Will This Finally Be a More Diverse Year for Costume Design?
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Since the Academy Award for costume design was first presented in 1949, only 20 nominations have been awarded to BIPOC honorees — with just five wins: Sanzo Wada for Gate of Hell (1953), Bhanu Athaiya for Gandhi (1982), Emi Wada for Ran (1985), Eiko Ishioka for Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and Ruth E. Carter, who made history as the first Black person to take home the trophy, for Black Panther (2018). Progress has been slow — if not glacial — over the past seven decades. Could this year finally be different?
“There are so many designers of color that are contenders,” says Carter. She broke ground 25 years before her monumental win as the first Black nominee for Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, followed by Steven Spielberg’s Amistad.
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This season, buzz surrounds Tony- and Emmy-winning Paul Tazewell for 20th Century Studios’ West Side Story, Clint Ramos for MGM/United Artists’ Respect, Antoinette Messam for Netflix’s The Harder They Fall, Marci Rodgers for Netflix’s Passing and Sharen Davis for Warner Bros.’ King Richard. Carter herself is in the running for creating another stunning fictional kingdom in Amazon’s Coming 2 America. “Someone needs to put this panel together!” she says. “Put the pictures up just to show, because this is not something that happens every year.”
Ever since the #OscarsSoWhite callout of 2015, the Academy has been making efforts to diversify its traditionally older, white- and male-dominated membership. Of 2021’s 395 inductees, 53 percent hail from 49 countries outside of the U.S. and 39 percent from underrepresented ethnic/racial communities. The new class includes one of the youngest Academy members, costume designer Charlese Antoinette Jones, who made waves in 2021 with her designs for the social justice and civil rights movement in Judas and the Black Messiah.
Jones is navigating her first voting cycle, as the pandemic throws another curveball into a season hopeful for a full return to festivities. With screening-room attendance sparse and meet-and-greets on hold, members are relying on DVDs, screening links and participation in online message boards for recommendations — which can prove to be an obstacle for BIPOC-themed movies in particular.
Jones can see how voters, in preparing to tackle 80-plus films, revert to recognizable names and repeat favorites and remain in their comfort zones. “Just because there is diversity doesn’t mean people are actually going to watch the films — and then the films actually get voted on,” she says. “The issue has always been getting Academy members of all these different [branches] to actually watch the films told through a BIPOC lens.” Davis, who also broke barriers as the second Black designer to receive a nod, for Ray, followed by Dreamgirls, recalls her three years as a governor representing the costume design branch starting in 2016. “It was always a struggle for some people,” she says. “It wasn’t so much diversity. They just didn’t know how to break through that bubble. I call it ‘the 1950s bubble.’ ”
Branch voters are tasked with a tremendous responsibility: to find the “excellence in” the work of the year’s contenders and narrow the field down to five nominees. But through what standards, and through what lenses, is the superlative determined? Historically, voters have recognized international films in select cases, like influential Japanese cinema. But reconciling multicultural stories within Hollywood films at large requires letting down walls and opening up perspectives from what we’ve been conditioned to as a society.
“We have to redefine what ‘American’ is,” says Philippines-born Ramos, who made history as the first BIPOC costume designer to win a Tony for best costume design of a play, for the Lupita Nyong’o-starring Eclipsed. He took on Respect as “telling an American story”: Aretha Franklin overcoming the odds to become the Queen of Soul while playing an integral role in the civil rights movement. “It did not get any more American than this woman’s life,” he says.
The Academy has long favored sweeping period costume design, but it’s time to expand the definition of “period” beyond corsets and ball gowns. Because nominated films set in decades or centuries past tended to center on Western European stories, the cast, crew and costumes reflected those sensibilities, which came to define what “costume drama” even meant. “It goes back to the way we educate designers,” says Ramos, remembering his theater school experience. ” ‘Period’ was always about Shakespeare and Chekhov. It’s always the white standards, and then the projects of color are just siloed into a ‘color.’ To me, it goes back to how we’re educating folks.”
Davis also hopes for voters’ viewing habits to expand through the success and reception of a more diverse range of work, like Carter’s in Black Panther. “The job is to make sure they do start getting a reference point and understanding the subject matter and why it’s important,” she says.
