Scavenging Through Our Closets (ft. Academy Award Winner Ruth E. Carter)

Let's talk about all things costumes!

Back in 2018, I had the pleasure of meeting now Academy Award Winner Ruth E. Carter at a conference. She shared some advice on how costumes can bring a character or a specific setting to life and how they could be used to progress a story. It was wonderful to hear her speak about the hours of labor-intensive research that she did to ensure that the costumes for the blockbuster film “Black Panther” were original and authentic yet “distinctively true to African culture”. As we approached costuming I had the same enthusiasm for costume design, ready to dive deep into the intricacies of creating an award-winning costume that can really bring an actor’s performance to life. Then I had to throw all of that out of the window and look at people’s closets so see what they could pull together to wear for the first day of filming. I had to remember that sometimes you can’t customize every minute detail and that doesn’t mean that it won’t work out in your favor.

We stared the costuming process around the same time we began the character development process. As you may remember, we made a character deck where we created a mood-board-style depiction of the characters and their costumes. For us, the costumes were key to make sure the audience could make a clear distinction between the characters and their marked personalities. This made the process of costuming infinitely easier and kept a level of intricacy higher than just asking our actors to show up with whatever. But like I mentioned, we didn’t have the time or resources to craft outfits from raw material or to design them to will, but we could match clothing our actors and ourselves already owned and use them to our advantage. We asked the cast to review their character slides and to piece together the closest thing they could to what we created with the clothes in their closet. Jake and I reviewed their photos and asked them to make changes, sometimes matching some pieces with clothing items we owned.

Dani (Isabella) had exactly what she needed for the role, her costume couldn’t be more perfect if Jake and I had personally gone shopping for it. She had exactly what we depicted in the mood board plus her shirt was dark purple, Stok High’s color. We also got lucky with Jakoob (Bryce) and Taylor’s (Courtney) costume; they had exactly what we were looking for. After matching the right colors and shoe combinations, their costumes were ready to go pretty quickly.


Jakoob is wearing an outfit that alludes to his character's raw material inspiration, Payton Hobart from Netflix’s “The Politician”. Taylor is wearing a modernized version of outfits traditionally used by characters like Sharpay Evans (from High School Musical) and Regina George (Mean Girls); her outfit was also inspired by that of real people that Jake and I attend school with.

Jake’s (Garrett) costume was also really easy to piece together. In Garrett’s debut on screen, he was wearing a yellow turtle neck and light teal blue pants. We figured that he would likely not be wearing the same outfit he did for a music video to school, so we decided to change it up a bit while keeping it true to the character. In this version of Garrett, he has grown out a bit of a beard (mostly because Jake had a show going on at the same time as we were shooting) and he is wearing a yellow hoodie with teal light blue shorts; keeping that iconic image.

Zack’s (Z) character was also easy to costume for since Jake had previously arranged for the costume a long time ago (even before Zack agreed to play Z and when it was originally Jack). Z’s costume is inspired by real people who have similar characteristics as him that Jake and I go to school with. His outfit is very characteristic of a particular group which is perfectly conveyed by his costume.

Andrews's costume was also easy, it was just a hoodie, some shorts we borrowed from Jake and light blue shoes which were also Jake’s. Very much like his description said.

Christian’s (Charlie) costume was also very convenient since he wears it almost every single day. You see, we didn’t need to search too far or wide for our Charlie; Christian is literally the character. No, we didn’t write it with him in mind, but the more you visualize the character the lines between fiction and Christian become unclear.

Kailey’s (Miranda) costume was mostly handled by Jake. We had a general idea of what we wanted Miles (the original character when he was to be played by a guy) to dress like, and I think we did a great job with Kailey’s costume choice. This was a quick decision because Kailey didn’t know she was playing Miranda until the night before so we definitely rushed into her costume, but for what it's worth I think it's a great outfit for the character.

And last but definitely not least, Ameerah (Riley). Ameerah’s costume was the trickiest one of all because we definitely did not end up with what we had originally envisioned for the character; mostly because apparently no on tin this planet owns an orange item of clothing. We searched for days for an orange hoodie, then we gave up and searched for an orange shirt, and finally, we conformed with a shirt that had orange in it. After we were done with picking her costume and filming her scene, I went out and bought an orange shirt, just because I felt so dumbfounded at the fact I didn’t already own something orange. Anyways, Ameerah may have the tiniest costume even for an audience member to realize what her character was, but thanks to her great acting I’m sure that won’t be a problem.

Well, that concludes my costuming post! I guess a voice in the sky doesn’t need a costume so I’m not getting fitted for one! After the incident we have another filming ahead of us, I’m excited about it! In the words of Ruth E. Carter, “This whole process is very rewarding and I wouldn’t trade it for anything”.