Exclusive: The Supremes At Earl's-All-You-Eat interview with costume designer Whitney Anne Adams

Searchlight Pictures' emotional period drama, The Supremes At Earl' s-All-You-Can Eat, tells the gripping story of three best friends experiencing life through trials and triumphs. The film spans three decades, from 1969 to 1999, briefly introducing the women's early lives in the fifties. It was a critical time for Black women, as segregation was exempt but still felt in the American South, and some of The Supremes' plot points underlined the issue.

The film opened theatrically on August 18th and made its new home on Hulu on August 23rd.

Actresses Uzo Aduba (Clarice), Sanaa Lathan (Barbara Jean), and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (Odette) blew me away with their talent. They breathed life into their characters and, with their unique form of storytelling, helped me better understand the values of life and why it's precious. The younger cast (Tati Gabrielle, Kyanna Simone, and Abigail Achiri) portraying the teenage eras of Barbara Jean, Clarice, and Odette were meant to become these characters as they connected so well and wonderfully with their adult counterparts.

Searchlight Pictures gave the following synopsis regarding The Supremes At Earl' s-All-You-Can-Eat plot.

"[The movie] follows a trio of best friends known as "The Supremes" who, together for decades, have weathered everything through marriage and children, happiness and blues."

The Supremes At Earl' s-All-You-Can-Eat is based on the 2013 Edward Kelsey Moore novel. The novel and film are gorgeous incantations of female friendships and becoming a family unit. Both are filled with perspective, charm, and life floating off the pages and our screens.

Culturess had the amazing opportunity to speak with Whitney Anne Adams, the costume designer department lead behind The Supremes At Earl' s-All-You-Can-Eat. In the exclusive interview, we talked about the costume design process, finding the right pieces for each character, and being the lead costume designer for the film.

Interview with The Supremes At Earl's-All-You-Can-Eat Costume Designer Whitney Ann Adams

When deciding on fashion for a production, Whitney Ann Adams uses her expertise and vision to create scene-stealing outfits from start to finish. The job is challenging because several stages are before the final curtain call. It is rewarding, as clothes are a vital part of any show or film and can help us recall specific moments in the stories.

Adams was passionately articulate regarding the overall design and structure of The Supremes' wardrobe, focusing on particular colors and patterns to make the characters stand out and share their unique stories in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Adams additionally got to work with one of my favorite musical artists before her career in film.

Culturess: Thank you for doing this interview with me. Could you tell us more about your costume design background?

Whitney Ann Adams: Yeah, no problem. So I started college pre-med, and then I switched to theater about three weeks into college. I got a degree in theater from UC San Diego, and then I moved to New York to do Broadway. I fell into a costume shop, worked in a costume shop for three years making costumes for Broadway, and made Beyonce's World Tour in 2009.

I also was part of Lise Minelli's personal tailoring team for a couple years, and then I met Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin through a costume design contest, and my first movie I ever worked on was The Great Gatsby, and I was the costume design assistant on that, and that was my sort of like jumping off point into professional costumes.

Culteress: I watched The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat. It's fantastic, lovely, and wonderfully put together, with a great cast of characters. What inspiration did you take from when you designed the costumes and the pieces?

Whitney Ann Adams: My starting place was the color palette, and I'm very much a researcher. So, I was going through yearbooks and photos from the time. Many people upload their family photos to [the photo-sharing site] Flickr. So I was going down the rabbit hole on Flickr, trying to find every single different real -life person. Because you can look at catalogs and magazines, but that's a different type of person. I wanted the real-life people that could inhabit this town. All of those real -life picture references are so important. And I was then starting to source everything. But really my inspiration was, as my cast started to get together, what colors looked great on them. I love telling the story through color. And I feel like we really got an emotional journey and arc with our color story, especially connecting our older and younger versions. We need to make sure that they feel like the same characters.

