Ruth E. Carter: Designing Black History on Screen

Ruth E. Carter is no stranger to costume design. By the time Carter won the Academy Award for best achievement in costume design in 2019 for her work on Marvel’s Black Panther, she had worked with some of the biggest directors in Hollywood — Spike Lee, Steven Spielberg and John Singleton, to name a few.

Carter’s first foray into designing clothes was during her early teens when she found a sewing machine inside a desk. She started making clothes out of items no one wanted anymore stored in an attic. At Hampton University, a historically Black college and university, she received a key to the costume shop after not gaining a part in a production. Carter, 63, says the professor who was directing the play said, “There’s nobody to do the costumes. And I was like, oh, OK. You know, it felt like the consolation prize.” That key opened more than the door to the shop; it opened “a learning lab for me,” Carter says. “It just became my home away from home. And I thought, I know how to sew, I know how to put some garments together. I could do this,” she says during a “Real Conversations With AARP” interview.

With a total of four Academy Award nominations for costume design (Malcolm X, Amistad, Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) and two wins (for the Black Panther movies) under her belt, Carter knows what it takes to dress characters of the past and the future, while representing the many aspects of Black history.

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For Amistad, Spielberg’s film about an uprising by African captives aboard a Spanish ship in 1839, Carter says she received the cargo list for the real vessel to know what it was carrying. “I was like, what was on when they overtook the ship? What was the ship carrying? And I saw that it was carrying leather and cotton and all of these materials that I used to create a look for them,” Carter says.

Ruth E. Carter says the crown for Wakanda’s Queen Ra​monda, played by Angela Bassett, center, had to be computer-generated and have its own technological approach.

Marvel/Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures/Everett Collection

Then for Carter’s award-winning costumes in Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, she needed to focus on the future. She says that when she was conceptualizing the crown that would be worn by Angela Bassett’s Queen Ramonda, she had to figure out “what would be the perfect crown for the queen that rules in Wakanda, the most forward-thinking, leading” place in Africa. To create a perfect sphere, “you know, it has to be computer-generated,” Carter says. “It has to have its own technologically advanced approach.”

Carter’s Oscar wins brought the coveted gold statuette to Marvel.