Ruth E. Carter’s Costumes For ‘Sinners’ Have Made Pop Culture Better

To celebrate the Museum of Pop Culture’s 25th anniversary, the museum held a Gala; MoPOP 25: A Quarter Century of Culture. On October 23, 2025, it did one of the many things this esteemed institution consistently makes a priority: celebrating and recognizing the creators (in fashion, film, gaming and music) whose work consistently gives voice to untold stories. I was offered the opportunity, which honestly felt much more like an honor, of speaking with both honoree, Ruth E. Carter, and MoPOP CEO, Michele Y. Smith, to learn about the prestigious museum and Carter’s work on “Sinners,” Carter’s latest triumph in costume design.

Just shy of an hour into Sinners, past present and future collide and the experience is visceral. All the verb tenses time occupies coalesce and collapse in the frenzy of a healing ritual. Under the watchful guidance of the griot, walls become suggestive of memory as they burn away, replaced instantly by stars. Time is banished.

What makes a story resonate, what binds it to the milieu, is the parts of ourselves we see reflected and refracted. There are hungers which cannot be sated with consumption, intangible needs that will not be quieted by excess. And, if we avoid feeding the parts of ourselves which keep us tethered, they achieve violence where otherwise we might experience joy. In Sinners, all of this is encapsulated in a few minutes of joyful music, obviously important to the narrative, but also undeniably connected to the present, the moment in which we all live, even though ‘now’ is a constantly moving target.

“Knowing that we’re putting together a juke joint, I didn’t want to make a ‘Hollywood story’,” costume designer Ruth Carter explained. “I’ve never wanted to make a typical Hollywood story, I’ve always wanted to share history and knowledge of what the parameters were. In Sinners, that sharing is happening in every frame. I think the way that Ryan Coogler and Autumn Durald Arkapaw, the director of photography, decided to use the aspect ratios, the wide horizontal and then the vertical, it spoke to the rhythm of this time. It had its own symphony, if you will, that further drew us into understanding how big the world was, then coming in really tight and seeing every detail. It was a beautiful way of painting a story in two ways: seeing how big these fields were and how much these people had to do just to live.”

Though I could think of a dozen reasons to celebrate Ruth Carter’s many contributions to the art of filmmaking, I asked Michele Smith, the Museum of Pop Culture’s CEO, what made this film and its costume designer the right choice for the museum’s silver anniversary.

“Ruth Carter stands out as an icon of pop culture due to her groundbreaking contributions to costume design in the film industry,” Smith told me. “With over three decades of experience, she’s worked on critically acclaimed films such as Malcolm X, Black Panther and Selma, and now Sinners. Her ability to blend historical accuracy with contemporary aesthetics allows audiences to connect with her characters on a deeper level. And her designs celebrate African-American culture and heritage, creating like a visual language that resonates across communities.”

“And her impact extends beyond costume design,” the CEO continued. “She’s become a symbol of representation and empowerment in an industry that has historically marginalized Black voices. And by winning an Academy Award for both Black Panther films, for her costume design, she solidified her status as a trailblazer and an influential figure in fashion and film.”

What Carter does is much more than dress actors. In the very center of the film, at twilight, the tension becomes almost a character. But before that time is an open road, and with the top down, surrounded by those they love, those Smoke and Stack came home to, it feels probable that our main characters will come out of this together even though, intellectually, we know that such optimism is impossible.

These are not ideas which could be passed on to the audience with words. Costume design steps in when words would kill the magic, when they would destroy suspension of disbelief.

“We open the story with a sharecropper,” Carter said when I asked her about what costumes do that lines cannot be trusted to convey. “We see the expanse, the aspect ratio is huge, and we know we’re in this big world. We see how these people live and the community in this big world of Southern sharecroppers in cotton fields. Those visual elements help us get into the story and I tried to make sure that my passion for telling this story included history.”

