Phillip Boutte Jr. is part of the team behind the tribal, yet tech, costumes we see in box office smash Black Panther. Boutte drew illustrations and collaborated with costume designer Ruth Carter to create the garments worn by heroes and villains alike in the fictional East African nation of Wakanda. Those include warrior outfits, the adornment of the Wakandian elders, their allies, the Jabari tribesmen and Black Panther's superhero costume.
Boutte is no stranger to the drawing board. He’s worked on the complete Hunger Games franchise, Star Trek, X-Men, Guardians of the Galaxy, the TV series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Altered Carbon and the results of his work will next be seen in the Oprah Winfrey/Reese Witherspoon film, A Wrinkle in Time. He’s also working on the upcoming Captain Marvel.
What was your vision for the costumes of Wakanda?
That was with my good buddy, Ruth Carter, who’s amazing. We started on the project together. She’s done a lot of projects. She worked with Spike Lee for 15 years. So her main focus was the nerd part of it. I was looking at it like, "the comic book is this…"
Her main focus was, "now that we know what these things look like, let’s try to infuse them with African culture so that it means something." So if there are bees on the costumes, she wanted to [explore] a specific tribe and try to figure out what that symbolises. Does it symbolise beauty? Does it symbolise strength, power, marriage, death?
So we started to research all these tribes and it was really great. It was a project where every day I was surrounded by these huge boards in the office. There was a map of Wakanda and nothing but boards of different African tribes and who they are; their names and how they make their stuff. That really helped.
We also started to look at more modern things; Afrofuturism, Afropunk, trying to figure out the hipper, more contemporary version. What I continued to bring to the table is that Wakanda, to me, is more like Timbuktu. If you know the story of Timbuktu, the king there had all the gold. He was super rich. Europe was always trying to raid TImbuktu but it’s situated in a place that’s super hot. The desert is super hot so you would just die trying to get there.
Timbuktu also had a strong military so if you did get there, you’d probably be overwhelmed by them. So to me that’s what Wakanda is, if it were never touched by European influence, if it were allowed to prosper. So we built out from there.
It’s like saying what would Africa be like if it were never touched by European influence or if it were never raided or if the world didn’t take all their resources and leave them with nothing. What happens if Africans have access to complex textiles? Then maybe they have their culture. So someone has scarification but then someone has also launched some cool jacket that has pieces cut out of it so you can see the scars on their torso. It was that type of deal. Let’s have fun with it and see that vision of Wakanda. What if they have all their resources and still have their culture? That was really exciting to me.
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