Culturess: What was Odette's cancer-surviving moment like, and how did that come to be? For her journey as an adult, as she's getting sick, it was really important to also tell Odette's story through color and texture.

Adams: She starts off bright, vibrant, that really beautiful red jacket. And she's very much like the Odette that we've seen in the younger. But then as she gets this diagnosis and she starts to get sicker and sicker and goes through her treatment, all of the color starts draining from her costumes. So she goes from these bright, beautiful, bold colors that represent her fiery personality into these like soft, dull, faded, lifeless colors and patterns and to sort of represent her journey as she progresses and gets sicker.

Culturess: The one thing I noticed that was Odette's journey was hard, but it was also beautiful at the same time because you're able to tell the story through fashion because we don't have to think about it. t's kind of in the back of our mind to express how we feel and how we're how we're doing at that period of time.

Adams: Absolutely, and like making sure that the shapes were also baggier and not as fitted and not as, you know, it didn't fit her body properly. And so it's just, she's getting sicker, and the clothes look worse on her. I think the audience can tell, they're not clocking all these individual choices, but as a whole, they're feeling her journey. And that's really like subconsciously. And that's really what matters.

Culturess: Do you have a favorite outfit that you are particularly proud of? While working at working on The Supremes?

Adams: I think my favorite is Odette's orange dress for 1968 Odette. It's sort of our big introduction to her. We've seen her, you know, briefly in one costume right before this, like the main opening, but she spends a lot of time in this orange dress. Her blind grandmother made this for her. She cares about her family so much. And the fact that her grandmother spent the time to make this dress for her, she doesn't care if it's trendy or looks cool or in the script and in the novel, they say this is the ugliest dress ever. how do you make the ugliest dress ever? And like, what does that mean? I sort of took it as it's not what we'd all call the ugliest dress ever. It's it's out of sync of trends of the time. And it's also something that represents her amazing, beautiful, fiery personality. She rocks it no matter whether it's on trend, off, off-trend, you know, the seams I made sure to so have our tailor so not, not straight. So you can tell that someone like, you know, made it at home who doesn't have the best eyesight. I just love that it represents her love, and how much she does for her family and friends, and how much she treasures the love of her family and friends. And so that was a really fun thing to create.

Culturess: Do you have a favorite actress that you enjoyed working with?

Adams: I love all of them. It's hard to pick because I had such an incredible cast. I love our young trio [Tati Gabrielle, Kyanna Simone, and Abigail Achiri], our adult trio [Uzo Aduba, Sanaa Lathan, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor], and we sort of split filming into halves. So the first half was all 1968 and the second half was 1999. So we had two very different energies in a good way where like the first half of filming was vibrant and hilarious and like high energy. there was something really like beautifully comfortable and relaxed and elegant about the second half of filming. So, I just love getting to work with so many different and talented people, especially these incredible women. It was really cool to be in all these long fittings with them

Culturess: Do you have a favorite costume piece for each character? We spoke about Odette's orange dress, but were there any other favorites? I love how the little pieces tell a story.

Adams: I'm a big lover of jewelry and how that tells a story. Like I'm a person who wears the same two rings every single day and thinking in developing teenage Barbara Jean [Tati Gabrielle] and adult Barbara Jean [Sansaa Lathen]. And she's been through so much in her life, so many trials, so many tribulations and thinking about does she feel cursed? And so that's how we landed on this sort of like the Evil Eye pendant that she wears the entire movie, is it felt like a touchstone for her as a protection. Whether it works or not, she doesn't care. It's about having something to hold on to every single day that she's not adrift by herself. It's sort of like her rock reminder to herself. And so I like those little pieces of character development. So I love that necklace that adult Barbara Jean wears.

Culturess: What about designing and putting the clothes together for the men?

