FASHION / SCREE STYLE : A Wardrobe Inspired by African Designs

The Movie: “White Man’s Burden”

The Setup: Factory worker Louis Pinnock (John Travolta), a white man, crosses paths with successful businessman and African American majority member Thaddeus Thomas (Harry Belafonte, pictured).

The Costume Designer: Isis Mussenden, whose credits include “Sleep With Me,” “The Waterdance,” “Bodies Rest and Motion.”

The Look: A fashion world that exists without Calvin Klein and Donna Karan or, for that matter, without the Victorians or Edwardians. This American style is based not on a European-based concept of dressing, but on an African one.

The Details: Men such as Thomas dress in conventional trousers, jackets with neither lapels nor button closures and vividly patterned shirts minus neckties. African American women wear dresses, skirts and blouses in large patterns and rich colors (purples, oranges and greens), with the wealthiest adorned with African-inspired chokers and Fulani, or traditional African hoop earrings. Hats and head wraps top braided heads of hair.

Women from the white underclass--including Pinnock’s wife Marsha (Kelly Lynch) and her mother Josine (Carrie Snodgress)--dress in a similar vein but minus the jewels. Only Pinnock wears familiar American working-class garb: T-shirt, khakis and twill jacket.

Quoted: “It was tricky. Everyone--the actors, the director--came in with a different idea of what the clothes should look like,” Mussenden said. “I thought it wasn’t right to take Africa’s costume of today and put it in America. I never fell into a kente cloth. I wanted to take it to a different level. . . . So I went back to thediscovery of the Americas and added 200-plus years of nurturing a culture--the Afrocentric culture--and took into account industrialization and climate change.”

You Should Know: One of the Thomases’ dinner guests was played by Attallah Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm X. Before Mussenden had fully formed her approach to the costumes, she met Shabazz and realized she dressed in virtually the look Mussenden wanted. “Her clothes had the feel and color of a sense of Africa, yet everything she wears is made and altered in a style to fit her.”

Research: The Studio Museum in Harlem, N.Y., the Museum in Black in Los Angeles and many books on African culture.

Sources: Most of the women’s accessories and jewelry came from Kongo Square Gallery and Gift Shop in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles and from stores on Atlantic Boulevard in Brooklyn, N.Y. Principals’ clothes were made by Steffani Lincecum in Los Angeles.