The Fashion Studies Journal

^{Aude Fellay is a writer, researcher, and teacher. She coordinates and teaches theory courses in the MA program in Fashion, Jewellery, and Accessory Design at HEAD-Genève, where she is also engaged in practice-based research. Her writing explores contemporary fashion, image culture, and labor. Her work has been featured in publications such as Dune Journal, Issue Journal, and Revue Faire.}

In her landmark book Fashion at The Edge, Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness, Caroline Evans gives weight to fashion design as a form of cultural analysis. [1] In a recent interview with Rosie Findlay about the publication, Evans acknowledges that the book’s method registers as a “sort of mimicry” or “perhaps an echo?” of fashion design’s own operations. [2] From my perspective, as a “theorist” [3] surrounded by practitioners, and in a perpetual struggle against the incessant infantilization of the practice, her writing conveys more than an echo of fashion design. Despite it being theory-heavy, it goes some way in narrowing the gap between theory and practice as institutional categories, by theoretically “testing” the methods of “creative” fashion design. [4] Put differently, it mobilizes fashion design methodologies, which it simultaneously helps to foreground, “assuming an equivalent between the historian and the designer.” [5] As such, the book—and her work more broadly—offers fashion design a form of legitimacy as a mode of inquiry and highlights its specificities in ways that do not reiterate false oppositions between the material and immaterial elements of fashion. What follows, then, is a very brief attempt to point out the significance of Evans’s work not simply as fashion history but as a resource for the further formalization of practice-based research in fashion at a moment when its stakes and formats are being outlined. I have set out to do this in the wake of having almost concluded a two-year long practice-based project at HEAD–Genève (HES-SO). Here—to borrow from the Virgil Abloh playbook—I am “postrationalizing” Evans’s contribution from the standpoint of that project and elaborating on the project itself to highlight ways we might “stay with the practice” as we transform it.

The first edition of Fashion at The Edge. A second edition was released in 2023.

The Wall

The hurdles fashion studies faced as it entered the academy have been well documented. [6] The obstacles facing fashion design as it follows the same path—some forty years after the fields of art, design, and architecture did—are even greater. [7] Firstly, practice-based research, regardless of the practice in question, still suffers from a lack of credibility. [8] Additionally, in the case of fashion, its academic field’s increased criticism of fashion design and the fashion industry more broadly have—and justly so—raised serious concerns about the practice itself. [9] This has resulted in both a permission to rethink how fashion is done and a steeper “wall of articulation” for fashion design as research. [9] In other words, the internal and external pressures of criticality and criticism have raised the bar “when it comes to proving [fashion design’s] activities and endeavors are worthwhile.” [10]

It is tempting, in this context, to salvage the practice of fashion design by repackaging it as art. As José Teunissen notes, fashion designers turned researchers have looked to “performances, installations, interventions, films and exhibitions…to replace the classic representations such as the catwalk, the fashion magazine and the fashion campaign,” valuing “the design process and the story above the artefact.” [11] Like Evans, I am uncomfortable with fashion’s strategic alignment with art, not least because, as she puts it, “fashion is plenty interesting enough.” [12] I do, however, understand its logic as a survival strategy for practitioners. In any case, clarifying the specificities of fashion’s practice, in its diverse contexts, is a worthwhile endeavor in light of both a growing interest in practice-based research and art’s more longstanding tradition of artistic research. To this end, I find myself going back to Evans’ work for ways of thinking about fashion design that attend to fashion as a design practice with its own methods, formats, constraints, and contexts.

Top: One of the “iconic” objects we chose as starting points was the Maison Martin Margiela veil. Shown here are examples of artifacts we developed in response. The piece on the left was produced by @knitgeekproject (Valentine Ebner), while the mask on the right was created through the upcycling of garments. Bottom: The artifacts progressively departed from the original item as the research advanced.

“I find myself going back to Evans’ work for ways of thinking about fashion design that attend to fashion as a design practice with its own methods, formats, constraints, and contexts.”