Adams: Oh, they're so fun. It's great and challenging in these period films, too, because men's wear is a little bit more streamlined and less, you know, different types of styles save for women. So, getting to tell all of their individual character journeys through [fewer] differences in the clothes was a fun challenge. Like Richmond was the flashy, like put together, like really showy kind of style. Whereas Lester was the most adult and had the full suit and tie situation. So he was showy but elegant instead of like the young sort of showiness of Richmond. And then James is really grounded and not fancy, but he, it doesn't matter. That's just who he is. And that's why Odette loves him so much is that he's like real and is just about wearing what feels like is true to him. So you have these three men who are totally different. Then you have Chick, who's like low income, working at the farm, he's wearing the more work wear, the more denim, the converse. All four of these men are incredibly different. And it was fun to showcase that in each one of their costumes.

Culturess: What idea did you have for Odette's gray sweatsuit when she got her head shaved from the cancer treatments?

Adams: I wanted to find like, what would she want to feel comfortable in? At least she's just with her two best friends. So she doesn't have to, you know, look a certain way for anybody else. She's in her comfortable sweats, and something that's really simple that represents [her struggle]. I think once her head is shaved and her hair is gone, I wanted to find that minimalist look. She's stepping away from the patterns for a minute because she wears mostly patterns in the whole film. So, I love that drawing the attention to the act of shaving her head. So it was a lot more minimal than pretty much any of her other costumes. I imagine she stopped caring. She's like, whatever is the closest thing I'm just going to wear, like one of her last treatments we see her in with James, she's wearing one of his shirts. I like that it's a men's shirt. You know, we don't explicitly say it's one of his shirts. But that was my idea behind it: she just wanted to wear something that's comfortable and more comfortable than her husband, who she's loved her whole life. That was sort of the design decision behind that, and it was also the easiest thing to grab James's shirt.

Culturess: There's a lot of Southern racism, especially in the early beginning of the film. How did the costuming work around that?

Adams: I think I wanted to make sure that Desmond, you know, our horrible racist jerk, wanted him to feel out of date, because all of his ideas and racism is so wrong, and so rooted in the past and past failings. And so all of his costume, even though our story takes place in 1968, I wanted to pull him backward to the 50's. And so what he's wearing is kind of pretty classic. You can see anyone in the 40s, 50s wear that outfit. I wanted him to feel outdated in comparison to like the rest of our amazing, beautiful cast, and that he stuck in the past in, you know, horrible hatred was definitely my design choices for him.

Culturess: Barbara Jean got intimate with Ray, a white man (not that it matters), but how did you come up with the costuming for their union?

Adams: I think that most of her costumes that she wears around young Ray, I wanted their colors to complement each other. I wanted their colors to feel like they gelled. And so it was a lot of putting their fitting photos next to each other and seeing which combinations just felt right, sort of go with the gut instinct. It's really not something I can explain. It's like what feels good together. And so that was definitely something that I constantly did to make sure that every scene that they were together, they felt like they went together visually in a color palette way and in a shape way.. That was a really fun challenge because not only am I balancing their colors and their shapes, I'm also balancing Barbara Jean with the other Supremes and then everyone together as a whole in one scene. making sure that all the shapes, colors, everything looks right.

It's a lot of like math, color math, basically trying to balance everything out. But it was definitely making sure that they looked and felt like a couple and they looked good together. There's this one dress that she wears the night that she and Ray first sleep together. I wish we got to see a little bit more of it because it's my favorite dress that I put on Tati [who plays] young Barbara Jean. It's this beautiful abstract pattern. It's a little bit old-fashioned for 1968 because instead of in the book, Barbara Jean wears her mother's trashy hand-me-downs. But if we did that in the movie, I don't think an audience would grasp that she just would be wearing trashy clothes instead of the fact that they came from her mother. Instead of doing trashy clothes, I did old-fashioned, like more behind the times until she gets taken in with our big girl in Thelma. Once they take her in, her fashion jumps forward. She's able to get a little bit of money to wear newer things, but it was a lot of like a mixture of the old and the new.