“I wanted to tell you about the history of these people,” Carter told me, “something that the script does not say, or that it tells you indirectly. To show you more specifically about how they made something out of nothing, how they made the blues, how their clothing is just not a symbol of the times. It’s also a symbol of resilience. The aspect ratio changing, it opening when their car is driving down that little dirt road. I’m envisioning that scene, the transition, it gives you real geographic context. You know you are in the South and I think it really does add to the way we conceive how this story means more.”

Calico, chambre, denim, all the beautiful wool suiting in Sinners; the textiles are filling the spaces between words. Excellent costume design does not pull focus or take over on screen, not unless that is what the narrative requires.The stories which feel most real, when told on film, have slivers of truth running through them like fluvial geomorphology. There is a way to use the past as an armature and Ruth Carter has perfected it.

I asked the Oscar-winning designer how she worked such intangible concepts into the hundreds of garments we see on screen; it is one thing to have an idea, but communicating it to an audience of millions of global viewers, without relying upon words, is not something every designer can achieve. And Carter does so seemingly without trying, the hundreds of hours of hard work belied by the seemingly effortless precision of this film.

“I looked to my aging and dyeing department,” Carter said. “I looked to my buyers and fitters and I told them, if this is about resilience, we have to see the sweat. We have to see the strain on the fabric. We have to embody the concept of hand-me-downs. But when you’re talking about a time of resilience, you have to understand what has happened to these people, and the script does not tell you there was a major flood, like a Katrina, that happened in the Mississippi Delta in 1928. And they survived, but they were refugees in their own land. They were able to bundle their few belongings and survive a huge flood that really kind of springboarded us into the depression.”

“We’re passion-led from the start,” Carter told me, “and that begins with the writing. The writing lets us know where we’re gonna stand, what the time and space is gonna be. From there, there is the passion of storytelling from a visual point of view. And storytelling is visual, it’s immersive, it has history, it has rhythm, it has language. The first part of that process is to find the avenue that everybody can speak to, that everyone on your team can relate to and get something from. I do a real deep dive into visual research.”

I asked Smith how she saw Sinners making an impact on culture, on the changes she saw, thanks to Ruth Carter’s costumes, in the way people talk and think about clothing in filmmaking.

“The costume design really went along with the story,” Smith explained. “Right now, we’re living in complex times and the film really resonated, with where we are politically, globally, where the world is. The costume design was a story, it told a story, fashion can be storytelling and she really represented that, and it was just done so beautifully. I always like the dance scene, it makes you cry and you want to dance. It’s like a revival.”

To achieve this, Carter started from Ryan Coogler’s script and expanded that vision into the history embedded in the Mississippi Delta, into the history of the Blues and the mythology of Robert Johnson at the crossroads.

Elijah “Smoke” Moore and his twin Elias “Stack” Moore, both portrayed by the exceptionally talented Michael B. Jordan, each embodies a primary color in their costumes. This is a kind choice in a story and era when kindness is uncommon, one of many ways that Coogler or his hand-picked team play with juxtaposition and dichotomy. By using color to code the characters, any worry a viewer may have about confusing one twin for the other is obliterated.

“We had to depend on the blue and the red in a sense,” Carter told me. “They were twins, you couldn’t rely on facial recognition, you had to rely on the visual color cues, as well as style cues and characterization. But that was subtle. It wasn’t actually written down in the script. Ryan verbally told me this one day as we were having one of our meetings. I was thrown, I have to say, because I’d never been told to be that intentional with color on two characters in a period piece. I knew that through indigo dyeing and denim, blue made sense. In terms of the red, which kind of red could I visually tell that story with and not take us out of the film? I worried a lot, a lot of sleepless nights over that red and blue.”

There is no indication of that stress in the final product, and I asked the designer how she arrived at a resolution. It is obvious she knew exactly what she was going. Lisa (Helena Hu), the Chow’s teenage daughter, is wearing a beautiful red blouse when we first meet her. Her red is related to her Chinese heritage, but its also the Stack’s red. When I saw this I knew, before the words had a chance to explain, that the choice of shared tone was an indication of friendship approaching a family tie.

