How the Costumes of Queen & Slim Celebrate Blackness

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Throughout her journey from editorial (including working at CR) to costume design, fashion has always been at the heart of Shiona Turini’s career. “Because I wasn’t trained in the world of costume, I feel like I can bring skills and traits that I’ve learned from all of these different areas to these projects,” Turini tells CR. While she has been a consultant for HBO’s Insecure and Beyoncé’s “Formation” music video, Queen & Slim, which releases tomorrow, marks her silver screen costuming debut. The film, which stars Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith as fugitives on the run, tells the story of two people whose Tinder date turns into a racially charged manhunt after an all-too-possible fatal altercation with the police. Wrapped up in themes of black love, resistance, and resilience–and coming at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement continues to reverberate in the American conscience–the movie’s narrative is driven by African Americans making an impact in Hollywood, including writer Lena Waithe, director Melina Matsoukas, Kaluuya and Turner-Smith’s leads, and Turini’s clever costume design.

Because of the limitations of Queen and Slim’s situation, each costume choice has to communicate a lot about the characters. For Queen, a tiger print minidress alludes to her own sense of empowerment as she ventures deeper into their wild ride. And for Slim, a Sean John-inspired tracksuit reflects his own need for comfort, namely from the people and places he surrounds himself with. Bold as they are on the surface, the impact of these costumes become even more complex as the story unfolds. To guide her vision, Turini recalled something that she learned from her time at CR. “I’ll never forget that Carine said one day, ‘Clothing is supposed to make us dream,’” Turini says. “So I’ve always tried to work in the costume designing space creating things that people aren’t going to forget.”

Here, Turini explains how the clothing of Queen & Slim contributes to the visual storytelling of the characters and celebrates the black community.

Can you tell me about the costume choice for the first time the audience sees Queen and Slim?
“In the beginning, it almost felt like the clothing had its own narrative. Melina wanted it start very cold and conservative. There was a polar vortex when we were shooting so it was pretty authentic in that way. I had seen this photo of Diahann Carroll on the couch and she had all-white on—it’s ended up on so many of my reference boards throughout my career. She looks so strong, so confident, like she has her finger up as if she’s mid-reading someone their rights. That image has stuck with me, so the second I read the script that fully took over every aesthetic direction I could have gone. Melina never wanted Jodie to be in all-white but, I kept coming back to it. She would say, ‘I said NOT white!’ And I would keep revisiting it, because there was so much to tell in that one scene in the diner. They had to show that this was not an equal match–Queen felt out of his league. There was something so underrated but elevated about that white Max Mara turtleneck, the pants, and the white boots. For that, I put the brown suede trench coat over it, and it just came together. We tried other color palettes, we tried other combinations, but it was always that image of the pure, stark white, that image of Diahann Carroll, and what that represented to me.

With Daniel, he wanted to dive into the mind of this character, of Slim. Our first meeting was supposed to be a fitting, and he didn’t try any clothes on because we spent so much time talking about who Slim was. What’s his version of ‘dress-up?’ He is going on a date. His license plate says ‘Trust God’–is he wearing what he would wear to church? What’s he wearing when he goes to dinner with his mom? That’s what we settled on–a very workwear-inspired, practical look for this dude who is meeting a girl that he met on Tinder. He is putting in effort, but what’s his effort? It is in no way, shape, or form, what Queen’s effort was. So we landed on that navy sweater and the Carhartt-style pant and jacket and a Timberland boot, because they felt super authentic to the character that Daniel wanted to embody. I know it just seems like a sweater and a pant but, to get to that point with Daniel was exciting for me because he truly took on that character.”