A “New” Form of Cultural Analysis

Evans’ Fashion at The Edge, first published in 2003, is “a case study of a method,” which she directs at the work of designers of the late 1990s. [13]Collecting concepts and historical motifs, she moves from present to past, and past to present, to make sense of the ubiquity of spectacle and death in the work of designers such as John Galliano or Alexander McQueen, zooming in on the historical citations that permeate their work. The book homes in on fashion’s material underbelly, contextualizing the anxiety and trauma designs evoked among the large-scale transformations underway at the time: a technological revolution, globalization, a century coming to its conclusion. Her method takes cues from her subject matter: she writes how the designers of which she speaks design. [14] She made this clear at the time, writing that “ragpicking, as well as describing designers’ methods, is also a useful tool for the cultural historian in thinking about fashion today.”[15] In contextualizing her methodological choices and the breadth of the issues addressed, she goes some way in lending fashion design’s “cultural poetics” epistemological weight. [16] She does the latter by way of household names, looking for equivalent methods in the writings of Walter Benjamin (among others). [17]

Like many fashion designers, Evans “thinks through images,” drawing on her own images to illuminate the work of designers—the Benjaminian ragpicker being one of them. She unearths concepts and brings them to bear on fashion to both decipher its meanings and describe its operations. Italo Calvino’s “thinking through images” is an example drawn from another, influential essay of hers, which I have found particularly useful. [18] It is both concrete—it hints at designers’ visual research—and analytically productive. The term can be applied to the fact that designers create garments with an understanding of their narrative or conceptual function within broader compositions—a look and/or a collection. The expression also points to the emblematic quality of the processes and outputs: as Evans argues, images are transformed into objects, and objects into images. In this sense, it points at the central role of “dreamworlds,” not as ad hoc contextualization but as the deliberate materialization of a viewpoint, one that arises from the interaction of a design identity and a specific topic or theme. In many ways, then, her work underscores the specificities of fashion design as it is practiced in our shared context, puts forward concepts through which to apprehend it, and implicitly legitimizes its operations as ways of knowing. [19]

The second “iconic” object was the Louis Vuitton Speedy bag tagged by Steven Sprouse in a collaboration initiated by Marc Jacobs. Shown here, an artifact created in response to the Speedy and the opening chapters of the Vuitton series.

“[W]e decided to look critically at our own context (the western fashion and luxury industry), and its golden age (the late 1990s—Evans’ purview), through the viewpoint of some of its ‘iconic’ objects.“

How To?

Granted, the knowledge produced by fashion design in this context is dependent upon the labor of the critic or the cultural historian. It must be inferred from the images and material translations designers conjure. But there are ways for practitioners to uncover that knowledge and reveal the medium’s potential as a mode of inquiry, and there are dissemination formats to be found within fashion design’s own methods. [20] When designer Emilie Meldem and I set out to conduct a practice-based research project, we decided to look critically at our own context (the western fashion and luxury industry), and its golden age (the late 1990s—Evans’ purview), through the viewpoint of some of its “iconic” objects. [21] The icons were fitting emblems for the industry and a manageable starting point for a more wide-ranging, anti-capitalist, and feminist critique of the fashion industry’s extractive nature and normative thrust. These objects were not only “iconic”—or rather, heralded as such by the industry—but evoked central elements of a fashion design practice: a design identity (a “DNA,” if you will), and a know-how or savoir-faire, which raised questions about materials and production. In short, our choice of objects would help us build our own DNA and savoir-faire.

Our research book—a tool commonly used by designers to document their research and process—became both a format for sharing our output and an analytical tool, through which we articulated our critique and postrationalized our design experiments. In it, our engagement with the icons takes the very literal form of a “detective story” (a term that Evans uses, in fact, to characterize the type of cultural analysis shaped by Walter Benjamin’s concept of the trace and fashion design’s ragpicking [22]). The research material is presented as a series of clues to be deciphered through their captions and the objects they correspond to. These materials provide context for both the icons and the artifacts we created in response, which indexed specific aspects of the original icons or embodied our critique of them. While the initial artifacts closely resembled the icons, they became increasingly distinct through successive iterations—a shift shaped, in part, by the evolving framework of the research, as we moved from an initial, “paranoid” reading of the icons, which focused on the economic system and patriarchal order underwriting them, to attempts at yielding “reparative” tools and practices. [23]

The research material was post-rationalized into a series of visual chapters, with captions offering interpretive clues.

It was clear to us from the start that to stick with the practice, we would have to design the artifacts on the basis of a design identity, and think of a specific know-how, as well as consider production issues. Our close reading of the Margiela veil and of Maison Margiela’s broader appeal as expressing a desire for collective design structures informed the design identity: we gave up on devising an identity as a duo to test what designing as a collective would actually entail. [24] In short, we took seriously the desires lodged in the stories we tell ourselves about these objects, while exposing their falsities (Margiela operated, like most design studios, hierarchically). We assembled a research team and looked for tools to address asymmetries, and make power visible and accessible within the group. [25] So, while we remained committed to fashion as an existing set of practices, we were equally determined to reshape it, drawing on the counter-hegemonic critiques of the theorists, activists, cultural workers, and practitioners in our lives—many of whom embodied several of these roles. [26]

Artifacts that respond to the Louis Vuitton bag, highlighting its components: the body is made of PVC-coated canvas, while the only leather elements are its handles.

