On Sunday night, Costume Designer Ruth E. Carter made history as the first black woman to win two Oscars. The legendary costume designer took home her second Academy Award for Best Costume Design, this time for her work in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” . She previously won in 2018, again for the costumes in “Black Panther”.
“Thank you to the Academy for recognizing the superhero that is the Black woman,” Carter said during her acceptance speech. “She endures, she loves, she overcomes. She is every woman in this film. She in my mother.”
As Fashionista reports, the win represented many firsts, the most notable being Carter becoming the first Black woman to win multiple Academy Awards. In 2021, Insider found that 89% of nominations in the past decade went to white people. Most awards go to white men.
In an interview with Fashionista about “Wakanda Forever” last year, Carter said of the Ryan Coogler-directed film: “I felt like it was a great story of women and how we can be non-traditional. We can be aesthetically fashionable. We can be off-center sometimes, but also very centered. We can be vulnerable with our arm and our skin exposed, and complicated but beautiful.”
In her acceptance speech on Sunday, Carter told the audience, “Together, we are reshaping how culture is represented.”
It’s also significant that this milestone happened in the costume design category, as, within the entertainment industry, these professionals are often paid less than their directing and acting peers. The Costume Designers Guild formed a Diversity Committee in 2020 to address this and make inclusion efforts when only 33% of its membership at the time identified as BIPOC.
In the press room backstage at the Oscars, Carter spoke about her journey to this point. “I pulled myself up from my boot straps. I started a single parent household. I wanted to be a costume designer. I studied. I scraped. I dealt with adversity in the industry,” she said. “This win opens the door for other young costume designers that may not believe that this industry is for them.”
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