“I did a lot of research to understand,” Carter explained with a smile. Lovely Reader, please understand, this was the type of smile that speaks to love and of vocation.

“I looked at a lot of art. Even Norman Rockwell and the American stories that he painted; they were very red, white, and blue. I also looked at the saturation of colors from artists like Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, my favorite, who collaged the South. I thought this would be something like that, in terms of collaging in a color palette that was intentional and felt like the American South. I found some rules through research, in looking at booking photos from the 1920s, of gangsters, photos of prohibition. All of those were black and white, but they gave me the weight of the fabrics and how they were worn, the proportions; how a vest and a pair of pants should lay on the body.”

The deft use of color felt like a reaffirmation of something this writer already knew to be a fact; there are times when fashion is an art, and I asked Smith what her thoughts and beliefs about that were.

The deft use of color felt like a reaffirmation of something this writer already knew to be a fact; there are times when fashion is an art, and I asked Smith what her thoughts and beliefs about that were.

“First and foremost, the MoPOP CEO told me, “our core pillars at the museum are fashion, film, gaming, and music. And it’s a part of our four pillars of the museum because we believe that fashion is a creative expression and pop culture invokes that. We have so many different costumes within our permanent collections, but if you think of pop culture in and of itself, if you think of any type of artist; they create their own persona with what they wear. Then it becomes a fandom for the people. It helps people embrace their individuality. I think it’s been part of the way trends are set.”

Though the concepts explored in this film are enormous they do not become stumbling blocks, even when it is addressing xenophobia, the times and places where religion can hurt, or the many evil deeds committed against Black people in the American South, really, anywhere in America.

Beginnings can be perilous, literature makes this clear. Finding solid ground in history, like the designer did here, makes connections stronger than tenuous, a foundation upon which large ideas can have the space they need to grow. Now that I understood how this costume designer found solid ground in history, I wanted to know how she chose where to go next, after setting her point of origin.

“I started by worrying and looking at research really carefully,” Carter said. “And then one day I found a red hat at a hat store and it was just such a beautiful red. It had such a great feeling, the 1930s had a really high crown and a healthy brim and it had those elements. And, I knew that Michael would look really handsome in it. I carried that hat back from Los Angeles to New Orleans for his fitting. Each step was intentional as we told our story. I found some brown pinstripe that had a very reddish tone. I knew that I could get away with things like pink shirts and a soft collar, the turndown collar had just come into fashion. And because they came from Chicago, I could show one of them with this newer shirt collar as opposed to what would have been a residual from an earlier time.”

The people who populate the story could be real, or they feel that way, and much of that is because of the invisible word done by Carter and her department. All the beautiful hats and shawls, it feels like they fill the spaces where jewelry would be in a different type of story. The use of textiles here is important. The way clothing hangs from and moves about the body always matters on film; it is a way to encourage audiences to understand that in addition to being a component of material culture, what characters wear on screen reinforces the connections between heritage and history as well as the times and places where those two concepts diverge.

Thinking about these specific ideas, I asked about Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), and about her jewelry specifically. Because, to me, it felt like the spiritual role in her community was related to her necklace and earrings.The subtitles I always leave on told me that there was a Yorubu connection, but guessing and making assumptions are often a terrible idea. Especially when you have the opportunity to admit what you do not know, might not understand and have an expert in front of you who could explain.

“The Yorubu called them Eleke beads, and they are blessed,” Carter explained. “There’s not a lot of research that says, ‘this was a root worker.’ But she was a hoodoo woman. There’s some very specific people that were, in history, written down as root workers or hoodoo practitioners and they represented femininity and beauty. But there are lots of images that make you wonder if she was a root worker, because she does wear these Yorubu beads. And they wore the beads inside of their garments because you’re not supposed to touch them. They’ve been blessed. And if you touch them, they have to be washed and re-blessed. We see Annie take the mojo bag from Smoke and she refreshes it; it’s the same with the beadwork. I also felt like the earrings from that era, you know, do have such a beautiful little magic to them.”