We extrapolated methods from fashion understood as not simply made of design, narrowly conceived as the making of objects, but a whole host of practices that surround it and enable it. Storytelling, and fashion’s own hybrid language (in our context, Franglais), informed the publication’s structure and tone, for example. From the perspective of practice that is often ridiculed or deemed incapable of critical thought, it was essential that we developed our methods and dissemination formats from within the confines of the practice. In fact, staying with the practice meant devising two final stand-alone objects based on the many artifacts produced. [27] This acted as a productive constraint. It compelled us to confront both practical and theoretical questions, which would have escaped us otherwise: how aesthetic decisions are made when a collective is involved, or what desire and success might look like for us, at both the level of the objects and our own life choices, for instance. A focus on the process alone would have led to different outcomes, arguably more theoretical than applied.

The chapters move from examining the object itself to documenting and reflecting on our partial responses and provisional solutions to the questions it raised.

Fashion research can be both “artistic” and result in concrete changes to the practice itself, providing its specificities and applied dimension are accounted for. Theoretical frameworks can be put to work, and find themselves refined in the process, perhaps especially when theorists and designers collaborate and titles loosen in the process. This is one of the epistemological potentials of (critical) practice-led research at this moment in time: the possibility to act upon the critiques it articulates—to do better in real time. Fashion’s proximity to desire means it is also uniquely positioned to engage in and render desirable projects of making a good life. Perhaps this is what Evans gestured at in a 2020 interview with Susanna Strömquist, where she proposed fashion activism (re)acquainted itself with utopia. [28]

Storytelling played a crucial role in sorting, connecting, and organizing the research material. The research book—designed in collaboration with Sereina Rothenberger and David Schatz of Hammer—is scheduled for publication by Rollo Press in 2026.

Notes: Thinking Through Fashion (Practically)

[1] Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness (Yale University Press, 2003).

[2] Rosie Findlay, “Revisiting Fashion at the Edge: An Interview with Caroline Evans,” International Journal of Fashion Studies 11, no. 2 (2024): 319-327.

[3] I do not hold the proper credentials, in the context of my own institution, to claim the title. I am PhD-less and a part-time member of staff.

[4] The word is a coded and loaded term that refers to art and design schools of the Global North with associations to the upper echelons of the fashion industry and its capitals.

[5] Evans, Fashion at The Edge, 13.

[6] Valerie Steele, “The F Word,” *Lingua Franca* 1, no. 4 (April 1991): 17–20.

[7] For an introduction to the rise of practice-based research in fashion, see Elke Gaugele and Monica Titton “The Politics of Fashion Knowledge between Practice and Theory,” in Fashion Knowledge: Theories, Methods, Practice and Politics, ed. Elke Gaugele and Monica Titton (Intellect Ltd., 2024), 1–11.

[8] Yves Citton, “Ce que la recherche-création fait aux thèses universitaires,” Issue, 15 octobre 2024, https://www.hesge.ch/head/issue/publications/ce-la-recherche-creation-fait-aux-theses-universitaires-yves-citton

[9] The term, borrowed by Mika Hannula, Juha Suoranta and Tere Vadén, from Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s work on scientific knowledge and indigenous communities, describes an asymmetrical relationship, or the idea that “the values and phenomena self-evident in communities of the artists may not be self-evident in communities of scientists.” Mika Hannula, Juha Suoranta, and Tere Vadén, Artistic Research Methodology: Narrative, Power and the Public (Peter Lang, 2014). On fashion studies’ critical turn, see for example Natalya Lusty, “Fashion Futures and Critical Fashion Studies,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 35, no. 6 (2021): 813-823.

[10] Mika Hannula, Juha Suoranta, and Tere Vadén, Artistic Research Methodology: Narrative, Power and the Public, 67.

[11] José Teunissen, “The Transformative Power of Practice-Based Fashion Research,” in Fashion Knowledge: Theories, Methods, Practice and Politics, ed. Elke Gaugele and Monica Titton (Intellect Ltd., 2024), 25.

[12] Caroline Evans, interview by Susanna Strömquist, “Challenging the Orthodoxy of Fashion from Within,” Critical Fashion Project, 2020, .

