‘You know when you’ve hit it – it’s a transformation’: Ruth E Carter on building the bold world of Sinners

‘You know when you’ve hit it – it’s a transformation’: Ruth E Carter on building the bold world of Sinners The two-time Oscar winner on dressing Michael B Jordan’s twin antiheroes, her start with Spike Lee and crafting the period detail of Ryan Coogler’s genre-bending epic R uth E Carter’s costumes were a crucial part of establishing the identities of the two identical twins, both played by Michael B Jordan , in multi-Oscar-nominated Sinners. Particularly the hats. One brother, Stack, wore a red fedora. The other brother, Smoke, wore a blue newsboy flat cap. Finding the hats was a critical moment in the film’s backstory. When director Ryan Coogler first saw Jordan try on Stack’s red fedora, bought by Carter in Los Angeles’s Melrose Avenue, “he was like – that’s it. Then he goes up into the rest of the office, and people are coming down, like, ‘Ryan’s talking upstairs about a red hat?’ You know when you’ve hit it – it’s a transformation.” This is just a small example of the canny period world-building that has made Carter the most-garlanded Black woman in Oscars history, and the owner of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (her family were in attendance, she says, of its Covid-era unveiling, while Oprah and Eddie Murphy dialled in via Zoom). Her work on Coogler’s genre-squashing, Jim Crow-era drama, which has gained a record-breaking 16 Oscar nods, has landed a fifth nomination for the two-time Oscar winner (she is, according to a poll by Variety, a favourite in the category). Among her starry upcoming projects: a biopic of the pioneering Black fashion designer, Ann Lowe – designer of Jackie Kennedy’s wedding dress – which she will produce alongside Serena Williams. We meet at a plush suite at a London hotel that’s been co-opted by Warner Bros for the Baftas. Carter – painlessly chic in a white T-shirt, high-waisted blue jeans and chunky black glasses – whizzed into town a few hours earlier, but she’s enviably sharp as she unpacks her latest hit. The costumes of Sin...