Ryan Coogler’s “ Sinners ” follows twin brothers Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan) as they return to the Mississippi Delta to open a juke joint, only for Irish vampires to interrupt their plans. While the film has plenty of the genre details of a horror film, costume designer Ruth E. Carter saw the horror “as a metaphor.”

In approaching her designs, the Os-car-winner focused on the Mississippi Delta and how “people turn their pain into joy. That rang so clear for me to depict.” Migration patterns were also taken into consideration in her work. “I started thinking about the plantation system and how blues [musicians] were rotated around to different plantations in the South.” Reds and blues were key to the film’s palette.

Here, Carter shares her approach to some of the film’s main c

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