[13] Evans, Fashion at The Edge, 4.

[14] As Evans notes, designers who were “economically marginal” yet “symbolically central” to the fashion industry in the late ’90s.

[15] Evans, Fashion at The Edge, 11.

[16] Evans, Fashion at The Edge, 13.

[17] Evans, Fashion at The Edge, 12.

[18] Caroline Evans, “Yesterday’s Emblems and Tomorrow’s Commodities: The Return of the Repressed in Fashion Imagery Today,” in Fashion Cultures Revisited, 2nd ed., ed. Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (Routledge, 2013). The article was originally published in 2000, and appears to lay the groundwork for Fashion at The Edge.

[19] Evans’ institutional home is also an art and design school.

[20] Monica Titton has raised the issue of format in practice-based research, noting that “the format of the journal, book, or magazine (...) seems ideally suited for the representation of practice-based research.” See Monica Titton, “Theory as Practice,” in Fashion Knowledge: Theories, Methods, Practice and Politics, ed. Elke Gaugele and Monica Titton (Intellect Ltd., 2024), 27–35.

[21] If our home institution is located on the margins of fashion’s capital (Geneva!), Paris and its luxury brands remain the school’s gold standard.

[22] Evans, Fashion at The Edge, 12.

[23] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke University Press, 2003), 123–151.

[24] This meant conceiving of ourselves first and foremost as a collective, one that happens to design.

[25] The members are artist and designer Camille Farrah Buhler, designer Peter Wiesmann, and writer and couturière Sabrina Clavo. Together, we form the collective Horizons Glaise.

[26] Among them, fashion designer and playwright Marvin M’Toumo, cultural worker and feminist activist Elise Magnenat, and design researcher Jonas Berthod.

[27] We are still in the processing of finalizing these, but they consist of a bag and a poster.

[28] Evans, interview by Strömquist, “Challenging the Orthodoxy of Fashion from Within.”

^{Cydni Meredith Robertson, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at Indiana University Bloomington in Bloomington, Indiana, in the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture, and Design, Fashion Merchandising program. Her research interests include a) women’s experiences in the global apparel supply chain and b) the preservation of culture, dress, and identity practices.}

Fashion Griotte and Sankofa Approach to Costume Design

Fashion griotte Ruth E. Carter can simultaneously call forth both the past and the future, with timeless synergy, through the art of costume design. Traditional griottes/griots in West African, Senegalese, Wolof tradition express and preserve oral histories through song, poetry, and storytelling, as purposefully passed down from their ancestors. [1, 2] Carter has committed herself to authentically telling African diasporic narratives by employing creative design in clothing and accessories as her preferred medium of legacy communication. While Carter is renowned as a two-time Academy Award winner for her work in the Black Panther film franchise, Black Panther (2018) and Wakanda Forever (2022), her costuming debut in the Spike Lee joint School Daze (1988) began over 37 years of her fashioning Africentric films. From her work in motion pictures such as Malcolm X (1992), Amistad (1997), B.A.P.S. (1997), Selma (2015), Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013), and Sinners (2025), it is evident that Carter leans on and learns from the aesthetics of the past to meaningfully connect with fashion and film consumers in the present.

In this review of Carter’s costume-in-film anthology, we explore her work through a Sankofa lens that borrows from the Akan, Ghanaian term meaning it is not taboo to go back and fetch that which is at risk of being left behind, or it is not forbidden to go into history to validate and reclaim the past, or to look to the past to inform the future. [3, 4, 5]

The Adinkra symbol of the Sankofa bird illustrates the figure as flying forward yet looking backward, symbolizing the connection of the past and the present of the African diaspora with hopes for a brighter future. [6] Much like the Sankofa bird, Carter has contributed towards her hopes of a brighter, and Blacker, future in both fashion and film for nearly four decades. In honor of the 15th anniversary of the MA Fashion Studies program at Parsons School of Design, this reflection celebrates the past 15 years of Carter’s work with abiding gratitude and ancestral reverence.