There is very little jewelry in this film, and that is on purpose; I’d read that many times in the research I did before the interview. Which made Annie’s pieces all the more significant, the same way Grace Chow (Li Jun Li) and her simple silver cross felt important.

“People in this community didn’t go to the doctor,” Carter told me, “they didn’t have the money to go. You went to the root worker. You went to the woman who could give you the natural medicine to heal you and also could pray for you. It was a multi thing- you could buy soap there. You could get a potion there. The character had to have a presence that didn’t represent wealth, instead, it represented magic. Her little earrings and her beads, to me, represent her magic and her beauty and her femininity and the power that is innate in all of that. When we first meet her, we meet a woman who is upstanding, strong and powerful. We know that by her posture and by her beauty. I wanted to keep that thread going with her. The jewelry that she’s wearing doesn’t represent class, it represents culture. I feel like it’s giving more support to her, to Annie’s strong feminine energy.”

This all made complete sense to me at some fundamental level. Because if evil exists, then magic must as well; there is a unity in opposites. Coincidentia oppositorum, that’s the way Nicholas of Cusa or Carl Jung would say it, in Latin. Which sounds a bit magical, though I’ll be the first to admit that anything antediluvian resonates with me, I cannot help that. But this conversational vein had me very curious how Carter managed so much blending; of time periods, roles, archetypes, a million tiny parallels are made visible in this film through the designer’s impeccably elegant work.

“I give very specific instructions to my brilliant team that are working on the background,” Carter said. “We not only gather all of the elements that we need to fit people in, we also have many conversations about what we’re doing. We have research boards everywhere to motivate. I tell everyone all the time, go back to the images in the research. Because, as people come in, your mind is automatically going to relax and you’ll be doing the same look over and over and over again before you realize it. So, you have to go back to the research and really find someone that this person represents and focus on the details.”

“I also had a rule, and the rule was no alterations. Everyone that I looked at in my research looked like what we might want to say is an ‘ill fit’, but in totality, it paints the picture of the place. If we’d hemmed everybody’s pants and we took in everybody’s jacket, if we made everything perfect, then we were not really representing the details of the people. I was thinking of ways where we can show dignity, show respect within the design and the context. To let a woman wrap her hair up and put on that ragged dress; but it’s a beautiful pink and she’s good; she’s holding her carriage in the way she walks. It feels like time stood still in terms of the people. We have the people, we have the faces, we have the bodies. We actually tapped into a local culture that was, I think, pretty pure to the look of the South.”

Capturing the essence of a time and place, and doing it in a manner that expanded culture’s ideas about who is important enough to share stories about, or expanding the definition of beauty beyond narrow parameters, this sounded like a very good reason for an institution like MoPOP to celebrate the work of a designer like Ruth Carter, and that was something I knew I had to ask Michele Smith about.

My personal definition of art is work that invokes an involuntary emotional response, I told Michele this. How it makes you feel, in which direction, is not the point; when you experience an involuntary emotional response, making people feel things, is a very specific type of power. I mean, I seek that out. I want it everywhere. Nobody ever is hurt by expanding a vision of beauty. I very much believe art will save us. It always has, when humanity has been at its worst. Art always works to make us better.

“I believe that pop culture, it’s our identity,” MoPOP CEO Michele Smith said to me. “It defines us and we, in turn, define it. I believe that fashion really takes on a form of your own individuality. It gives your unapologetic self in your own way. I think that’s what’s so fun; it’s fluid, but it allows you to express yourself and how you’re feeling at a current moment in time. It’s the creators that disrupt the norm that advance culture. And Ruth Carter is one of them, she is one of the trendsetters.”

“Sinners” is available to stream on HBO Max, and there is a wide range of information about the film, its costume designer, and the ways we can all leverage pop culture to make a better world at the Museum of Pop Culture.

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