Dressing New York: The Costume Designers Who Put the City on Screen

Few cities are as familiar on screen as New York, and its characters are often remembered by what they wore before anything they said. A fringed suede jacket in Times Square. A bowling shirt in Bed-Stuy. A school blazer on the Upper East Side. Each was a decision made by a costume designer, usually on a budget and a schedule, and almost always with the city itself as a reference.

Here are five designers whose work shaped how the world sees New York, and the lessons their methods hold for stylists and designers today.

Ann Roth and the streets of Midnight Cowboy

Ann Roth’s costumes for Midnight Cowboy, the 1969 film set around a seedy Times Square, are a master class in using the city as a wardrobe department. As GQ recounted, drawing on Glenn Frankel’s book Shooting Midnight Cowboy, Roth found the white trousers for Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo on a table outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal, then picked up ratty black shoes on 42nd Street. “They were cockroach-in-the-corner shoes,” she told GQ. “I had to have those.”

The point was not shabbiness for its own sake. Frankel’s premise, as GQ put it, was that costume designers do not just make outfits, they make characters. Roth went on to win Academy Awards for The English Patient and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

Ruth E. Carter and Do the Right Thing

For Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing, set on the hottest day of the year in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Ruth E. Carter worked from Lee’s direction that the look should be bright, even “almost blinding AFROCENTRIC bright,” as her archive records. The palette of reds, yellows and greens became the film’s signature.

Her archive notes the neighborhood details: Radio Raheem’s gold LOVE and HATE rings were produced at the Fulton Street Mall in Downtown Brooklyn, and his hand-painted “Bed Stuy Do Or Die” shirt was made by a Brooklyn artist named NaSha at Carter’s request. Mookie’s bowling shirt, chosen by Lee, was customized with a Sal’s Famous Pizzeria logo.

Carter later became the first Black person to win the Oscar for costume design, for Black Panther, and won again for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Accepting her first award, she spoke directly to the director who gave her a start: “Spike Lee, thank you for my start. I hope this makes you proud,” as the Academy recounts.

Patricia Field and Sex and the City

Patricia Field was a New York retailer long before she was a television name. Raised in Queens, she opened her first boutique in Greenwich Village in 1966 and later ran her store on the Bowery for years. When she designed the costumes for Sex and the City, the show became known for fashion that felt individual and unexpected.

The Television Academy’s records show the series won the 2002 Emmy for Outstanding Costumes for a Series, with Field and Rebecca Weinberg as costume designers. Field was later nominated for an Oscar for The Devil Wears Prada, another New York story told largely through clothes.

Eric Daman and the Upper East Side

One name on that 2002 Emmy team, assistant costume designer Eric Daman, went on to define a different Manhattan. For Gossip Girl, he told Marie Claire, he studied real Upper East Side private-school students, noticing how cliques formed around specific designer pieces, then “really editorialized” the school uniform so that it felt like a runway show every day. He also explained that the show’s ever-present tights came from being a practical New Yorker, since the series filmed through January and February.

Donna Zakowska and 1950s Manhattan

For The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, set in New York in 1958, the Brooklyn-born designer Donna Zakowska drew on period photographs, European trends and the many cultures of postwar New York. Her work won the 2019 Emmy for Outstanding Period Costumes. Smithsonian magazine reported that the National Museum of American History acquired costumes from the show’s first season, including the pink wool housecoat and peignoir from the pilot and the black cocktail dress from the season finale.

What New York’s costume designers teach

These designers worked in different decades and genres, but their methods overlap:

• Use the city as research. Roth shopped the streets her characters walked. Daman watched real students. Zakowska studied period photographs of the city.
• Let color carry the story. Carter’s bright palette told audiences how hot, loud and alive the block was before a word was spoken.
• Dress for the weather and the shoot. Daman’s tights are a reminder that the most practical choice can become the signature.
• Make characters, not outfits. Every piece should tell you who the person is, where they live and what they want.

Read on: our walking history of New York’s department stores, and how the city became a fashion capital in six moments that built Seventh Avenue.

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Sources

• GQ, “Half a Century Later, the Clothes of Midnight Cowboy Still Speak Volumes” (March 3, 2021)
• Wikipedia, “Ann Roth” (secondary; Academy Awards for The English Patient and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom)
• Ruth E. Carter Costume Archive, “Do the Right Thing”
• Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, “My Oscar: Ruth E. Carter” (Nov 13, 2024)
• Television Academy, “Outstanding Costumes for a Series, 2002: Nominees and Winners”
• Wikipedia, “Patricia Field” (secondary; Queens upbringing, boutiques, Devil Wears Prada nomination)
• Marie Claire, “16 Exclusive Gossip Girl Behind the Scenes Moments in New Interview with Costume Designer” (2017)
• Wikipedia, “Eric Daman” (secondary)
• Smithsonian magazine, “Two Dresses From ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ Are Coming to the Smithsonian”
• Wikipedia, “Donna Zakowska” (secondary; Brooklyn birth, 2019 Emmy)

Photo: “Ruth E. Carter by Gage Skidmore” by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Editor’s note: facts in this article were checked against the linked sources in October 2026. Quotes from Ann Roth and Ruth E. Carter are verbatim from GQ and the Academy, as linked; Eric Daman’s comments are paraphrased from his Marie Claire interview. The featured photo shows Ruth E. Carter at a 2018 public event, not on a film set.