Ruth E. Carter in Academic Literature

Recent fashion scholarship has examined Carter and her work by acknowledging the visual and narrative tools used to convey historical and political dress. In the film Malcolm X, Carter’s characters donned patterned, colorful, and intentionally oversized wool and silk Zoot suits which were deemed unpatriotic and culturally offensive in their time. These Zoot suits of the 1940s were also perceived negatively due to the excessive use of fabric required to construct the garments during wartime rationing and to general racialized aggression towards Mexican, Filipino, Italian, and Black American freedom of expression. [7, 8] Researchers have analyzed the complex significance of Black skin and heroic costuming from a postcolonial view as displayed in the Black Panther films. [9] Scholars have also admired the impact of historically accurate cultural dress on cinematic queens such as Wakanda’s Queen Ramonda and her array of Isicholo (see: Isicolo) South African Zulu married woman’s crowns, the majority of which were 3D-printed specifically for the film. [10] Carter’s work has also been cited in books that cater to both the academic and public audiences, including her own visual autobiography, museum exhibition reviews, doctoral dissertations, and an abundance of news articles. [11-15] The presence of Carter’s work within these vast yet connected outlets signifies the present-day relevance of her historic and futuristic art across timelines, disciplines, and audiences. To expand upon the historicism woven into Carter’s work, the following section illustrates how she intentionally places markers of time and space in the African diaspora into her costuming practices.

^{Top: Queen Mother Costume for the film Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, designed by Ruth E. Carter. Photo by Cydni Meredith Robertson, Indianapolis Children’s Museum.

Ruth E. Carter - Afrofuturism in Costume Design Exhibit. June 2025.} Bottom: Costuming from the film Malcolm X, designed by Ruth E. Carter.
Photo by Cydni Meredith Robertson, Indianapolis Children’s Museum.
Ruth E. Carter - Afrofuturism in Costume Design Exhibit. June 2025.

Afrohistoricism - Fashion in Film that Looks Backward

Within academic literature and mainstream media, the terms Afrocentrism and Africentrism have been widely adopted. [16, 17] However, the rarely applied portmanteau Afrohistoricism now has the opportunity to be defined through the perspective of visual art and preservation of African diasporic cultural dress and identity. [18] The thread consistently woven within Carter’s work is Afrohistoricism—positive, holistic, and forward-thinking visual messaging about Black life and culture. Since 2010, Carter has designed notable nostalgic films such as Sparkle (2012), set in the 1960s Motown Detroit era, Marshall (2017), set in progressive 1940s Connecticut, and Sinners (2025), set in post-World War I 1930s Mississippi.

In The Butler, Carter personifies disco culture and the Black-is-Beautiful movement of the 1970s, with characters Cecil (Forest Whittaker) and Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) sporting matching textured black-and-white jumpsuits, inspired by a 1973 Eleganza mail-order catalog in a Frederick’s of Hollywood advertisement. [19] This costuming holds the energy of cultural revolution and self-revelation, as expressed through fashion, music, dance, and loving partnership. [20]

Top: Ruth E. Carter’s webpage, Collection, The Butler
Bottom: Cydni Meredith Robertson, Indianapolis Children’s Museum. Ruth E. Carter - Afrofuturism in Costume Design Exhibit. June 2025.

Yet, Carter does not limit herself to clothe-it-all-joy. In the film Selma (2015), Carter designed five dresses made of silk, cotton, taffeta, organza, and silk velvet to dress the characters representing the four little girls who passed (Carol Denise McNair, Cynthia Dionne Wesley, Addie Mae Collins, and Carole Rosamond Robertson) and one survivor (Sarah Collins Rudolph) in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing on September 15, 1963. The tragic event ignited the poem “Birmingham Sunday” (September 15, 1963) by Langston Hughes, which quotes, “Four little girls, who went to Sunday School that day, and never came back home at all - but left instead, their blood upon the wall, with spattered flesh, and bloodied Sunday dresses…”. [21] The range in Carter’s art extends beyond costume design. Her work crosses realms that connect with the human experience, bringing past pain and future hope to life through dress. These future hopes are illustrated in the following section as Carter’s influence on Afrofuturism and the Black Fantastic shines in her more recent films.

Author’s Note: As I was taking in the heaviness and beauty of the five dresses in this image at the Indianapolis Children’s Museum, I heard the voice of a little girl walk by and say, “Ooh, pretty dresses!”. Those simple, yet powerful, words almost brought me to tears. While the little girl knew nothing of the significance behind these Sunday-best dresses, her innocence humanized the experience of Denise, Cynthia, Addie Mae, Carole, and Sarah. May all little girls be able to grow old and reflect on the ‘pretty dresses’ they once wore.

^{Top: Five little girls’ dresses for the film Selma, designed by Ruth E. Carter.

Photo by Cydni Meredith Robertson, Indianapolis Children’s Museum.

Ruth E. Carter - Afrofuturism in Costume Design Exhibit. June 2025.}Bottom: Source - Medium, “Four Little Girls, 58 Years Later,” article by: Chloe Smith. Retrieved June 2025.

