the film in its trajectory throughout the ages, that people will be able to look back and see that this was something that was based on something real.
Joe Skinner: Thank you to Ruth E. Carter for taking us through her meticulous creative process. And we’ll see in just a few weeks if she’ll be taking home her second Oscar.
American Masters: Creative Spark is a production of the WNET Group, media made possible by all of you. This episode was produced by me, Joe Skinner. Our executive producer is Michael Kantor. Original music is composed by Hannis Brown. This episode was mixed and mastered by Evan Joseph.
Funding for American Masters: Creative Spark was provided by the Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, Thea Petschek Iervolino Foundation, the Anderson Family Fund, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, and the Philip & Janice Levin Foundation.
