In the world of I Love Boosters, color reigns supreme.
The new film from writer-director Boots Riley follows a group of boosters—shoplifters who resell their stolen clothes—led by aspiring fashion designer Corvette (Keke Palmer). They run amok in a surrealist, color-blocked version of San Francisco, wreaking havoc on a chain of department stores where each location is entirely monochrome.
“Color is so key, because it helps create worlds,” Shirley Kurata, I Love Boosters‘ costume designer, tells Fast Company. The Oscar-nominated costume designer keeps finding herself depicting the multiverse: For the Best Picture-winning 2022 movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, she costumed characters across dimensions, from the muted realism of everyday life on Earth to a chaotic mishmash of colors and patterns for the film’s mind-bending finale.
Though there’s no dimension-hopping in I Love Boosters, the movie still has clear-cut worlds. There’s the vibrant but corporate monochrome of the Metro Designers department stores, each with its own signature color applied to the walls, the wares, and even the employees. There’s the behind-the-scenes world of villain Christie Smith’s fashion brand, including a Chinese factory where workers are subjected to brutal conditions for next to no pay. And there are the eccentric disguises of the movie’s titular boosters, who embrace different eras and aesthetics to avoid detection.
“There’s multiple worlds in both Everything Everywhere All at Once and I Love Boosters,” Kurata says. “To separate that, I think color is the first thing that really shows that. And so it was probably one of the most important things for me in terms of costume design.”
Hollywood going gray
When the first teaser for I Love Boosters hit social media in January, the internet was immediately obsessed with the film’s in-your-face color scheme. The most liked comment on the movie’s trailer on YouTube reads, “Nice to see that someone remembers that colours exist!!!”
From Kurata’s costumes to the production design by Christopher Glass and cinematography by Natasha Braier, I Love Boosters offers a stark contrast to the dominant color scheme of modern Hollywood—or rather, the lack thereof.
Moviegoers are apparently fed up with films that verge on grayscale, whether it’s due to lighting, color grading, or production design. Take the reaction to the trailer for Disney’s upcoming live-action Moana remake, which social media users said “sucked up all the color” from the original animated film. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has long been criticized for its flat color palettes, with video essays with titles like “Why Do Marvel’s Movies Look Kind of Ugly?” racking up millions of views. Even films with fantastical settings, like the two-part Wicked series’ famously technicolor world of Oz, have caught flak for being strangely desaturated.
“I always love being part of something that’s an exception to the rule,” Kurata says. Though she thinks muted palettes have their place in cinema, she can’t help but find herself drawn to “hypermaximalist worlds” like that of I Love Boosters. “It taps into this surreal other world that I think is just sometimes more visually appealing, more interesting.”
Creating I Love Boosters’ colorful world was a labor of love. Kurata recalls closely collaborating with production designer Glass to make sure the movie’s many monochrome settings were truly one color, top to bottom.
“To get the right shades of the yellow or the green, I wanted to make sure that I had the actual paint chips,” she explains. “[Glass] actually did send me little painted boards so that I could hold that up with the clothing.”
She and director Riley also worked in tandem to conceptualize the film’s most outrageous outfits. A mid-movie montage shows the central gang of boosters looting store after store, as they dress in a new theme for each looting: neon Kawaii outfits ripped from Tokyo subculture, suits and featureless masks painted with cartoon faces, and head-to-toe floral ensembles that would feel at home in Midsommar.
Moviemaking with a message
I Love Boosters is Riley’s second film, following 2018’s Sorry To Bother You. Both movies are surreal satires with strong anti-capitalist themes. I Love Boosters calls out the fashion industry’s massive waste, inaccessibility, and poor working conditions, all culminating in a finale highlighting the power of collective action.
With a decades-long career as both a stylist and a costume designer, Kurata knows the fashion world’s injustices firsthand.
“I have a pretty broad understanding of all the mechanisms and also the things that are problematic about the industry, which I think this movie addresses so aptly,” she says. “I thought it was important that we do think about fast fashion, about ethical treatment of the workers that are creating the clothes—which are all still very problematic in this day and age.”
Beyond highlighting those issues on screen in I Love Boosters, Kurata made sure her work behind the scenes was in line with the movie’s principles.
For a climactic sequence set at a fashion show, she connected with fashion students at Savannah College of Art and Design, featuring some of their designs on the runway.
“I’m just always a big proponent for supporting up-and-coming designers and showcasing their work whenever I can,” Kurata says. “For me, it’s really important to work on movies that tell an interesting story, but also have a sort of added benefit to society.”
I Love Boosters comes to theaters this Friday, May 22. Check out the trailer below.