“The Adinkra symbol of the Sankofa bird illustrates the figure as flying forward yet looking backward, symbolizing the connection of the past and the present of the African diaspora with hopes for a brighter future.”

Afrofuturism and The Black Fantastic - Fashion in Film that Flies Forward

When the first Black Panther film was released into theaters, fans and scholars alike erupted with excitement and critique, guided by an Afrofuturistic framework. [22, 23] Authors such as Octavia Butler, lovingly positioned as “The Mother of Afrofuturism" in literature, have researched and applied Afrofuturistic themes in their renowned work for decades. [24, 25] An extension of Afrofuturism is the concept of the Black Fantastic which is described as “works of speculative fiction that draw from history and myth to conjure new visions of African diasporic culture and identity,” and has already become popular in fashion scholarship. [26, 27] One example of Afrofuturistic dress that maintained historical accuracy and cultural relevance was the red Himba style wig. This wig utilizes shea butter and red clay to form locs that are protected from debris and harsh sun, sealed at the ends with puffs made from wool or other animal fur. This character, an Elder woman in Wakanda, wears a full red skirt and floor-length shawl trimmed in the fictional alphabet of Wakanda, inspired by Nsibidi lettering in southeastern Nigeria and designed by Hannah Beachler, who introduces the futuristic element into these pieces, allowing for a modern perspective on a historical practice. At the 2025 Costume Society of America Conference, Carter stated in her virtual keynote address that “It wasn’t enough to just research the tribes and show them in their indigenous forms, we also needed to show how they honored their ancestry, but also wanted to use modern technology through their dress.” [28]

^{Himba Tribal Edler Costume for the film Black Panther, designed by Ruth E. Carter,

photo by Cydni Meredith Robertson, Indianapolis Children’s Museum.

Ruth E. Carter - Afrofuturism in Costume Design Exhibit. June 2025.}

Another dynamic example of Afrofuturism as expressed through dress in Black Panther were the Dora Milage warrior women costumes. The color red and detailing within their costumes were inspired by the Masai tribe in Kenya, while the warrior elements of their costumes were inspired by the Agojie, an all-women military regiment in the Dahomey Kingdom, dating back to the 17th century. Carter (2025) stated, “We wanted their armor to feel like jewelry. We wanted there to be a new way of training the eye to look at beauty under different standards.” [29] The stories told through these pieces are memorable, not just because they are aesthetically pleasing with attractive technologies and bold hues, but because they are memories made tangible in and of themselves.

Afronowism - Present-Day Gratitude and Impact of Carter’s Fashion in Film

A newly welcomed term, Afronowism, coined by Stephanie Dinkins, refers to “the unencumbered black mind [as] a wellspring of possibility.” [30] Much like the griottes of the past, Dinkins credits her grandmother as the primary source of inspiration behind the development of Afronowism, bringing ancestral wisdom into the modern, artfully lived experience.

Although films Carter worked on such as School Daze (1988), Do The Right Thing (1989), Crooklyn (1994), and B.A.P.S. (1997) are classics of the past, they were hyper-relevant and modern, reflecting the realness of the Afronow during the time of their production and release. This demonstrates that Carter has had her thimble on the pulse of African diasporic culture across dimensions. Most recently, in Ryan Coogler’s film Sinners (2025), Carter designed what will surely be honored as one of the most iconic displays of historic, present, and futuristic dress practices in the history of film. During the character Sammy’s (Miles Canton) song, “I Lied To You,” Carter channels her inner fashion griotte by inserting characters adorned in Zaouli-inspired dress from Cote d'Ivoire, Alvin Ailey signature red and flowy dancewear, as well as funk- and space-themed garb from the musicians of the late 1970s into the early 1980s. She incorporates 1990s women’s hip-hop–inspired streetwear and accessories, early 2000s Compton-inspired tall-tees, and more, making for a joyfully overwhelming experience, like a Black fashion history “Where’s Waldo?”.

Carter’s approach to costuming, dress, and identity aligns with Dinkins’ view of Afronowism as she asks, “how [can] we liberate our minds from the infinite loop of repression and oppositional thinking America imposes upon those of us forcibly enjoined to this nation?” [29] In the images below, there are hand-written ‘thank you notes’ to Ruth, showing appreciation for her influence and impact on the lives of their writers, emphasizing that her work maintains present admiration and continues to liberate generations past, present, and future. In the words of the characters Mister Señor Love Daddy in Do The Right Thing (Samuel Jackson) and Dap Dunlap in School Daze (Laurence Fishburne), I believe Carter has been asking the costume design industry for decades, not only to look back and fly forward but also to please, “WAKE UP!”

