A team of more than 30 designers and buyers (six times the size of the modest team Carter helmed for Selma) scoured the globe—from New York to Nairobi to Mumbai—to find robes, headdresses, and intricate jewelry to deliver on Carter’s ambitious vision. The result is stunning sartorial storytelling that weaves the past and the present to imagine a future of fashion.

Take, for example, Nyong’o’s character, Nakia—a Wakandan spy—in an exaggerated cold-shoulder, floor-length gown with splits to each hipbone. Carter and her team created this textile from scratch using design software, inspired by the kente pattern made by the Akan people of Ghana. Carter simplified its color palette to showcase the pattern’s intricate geometric shapes. She then transferred it onto black fabric, using a 3D printer to make the graphic lines raised and textured. After constructing the silhouette, she hand-painted the dress in an electric chartreuse hue to accentuate that raised outline, creating an ombré effect as the green fades to black down the length of the dress. “As a member of the royal family,” Carter said, “[Nakia] needed to be unsuspecting, but then she needed to be able to kick some ass.”

Carter’s black-centered worldmaking may be evident in her artistry, but she’s reluctant to call herself an “Afrofuturist.” Since the ’90s, the term has been used to describe literature and art that meld African-derived histories, cosmologies, and technologies to imagine new possibilities for black survival and social order. Carter said she was concerned that the complexities of Black Panther might get lost as trendiness and camp take over discussion of the film. As the word Afrofuturism further enters the mainstream, there’s a risk of its meaning being diluted—as it gets casually applied to any black-centric work with the slightest hint of sci-fi or magical realism, without a sense of the term’s socially-conscious context.

Carter is quick to point out that her work has always centered a black conception of the future, one rooted in political determinism and creative self-expression. This vision was present in her earliest films with Spike Lee, including School Daze and Malcolm X, as well as in John Singleton’s Rosewood, Ava DuVernay’s Selma, and the 2016 TV adaptation Roots. “I feel like … if I am to embrace that term, and I am going to call myself an Afrofuturist, I can say I’ve been that my entire career,” Carter said, noting that this ethos is getting more recognition now because of Black Panther’s explicit use of technology.

That sense of complexity and contradiction is what Carter brings to Black Panther. She listened to James Brown’s 1968 anthem “Say it Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud” on repeat as she crafted the film’s techno-funky wardrobe (the track became a theme song of sorts on set). For Carter, Wakandan fashion is “absolutely saying we’re not falling into any kind of mold of the way things should be. We’re going to create our own. The time is now.”