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In the 1920s, the richest community in the world<\/a> was the Osage nation concentrated in northeast Oklahoma. Thanks to the oil below their lands, tribal members were sitting atop a vast fortune. And they were spending it, too, on roadsters and Parisian couture; there was a Tiffany\u2019s counter at the local trading post.<\/p>\n They merged their newly acquired fashions with their tribal customs and aesthetics \u2014 wearing traditional wool blankets with Stetsons and Spanish-heeled cowboy boots, and adding embroidery and bright plumage to the towering silk hats they wore at weddings.<\/p>\n That mix of styles is vividly on display in \u201cKillers of the Flower Moon,\u201d<\/a> Martin Scorsese\u2019s epic set in Osage territory and due Oct. 20. Based on the nonfiction best seller by David Grann<\/a>, the movie stars Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone \u2014 a member of the Blackfeet and Nez Perc\u00e9 tribes \u2014 in a roaring crime saga<\/a> about the murders that plagued the tribal nation starting in the 1920s, as the Osage\u2019s white neighbors set out to strip them, by any means necessary, of their oil rights.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The culture clash was generations deep, said Julie O\u2019Keefe, a member of the tribe and the film\u2019s lead Osage wardrobe consultant. Her ancestors \u201chad what I call Kardashian money dropped on top of them,\u201d she said. They were economically savvy but until that era hardly even used a currency-based system: \u201cWe traded for everything that we needed.\u201d The matriarch in the story, Lizzie Q, \u201chad come off the prairie hunting buffalo.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Led by Scorsese, the filmmakers aimed to be scrupulously authentic in the ways they depicted the Osage, down to the threads in their clothing. There was plenty of documentation: the Osage were rich enough to sit for portraits and even to make home movies \u2014 astronomically expensive at $800 a minute, said Jacqueline West, the film\u2019s costume designer. \u201cFew people in the world could afford that, but they documented their lives and their travel and where they lived so beautifully. I relied on those.\u201d<\/p>\n The Osage always had an eye for luxe and color when it came to clothing and adornment, said Daniel C. Swan, an anthropology professor and curator emeritus at the University of Oklahoma who has written about the tribe. \u201cIf you read the 16th- and 17th-century accounts of encounters with them, they had this air about them \u2014 we would say they had real style,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n By the early 20th century, the Osage were as au courant as Vogue editors. \u201cThey had incredibly sophisticated palettes,\u201d Swan said. \u201cThey wore the finest French, Italian, New York fashion; they kept up with hairstyles and footwear.\u201d But perhaps the best example of their sartorial resplendence, and their culture, could be seen at weddings.<\/p>\n The wedding scene in \u201cKillers of the Flower Moon\u201d is a showstopper, with Mollie Kyle, the bride played by Gladstone, and her bridesmaid sisters in richly embroidered skirts, finger-woven belts and bespoke military coats, complete with brass buttons and braided epaulets. The look is topped off by towering 18-inch hats decorated with French ribbon and festooned with feathers dyed cyan or magenta. It feels fantastical, and it is utterly real.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWhen I saw the photographs of the wedding clothes, of course I had to include them,\u201d Scorsese said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The coats came into the Osage world entwined with American history. In the early 1800s, Osage leaders visited President Thomas Jefferson in the White House. It was part of a U.S. government effort to ingratiate itself with tribes along the path that the explorers Lewis and Clark would travel, and the leaders were greeted with military demonstrations that showcased the new country\u2019s military might. The story goes that an Osage chief was taken with the coats worn by his Washington, D.C., counterparts, so they gave him one. It didn\u2019t fit \u2014 Osage were exceptionally tall \u2014 and he passed it onto his daughter, who wore it to her wedding, a tradition that persisted for more than a century. (The top hats had a similar lineage \u2014 from headwear for infantry officers to party chapeau.)<\/p>\n Refashioning the attire of war for a bride, \u201cthere\u2019s something beautifully rebellious about it,\u201d West said. It\u2019s a subversion of the dynamic Jefferson wanted to display: the Osage turned \u201csomething that represented power over them to something that represented joy.\u201d They even made their own versions of the coats when the originals wore out.<\/p>\n \u201cThe U.S. government gave these coats out to all different tribes,\u201d Swan said. But only the Osage remodeled them into wedding finery.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Swan, an author, with Jim Cooley, of \u201cWedding Clothes and the Osage Community,\u201d<\/a> <\/strong>organized a companion exhibition<\/a> at the Sam Noble Museum in Norman, Okla., that Scorsese\u2019s team visited early on in the film\u2019s development. \u201cAs soon as they saw those wedding outfits, they said, \u2018He\u2019s going to love this! You can bet there will be a wedding in this movie,\u2019\u201d recalled Swan, who was also a resource for the film. <\/p>\n \u201cThe question is always: what do the clothes mean to the characters?\u201d Scorsese wrote in an email. \u201cThey look flamboyant, but they were worn proudly and joyfully \u2014 they still are.\u201d<\/p>\n West, the costume designer, used vintage pieces as inspiration, including heirloom garments that descendants of the real-life characters had stored away in trunks. As much as possible, she commissioned copies from Osage artisans.<\/p>\n With multiple crowd scenes, O\u2019Keefe, who lives in Tulsa, called on every Osage maker she knew. \u201cEverybody in the community made moccasins for this,\u201d she said. The local nurse who gave her a Covid shot wound up doing ribbon work on two blankets. West\u2019s wardrobe team of 10 picked up the slack, learning how to finger-weave at lightning speed. Normally tied over the back of a chair, one belt traditionally takes months to complete.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n