For more than 30 years, Ruth E. Carter has dressed the characters in seminal films about the African-American experience, from "Amistad" and "Selma" to "Love & Basketball" and much of Spike Lee's oeuvre.
But her work for 2018's "Black Panther," which has earned her a third Oscar nomination for Best Costume Design (once again, she could become the first Black woman to take home the award), presented her with a unique opportunity to look beyond America, and into the future.
With director Ryan Coogler and production designer Hannah Beachler, she crafted a new vision of Africa through Wakanda, a fictional country that leaves the West in the dust in terms of technological and social advancement.


Her final vision was an unabashedly slick hybrid of traditional garments and motifs mined from across the continent. (She had a massive team of 100 buyers to source pieces for inspiration.) She describes the result as a "quick study of the tribes, the cultures and the traditions of beauty" that different communities used to present themselves.
The Dora Milaje, fierce female warriors led by Danai Gurira's Okoye, wear handcrafted metal neck rings inspired by those worn by the Southern African Ndebele tribe, and tabards covered in the type of intricate beading that proliferates across the continent. Angela Bassett, as Queen Ramonda, wears 3D-printed versions of a Zulu married woman's hat as her crown. When undercover in a South Korean casino as the spy Nakia, Lupita Nyong'o wears a striking dress hand-painted with Wakandan text -- a nod to kente cloth native to Ghana.

We don hear. Let INEC do shap shap and declare ATIKU the winner of the election...my chill don expire.

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