Left: Gamma Ray Sketch for the film School Daze, designed by Ruth E. Carter, , photo by Cydni Meredith Robertson, Indianapolis Children’s Museum. Ruth E. Carter - Afrofuturism in Costume Design Exhibit. June 2025.

Right: Tina’s Costume worn by actress Rosie Perez in the film Do The Right Thing, designed by Ruth E. Carter, photo by Cydni Meredith Robertson, Indianapolis Children’s Museum. Ruth E. Carter - Afrofuturism in Costume Design Exhibit. June 2025.

‘Thank you’ cards provided to Cydni Meredith Robertson at the Indiana Comic Convention to be shared within this publication March 2025.

Researcher’s Reflection and Bio

I had three distinct pleasures to interact with Ruth E. Carter’s work in 2025 that led to the publication of this reflection essay and gratitude. In March 2025, I was invited to speak at the Indiana Comic and Pop Culture Convention on the topic “Ruth E. Carter - Afrofuturism in Fashion and Film: From School Daze to Wakanda.” It was at this event that I was able to gather a few personalized ‘thank you’ notes for Carter that affirmed the impact of her life’s work on the lives of those who wrote them. In June 2025, I had the privilege to hear Carter’s virtual keynote to the Costume Society of America’s Symposium at Loyola Marymount University. At this event, I gathered a few inspirational quotes that added color and life to this reflection. Lastly, in June 2025, I visited the Indianapolis Children’s Museum to explore the current exhibit on display, Ruth E. Carter: Afrofuturism in Costume Design, which features more than 60 pieces and illustrations of Carter originals from films such as Do The Right Thing (1989), Dolemite is My Name (2019), and Coming 2 America (2021). The photos in this reflection were taken from this exploratory museum visit.

Notes: Ruth E. Carter

[1] Thomas A. Hale, “Griottes: Female Voices from West Africa,” Research in African Literatures 25, no. 3 (1994): 71–91.

[2] Jayne Ifekwunigwe, Re-invoking the Griotte Tradition as a Feminist Textual Strategy, 2008.

[3] James Denbow, “Heart and Soul: Glimpses of Ideology and Cosmology in the Iconography of Tombstones from the Loango Coast of Central Africa,” Journal of American Folklore 112, no. 445 (1999): 404–423.

[4] Shaneé Yvette Murrain, “The Oxford Handbook of African American Theology,” Theological Librarianship 10, no. 1 (2017): 48.

[5] D. Appiah-Adjei, Sankofa as a Universal Theory for Dramatists (2016), ResearchGate, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289534716.

[6] D. Goeller, “Fashion (Hi)stories: Poetics and Politics,” Clothing Cultures 10, no. 2 (2023): 149–161.

[7] Marta Torregrosa, Manuel Noguera, and Nélida Luque-Zequeira, “Costume Design in Film: Telling the Story and Creating Malcolm X’s Character in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992),” Fashion, Style & Popular Culture, 2023.

[8] Indianapolis Children’s Museum, Malcolm X: Shaping the Image of a Leader (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Children’s Museum, 2025).

[9] L. Henry King, “Black Skin as Costume in Black Panther,” Film, Fashion & Consumption 10, no. 1 (2021): 265–276.

[10] Muhammad Salih Odeh, “Visual Identity in Costume Design of the Cinematic Queen’s Character,” International Journal of Design and Fashion Studies 4, no. 1 (2021): 228–244.

[11] Ruth E. Carter, The Art of Ruth E. Carter: Costuming Black History and the Afrofuture, from Do the Right Thing to Black Panther (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2023).

[12] S. G. Rubin, The Women Who Built Hollywood: 12 Trailblazers in Front of and Behind the Camera (New York: Astra Publishing House, 2023).

[13] B. Ishola, “Afrofuturism at the Museum of Pop Culture,” World Literature Today 97, no. 1 (2023): 8–10.

[14] J. Thompson, A Counterhistory of the Ratchet: Black Aesthetics in the New Millennium (n.p., 2024).

[15] CBS News, “Ruth E. Carter Makes History as First Black Woman to Win Two Academy Awards for Costume Design,” CBS News, March 13, 2023, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oscars-2023-ruth-e-carter-black-woman-best-costume-design-black-panther-wakanda-forever/.

