Artist Spotlight: Ruth E. Carter

Artist Spotlight is a fashion-focused segment that takes a deep dive into the unique backstories and their creative processes. Highlighting the fashion industry's hidden gems and innovative talents.

“My favorite part about costume designing is the artistry of the job. You meet with a director and a visionary to discuss ideas. You research the characters and figure out the components of their look through your own vision. You create a color palette for a film, television or stage medium and discuss it with the director of photography who then lights your colored subjects.”

-Ruth E. Carter

American costume designer, Ruth E. Carter was raised by her mother in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1960. Carter briefly considered a career in acting but instead choose to do costume design at Hampton University. She would go on to graduate from university with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in 1982. Carter decided to move to Los Angeles after working for the Santa Fe Opera and took jobs at dance studios and theater production. In 1987 Carter meet young filmmaker, Spike Lee, who offered her first job on his second feature, “School Daze,” a “West Side Story”-inflected musical set at a historically black college. Carter and Lee have worked together on fourteen films, including “Do the Right Thing,” his barn-burning commentary on racial tensions in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Carter’s latest work was on the film “Coming to America 2”, where she dressed the cast in Ankara prints and bold colors. Two years ago Carter worked on “Black Panther”, which helped skyrocket her career into the spotlight even more. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Carter talked about the thought process behind creating the Afrofuturstic world with the help of techno-fantastical 3D headpiece, warrior armor, and beaded battle wear.

Carter is a visionary and has worked on 40 films and has mastered the art of creating different looks for different periods and genres over time.