Their initial costumes are so deliberate, but then they get into a very rushed situation where they grab clothes from Uncle Earl’s house while running from the police. How did you decide what clothes they would choose, especially since its their costumes for the rest of the film?
“By the time we get to Uncle Earl’s house, it is so energetic and colorful and lively after you come from this cold environment. That was my favorite scene to costume design. It was so fun for me. It felt like doing a music video. [Queen and Slim] were pulling for things at random, but also it was so strategic because they’re in a house full of strippers. She has to end up in something that felt very out of character for her, made her look super vulnerable to Slim, but also something that she would come into her own in and embrace her sexuality and the person she was becoming in this process. The dress she ends up in was one of the very first things that we pulled. Although we did a lot of trial and error, it always came back to that dress for Melina, just like it always came back to the white for me. One of the notes that Lena [Waithe] had given me from the beginning was that when they’re walking out of the house it felt like a blaxploitation film. So I got to research all of those images and movies—the black films from the ’70s—and get that vibe for the house, which is how Uncle Earl ended up in the original tracksuit. It was scripted that he only had a closet full of tracksuits. When Melina and I sat down to figure out what that would feel like, it was like, ‘Okay, he’s a man who lived in his prime. He’s a straight dude who’s at the height of his drug dealing. Whatever his street vibe was, what would have been the coolest clothing of that time?’ A Sean John tracksuit. We definitely wanted a velvet or a velvet-looking vibe, because we knew Daniel would end up in this velvet red tracksuit.”

You mentioned that Uncle Earl’s tracksuit was originally designed. You collaborated with Dapper Dan on that?
“It was really exciting for me to be able to design that for the Dapper Dan team. It was one of the first sketches that I made to build something from scratch. I had to decide the color palette of the house and see how it would look on Bokeem [Woodbine] and to do fittings with the Dapper Dan team in Harlem. That was a huge moment for me, a career highlight. We wanted it to feel like a throwback. Back-in-the-day Dapper Dan and not so much current Dapper Dan, although there’s so much crossover with that right now. It was great to collaborate with that entire team and the Gucci team.”

So another part of Queen and Slim’s visual transformation is their hair. Can you tell me about that?
“Those are some of my favorite scenes because, as a black woman, I know how important the stories our hair tells are. I wear my hair in twists and braids kind of like the character Queen. To think that I’d have to wake up one day and take my twists out and shave my head–I feel so naked even thinking about it. And so vulnerable. It would feel like a transformation even without the clothing. To me, it was so beautiful because that’s very rare to see in a film. It’s so rare to see the leading lady and the love interest–two dark-skinned actors, both with short natural hair. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that.”

At the heart of the film is this sense of black resilience. How did you reflect that through the costumes?
“It was really important for us to highlight black designers. We really felt that Uncle Earl’s house was an explosion of culture and community, because that’s what it is for Queen and Slim in that moment. That was a huge focus for us: the Sean John tracksuits, the Dapper Dan tracksuits, the black jewelry designers, the black-designed bodysuits. We worked with the jewelry designer Matteo, who did a really beautiful ring on one of the girls in [Earl’s] house, and also Queen’s super delicate bracelet that she wears throughout the film. The boots that Queen wears were the Brother Vellies collaboration with Aurora James. She produces everything in Africa, so we were really excited to make those boots with her. It was about supporting that culture and community to parallel the environment that they step into.”

As someone with a background in fashion, you know that Chloë Sevigny has always been considered an It girl in the industry. In the movie she plays a very proper, aesthetically conservative lady–the opposite of what she’s usually pictured as. What was it like costuming her?
“We are all fans of Chloë Sevigny. I’ve never spoken to anyone who doesn’t believe that she is just the best. It’s interesting, because she was very similar to my interaction with Daniel. She came to the fitting with questions: ‘Who is this woman? What does she have in her closet? What is she wearing when these uninvited guests pop by?’ It was a lot of prim and proper buttoned up options. She had tons of feedback, and I love a collaborative process. Melina and I both love coordination, so we wanted her costume and Lee’s costume to play off of each other. Melina and I are really into building these worlds aesthetically. It’s what we do on a daily basis, because we love clothes and we love the stories that they tell.”

Was there any symbolism to any of the costumes that may not be initially apparent?
“One is definitely Queen’s ring, which was a beautiful Nefertiti ring and it was a nod to her name, Queen. She wears it the entire film, but it’s really really prominent in that juke joint scene. Up until the very end, no one ever calls them by their names. I know that that was important to Melina, because that’s what happens in our community. We don’t know these young black people who are killed by police officers. We don’t know them until it’s too late. We know her as Queen because that’s the title of the movie, but no one is ever actually really calling her that. So [the ring] was a little piece of symbolism–who our queens are, obviously, African [and] Egyptian queens.”

Queen & Slim hits theaters on November 27, 2019.

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createdAt:Mon, 25 Nov 2019 22:46:09 +0000
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