Costume design in film: Telling the story and creating Malcolm X’s character in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992)

Abstract

Costume designers collaborate with film directors to bring the characters in the script to life. Film costumes are a visual tool of a narrative nature with which costume designers meet the diegetic needs of each story. Through clothing, they make internal aspects of the characters visible, such as their transformations, their nature and styles, their passions, aspirations and suffering, as well as aspects of the spatial, temporal and social context in which the stories take place. This study explores costume design by Ruth E. Carter as a dramatic tool in the biopic Malcolm X (1992), directed by Spike Lee. To that end, the function of film costumes is assessed both as a visual and narrative tool that exceeds the aesthetic dimension and is essential to give meaning to any film production.