[16] Tessa Smith-Whicker and Jenna Brown, “Decolonizing Stylistic Awareness in Higher Education Contemporary Commercial Music Training: Exploring Performer–Practitioner Experiences through an Africentric Approach,” Journal of Popular Music Education 8, no. 2 (2024): 157–178.

[17] Damariyé L. Smith, Interrogating Identity in the Film Dear White People: An Examination of Afrocentrism and Eurocentrism (PhD diss., California State University, Sacramento, 2017).

[18] Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins and Joanne B. Eicher, “Dress and Identity,” Clothing and Textiles Research Journal 10, no. 4 (1992): 1–8.

[19] Sandra Jackson and Angelique Macklin, “Nice & Rough: Unapologetically Black, Beautiful, and Bold,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 43 (2015): 122–124.

[20] Clenora Hudson-Weems, Africana Womanism: Reclaiming Ourselves (Troy, MI: Bedford Publishers, 1993).

[21] Langston Hughes, Birmingham Sunday, September 15, 1963.

[22] Rumbidzai Chikafa-Chipiro, “The Future of the Past: Imagi(ni)ng Black Womanhood, Africana Womanism and Afrofuturism in Black Panther,” Image & Text 33 (2019): 1–20.

[23] “How Black Panther Marks a Major Milestone in Afrofuturism,” Time, April 12, 2018, https://time.com/5246675/black-panther-afrofuturism/.

[24] Octavia E. Butler, Kindred (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979).

[25] Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993).

[26] Ekow Eshun, In the Black Fantastic (London: Thames & Hudson, 2022).

[27] Janis Jefferies, “Razzle, Dazzle and the Black Fantastic,” TEXTILE 22, no. 1 (2024): 166–173.

[28] Ruth E. Carter, keynote address, Costume Society of America Conference, Loyola Marymount University (virtual), 2025.

[29] Stephanie Dinkins, “Afro-now-ism: The Unencumbered Black Mind Is a Wellspring of Possibility,” Berggruen Institute, November 13, 2020, https://www.noemamag.com/afro-now-ism/.

Additional Resources

Amistad. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Universal City, CA: DreamWorks Pictures, 1997. Film.

B.A.P.S. Directed by Robert Townsend. Burbank, CA: New Line Cinema, 1997. Film.

Black Panther. Directed by Ryan Coogler. Burbank, CA: Marvel Studios, 2018. Film.

Lee Daniels’ The Butler. Directed by Lee Daniels. Los Angeles: The Weinstein Company, 2013. Film.

Malcolm X. Directed by Spike Lee. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros., 1992. Film.

Marshall. Directed by Reginald Hudlin. Los Angeles: Open Road Films, 2017. Film.

School Daze. Directed by Spike Lee. New York: Columbia Pictures, 1988. Film.

Selma. Directed by Ava DuVernay. Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures, 2015. Film.

Sinners. Directed by Ryan Coogler. United States: Proximity Media; distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, 2025. Film.

Sparkle. Directed by Salim Akil. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures, 2012. Film.

Wakanda Forever. Directed by Ryan Coogler. Burbank, CA: Marvel Studios, 2022. Film.

Hello FSJ readers!

Discovering Fashion Studies

Methodology Matters

From the Periphery

The Wall

“I find myself going back to Evans’ work for ways of thinking about fashion design that attend to fashion as a design practice with its own methods, formats, constraints, and contexts.”

A “New” Form of Cultural Analysis

“[W]e decided to look critically at our own context (the western fashion and luxury industry), and its golden age (the late 1990s—Evans’ purview), through the viewpoint of some of its ‘iconic’ objects.“

How To?

Fashion Griotte and Sankofa Approach to Costume Design

Ruth E. Carter in Academic Literature

Afrohistoricism - Fashion in Film that Looks Backward

“The Adinkra symbol of the Sankofa bird illustrates the figure as flying forward yet looking backward, symbolizing the connection of the past and the present of the African diaspora with hopes for a brighter future.”

Afrofuturism and The Black Fantastic - Fashion in Film that Flies Forward

Afronowism - Present-Day Gratitude and Impact of Carter’s Fashion in Film

Researcher’s Reflection and Bio

Issue 15 ︎︎︎

Fashion & Southeast Asia

Issue 14 ︎︎︎

Barbie

Issue 13 ︎︎︎ Fashion & Politics

Issue 12 ︎︎︎Border Garments: Fashion, Feminisms, & Disobedience

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Issue 9 ︎︎︎ Fall 2021

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Issue 6 ︎︎︎ Fall 2020

Issue 5 ︎︎︎ The Industry

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