When Ruth E. Carter first read Ryan Coogler’s script for Sinners, the images came fully formed. The Oscar-winning costume designer behind Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever immediately saw the world and the people inside it.
“I was extremely excited, because I love doing period pieces,” says Carter, who is nominated for another costume design Oscar for Sinners. “It was Clarksdale, Mississippi, 1931, and sharecroppers and the great migration, all of those images of the people came directly to mind.”
But Sinners isn’t just a period piece. It is also a vampire film, a musical, a story about migration, and, most crucially for Carter, a dual performance by Michael B. Jordan as twin brothers Smoke and Stack. The challenge wasn’t only making them look historically accurate, but also making them look like entirely different people.
“The biggest challenge was dividing Smoke and Stack into two different characters,” Carter says. “Because he is the same person, he isn’t a twin at all. He’s one guy.”
Rather than separating the characters into different fittings, Carter approached the problem head-on.
“We attacked Smoke and Stack in the fitting at the same time so that we could clearly compare them in the moment and see what kinds of things Stack would choose to wear,” she says. “And then we would dress Smoke and try not to do anything that Stack did.”
Character psychology was behind those clothing choices. Stack, shaped by his time in Chicago, reflects the polish and bravado of organized crime. Carter studied Italian Prohibition-era booking photos and pulled inspiration from sharply dressed young men whose suits projected authority and aspiration.
“They had on three-piece wool suits, and they looked really cool,” she says. “They would have this identity that was very much a part of the times.”
Conversely, Smoke carries himself more like someone shaped by labor and survival. His clothing reflects function first, identity second. Even the cut of his jacket was influenced by story logic.
“I knew through the props that Smoke would be wearing a leather holster that we made for him with two guns under his armpits,” Carter says. “So we needed the jacket to be cut in such a way that it would conceal that he was carrying those weapons.”
Fabric itself became one of the film’s most important storytelling tools. Carter used material to reflect migration, history and displacement.
“We wanted to represent that the twins came from the North to the South. So they were the ones who wore the wool. Everyone else wore cottons,” she explains.
Even background details carried meaning. At a train station scene depicting Black families migrating, Carter made a deliberate choice about what they carried.
“I insisted that no one have real luggage. No Black people had real luggage,” she says. “They just had parcels wrapped in rope, or they had sacks that they put their belongings in. You know, there needed to be a sense of making something out of nothing.”
Ruth E. Carter on the Supernatural in Sinners
The supernatural elements of Sinners introduced another layer of storytelling through costume, particularly in the film’s vampire transformation sequences. Carter emphasized progression through subtraction rather than addition.
“When you first meet Remmick (Jack O’Connell), he is smoldering. He has a tank top on,” she says. “But then you meet him at the door of the juke joint, and he’s dressed up for the party. When you see Stack at the very end, he’s down to a tank top.”
Smoke undergoes a similar stripping away.
“You discover things that are always there, but you did not see them because he was fully dressed prior,” she says.
Every costume decision, visible or not, served the larger goal of honoring the people and history at the center of the story. That meant rejecting familiar visual shorthand, especially for Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), a spiritual healer.
“I didn’t want Annie to look like a typical root worker, a typical mystical woman,” Carter says. “I wanted Annie to look like a regular community person.”
Instead of leaning into stereotypes, Carter embedded subtler spiritual symbolism into Annie’s wardrobe.
“She wore the beads around her neck, and she also wore feathers in her hair,” Carter says. “And I don’t think that most people notice that there were feathers, but bird feathers are a part of magic.”
Those details reflect Carter’s broader philosophy. Costume design, especially in a film like Sinners, isn’t about decoration. It’s about the accumulation of history, identity and everything a character has survived before the camera finds them.
“You’re not just dressing a person,” Carter says. “You’re dressing everything they’ve been through.”
Main image: Michael B. Jordan as Stack and Smoke in Sinners. Warner Bros.