Culturess: Looking back, did you gain any new insight into the history of the United States making The Supremes At Earl' s-All-You-Can-Eat?

Adams: Every time I do a project, I learn so much about different pockets of the story that I'm telling, so getting to learn about the Midwest in 1968 and 1950 and 1977 and 1999, and you know, digging into the research, and the culture and making sure that I had the proper research and tools to tell this story. I learned a lot and talked to a lot of people. I made sure that half of my staff was Black. The things that I'll never know as a white woman, I made sure that I had people on my team who could help fill in those gaps.

Culturess: Absolutely. I mean, I think for us as white women, we can't fully comprehend what Black people could go through because they're Black. By listening to their stories, insights, and experiences and seeing how they behave in a certain way in the movie, we hope to gain some of that understanding and become better people.

The 1960s pre-MLK was a horrific period for People of Color in the US, and even a few years after. Although racism was highlighted in The Supremes, giving an ominous reveal of what transpired then, Adams clearly pinpointed the "joys' between the three best friends and what they overcame together.

Adams: I think the thing I wanted to capture in this, too, was just the joy, the joy of these young Black women. I think that was super important to, instead of, there's so many things that focus on the race issues of the sixties, which again is horrific and very important to talk about, but it was really great in the story, too. [For] most of the story, we got to focus on this friendship, the joy, and the universal story of friendship. There's a lot of high-highs and low-lows in this movie for sure.

Culturess: Were you inspired by the fashion designers back in the day, such as Dior?

Adams: For this one, I didn't focus on any particular designers because where our story takes place in the Midwest. It's not the fashion that really comes from this year's catalog. It's coming from the places that they're going to shop locally in the Midwest. And so I wanted to, again, those like designs are filtering down through the catalogs into what, you know, general people can buy. I wanted to focus on those pieces instead of actual designers because with who they are, where they live, and their price point, they're not going to be able to afford any of those pieces. So, I wanted to focus on the like and make sure that everything they wear made sense for them economically as well as in design.

Culturess: How is working on The Supremes compared to your past jobs and projects?

Adams: This one is definitely my biggest challenge [as it's] my first giant period movie that I designed myself. I worked on [2013's] The Great Gatsby. I've worked on other challenging things, but this was the first time that I got to be the department head. And so it was really cool to be able to tackle that challenge. I've always wanted to do that. Period is the type of movie that I really love doing. I also make a lot of horror movies, which I absolutely love, and they're a delight. But they're challenging in a different way with multiples, with stunts, with blood.

I think for me, the logistics are always a challenge, just they're different each time. So The Supremes, the logistics with getting all of that vintage clothing to Wilmington and, you know, having it all happen, because I had a lot of characters, a lot of clothes.

I had 162 principal costumes, 67 principal costumes just between The Supremes, and 2000 background outfits. So it's a lot to get on location to North Carolina in a short period of time with not the biggest budget. [There were] a lot of factors that were stacked up against me to make it all happen. So I'm really proud, but we did get to make it happen. And luckily, we didn't need a ton of multiples like we do in horror movies.

So I think it's just the logistics are always a challenge. They're just different on each one. But all the things I've done before and all those challenges I've overcome in every other film really helped prepare me for this.

And that's what's important. You take what you learned and put it into the new project. Absolutely. Each time I get better and better, you know, I'm so proud of the journey that I've had so far. My goal is to learn something new every day, To see how far I've come and evolved, and to know that I'm always learning [and] that I always have something new to learn. That's what's so exciting about every day I get to work in this industry.

The Supremes At Earl's-All-You-Can-Eat is currently streaming on Hulu. PerJustWatch, it was the fifth most watched movie in its opening week on the platform, with a total of 139.2 million minutes of viewership.

To learn more about Whitney Ann Adams and her fabulous work, visit her website at WhitneyAdams.com. You can also follow her across social media via Instagram and Twitter.