Elected as a governor in 2021, Carter sees progress happening through regular “conversations,” influenced by new membership blood and resources at the Academy Museum, which finally opened in September. “It’s so exciting to me to be able to hear a discussion between Spike Lee and Denzel Washington with Ava DuVernay in the audience,” says Carter. “That hasn’t been available to us before now. So forget the old Academy — people who are 100 years old. There’s a new guard, and it’s going to continue to blossom.” To help progress along, costume design insiders have shared what needs to happen:
IMPROVE AWARDS VISIBILITY
To connect with voters and the greater audience, giving costume designers and fellow below-the-line creatives a platform during the awards season circuit is paramount, especially for BIPOC creators. “It is also an opportunity for visibility. For us, it holds extra weight,” says Ramos, who also hopes for messaging not just focused on the diversity aspect. “That particular rubric can be expanded,” he says. “I would like to know about their trajectory in the industry. It’s not only about the work, but about the artists as well.”
Support and marketing dollars from the studios play an important role in creating visibility. Historically, BIPOC-centered projects tend to be pushed to the side in favor of big box office (and less inclusive) fare. Plus, “for your consideration” efforts often focus on the actors, directors and producers while neglecting below-the-line creatives.
Effective promotion also can advance opportunities for future BIPOC projects and designers, as Davis tips her hat to her longtime friend. “Ruth Carter’s campaign for Black Panther really opened the door for people,” says Davis. “She really campaigned hard. No one should have to ever campaign that hard.” Carter reminisces about flying around the world for elaborate daylong press junkets to share her in-depth research and process in celebrating the people of Africa, free of colonization, through her spectacular Wakanda costumes. “I felt like I was an actor,” she says with a laugh.
Beyond helping secure a nomination leading to her landmark win, Carter’s publicity rounds also made a powerful societal impact, increasing the conversation around the philosophy of Afrofuturism and the exploration of the African American experience. “We thought to project this more positive image of our world of Afrofuture in Black Panther, and we were successful with it,” says Carter. “So it gave me a platform to talk about it and what it meant to me in my own life and how it’s viewed in my community. That was the most powerful thing that the nomination and the win did for my career.”
CLEAR BARRIERS IN THE CAREER PIPELINE
But before embarking on the career track to an awards season film, BIPOC designers must break through systemic industry barriers — low starting pay, nepotism and old-fashioned Hollywood gatekeeping — just to get a foot in the door. “People of color getting the opportunity to do movies that get Oscar buzz is sort of like the chicken and the egg,” says Costume Designers Guild president Salvador Perez. “What’s going to have to come first?”
Diversifying the talent pool with recruitment and training comes to mind. A recent poll of International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) Local 892 members, aka the Costume Designers Guild (with an 87 percent response rate) found “about 33 percent” of the membership identifies as BIPOC, according to Perez.
CONTINUE WITH THE AMPAS CHANGES
Pushed by the nationwide racial reckoning in the summer of 2020, Hollywood and the studios have been making inclusion efforts, spurred by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). Starting with the 2024 Oscars season, best picture contenders must meet diversity and inclusion requirements, including at least two leadership positions or department heads from an “underrepresented group.” “The temperature in the industry right now is they’re open to giving that person an opportunity to try,” says Perez. “For the longest time, maybe those doors weren’t open for people of color.”
Inclusion efforts from studios also help veteran designers to pay it forward. “I get offered like three jobs a week. It’s crazy, but I’m glad I do because I have a list of people that I can recommend,” says Davis, who co-founded the Mildred E. Blount Scholarship Fund alongside Carter, Francine Jamison-Tanchuck and Michelle Cole to support young Black costume designers. Ramos is active in Design Action mentorship programs, and Jones, who founded the Black Designer Database in 2021, regularly mentors designers to join the union and start their careers. Including different voices in storytelling costume design — and all facets of film production — will help drive change come Oscar night, and advance beyond the historic firsts.
“I’ve been there for 25 years, and this is the first time I’ve had this many conversations about inclusion at the Academy,” says Carter. “I’m excited we really want this and we look at each other and we see Asian, we see Latino — we see it all — and that’s what we want our voice to sound like. It’s happening. It’s happening.”
This story first appeared in a January stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
