Killers of the Flower Moon:- The unmatched bridal attire and tribal customs are on display in Martin Scorsese’s epic drama about killings in Osage territory in the 1920s.
The Osage nation, which is concentrated in northeast Oklahoma, was the richest group in the world in the 1920s. Members of the tribe were sitting on enormous wealth as a result of the oil beneath their territory. They were also spending it on roadsters and Parisian fashion; the neighborhood trade post had a Tiffany’s counter.
They combined their newly acquired styles with their tribal aesthetics and customs, donning traditional wool blankets with Stetsons and Spanish-heeled cowboy boots and decorating the towering silk hats they wore to weddings with embroidery and colorful feathers.
The epic film “Killers of the Flower Moon,” directed by Martin Scorsese and set on Osage territory, is scheduled to come out on October 20. Based on the nonfiction best seller by David Grann, the film stars Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Lily Gladstone, a member of the Blackfeet and Nez Percé tribes, in a harrowing crime saga about the murders that tore through the tribal nation beginning in the 1920s as the Osage’s white neighbors sought to strip them of their oil rights by any means necessary.
According to Julie O’Keefe, a tribal member and the main Osage costume consultant for the movie, the cultural divide went back several generations. Her forefathers “had what I call Kardashian money dropped on top of them,” she claimed. They were smart with money, yet they hardly ever employed a system based on money before that time: “We traded for everything that we needed.” According to the narrative, Lizzie Q, the matriarch, “had come off the prairie hunting buffalo.”
Under Scorsese’s direction, the filmmakers tried to portray the Osage as accurately as possible, right down to the fabric of their clothing. Killers of the Flower Moon There was a ton of documentation because, according tremendous Jacqueline West, the film’s costume designer, the Osage were wealthy enough to commission pictures and even shoot home videos, which were absurdly expensive at $800 per minute. Few people in the world could afford that, yet they beautifully captured their lives, travels, and places they lived. I trusted those Killers of the Flower Moon.
According to Daniel C. Swan, an anthropology professor and curator emeritus at the University of Oklahoma who has written about the tribe, the Osage always had a taste for luxury and color when it came to dress and jewelry. Killers of the Flower Moon He stated, “If you read the descriptions of contacts with them in the 16th and 17th centuries, they had this air about them — we would say they had great elegance.
The Osage were on-trend as much as Vogue editors during the beginning of the 20th century. Swan remarked, “They had extraordinarily sophisticated palates. Killers of the Flower Moon They maintained their footwear and hairstyles, dressing in the best French, Italian, and New York fashion. However, Killers of the Flower Moon weddings offered perhaps the clearest glimpse into their culture and sartorial splendor.
The wedding scene in “Killers of the Flower Moon” is breathtaking, Killers of the Flower Moon with Mollie Kyle, Killers of the Flower Moon the bride, played by Gladstone, and Killers of the Flower Moon her bridesmaid sisters dressed in elaborately embroidered skirts, finger-woven belts, Killers of the Flower Moon and Killers of the Flower Moon custom military coats with brass buttons and braided epaulets. The outfit is completed with 18-inch high hats draped in French ribbon and strewn with cyan or magenta-colored feathers. Even though it seems ridiculous, it is really true Killers of the Flower Moon.
The coats were entangled with American history when they entered the Osage culture. Osage leaders paid President Thomas Jefferson a visit at the White House in the early 1800s. The leaders were welcomed with military displays that displayed the new nation’s military strength as part of a U.S. government campaign to win over tribes along the route that the explorers Lewis and Clark would traverse. An Osage chief reportedly showed interest in the coats worn by his Washington, D.C. counterparts and asked for one, which was then given to him. Given how tall Osage people were, it didn’t fit, so he gave it to his daughter, who followed a long-standing custom by wearing it to her wedding.
Repurposing military garb for a bridal has a “beautifully rebellious” air, according to West. Jefferson sought to show a dynamic, but the Osage subverted it by turning “something that represented power over them into something that represented joy.” When the original coats wore out, they even created their own versions of them.
Swan claimed that “the United States government distributed these coats to all different tribes.” But only the Osage transformed them into bridal regalia.
Swan, co-author with Jim Cooley of “Wedding Clothes and the Osage Community,” created a companion exhibition at the Sam Noble Museum in Norman, Oklahoma, which Scorsese and his crew visited early on in the making of the movie. “They immediately exclaimed, ‘He’s going to adore this!’ when they saw those wedding gowns! Swan, who served as a resource for the film, remembered, “You can bet there will be a wedding in this movie. (For this piece, Scorsese declined to respond.)
The costume designer, West, drew inspiration from vintage pieces, including heirloom clothing that the real-life characters’ descendants had stashed away in trunks. She worked with Osage craftspeople to commission duplicates as much as she could.
O’Keefe, who is from Tulsa, called on every Osage maker she knew for her numerous crowd scenes. For this, she claimed, “everyone in the community made moccasins.” The community nurse who administered the Covid shot ended up sewing ribbons onto two blankets. Ten members of West’s wardrobe department stepped in to pick up the slack, quickly mastering finger weaving. Typically, it takes months to create one belt, which is knotted over the back of a chair.
A large, multiday event entrenched in their ethos of generosity, an Osage wedding was unlike any other Indigenous ritual. Shannon Shaw Duty, editor of the tribal publication Osage News, said: “I was taught that being Osage is about sharing and togetherness and taking care of one another from a very young age.
Swan said that in the past, “they would give away 50 or 60 heads of horse, feed 400 or 500 people for a week” at weddings. According to one account from 1932, the father of the bride purchased five brand-new Chevrolet roadsters and gave them out at Hominy, Oklahoma, Swan continued. He claimed to have spent about $50,000—more than $1 million in 2018—on the wedding.
During the time of arranged weddings, that level of celebration was often reserved for a family’s eldest sons or daughters and was primarily observed by full-blooded Osages like Mollie Kyle. Swan said that it would have been unlikely for an Osage woman to marry a white guy, as she did in the film, but Scorsese used his creative license.
The scene is a respite from the otherwise heartbreaking narrative. Grann claims in his book that there were likely many, many more fatalities than the 24 cases the F.B.I. arrived to investigate.
O’Keefe was raised in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, the Osage nation’s capital. Everyone is connected to the narrative, she claimed. Because everyone in our communities lost someone, a family member, as a result of peculiar circumstances, there isn’t a district that doesn’t.
The wedding coats are one recurrent symbol from that era; during World War II, they were worn at the Osage people’s customary summer communal dance rather than at weddings. Swan argued that it is a unique and striking illustration of a historical garment that has achieved cultural durability while simultaneously being “recharted.”
O’Keefe remarked that at a recent dance, there were six to eight “bridesmaids,” who were “dressed in all these different wedding coats and hats, that were all given away to families.”
There is only one outing per woman wearing a coat. It’s a profoundly meaningful moment in a dance that hasn’t evolved much in more than a century, Shaw Duty noted. “People will always remember who made them and who wore them,” the woman predicted. “This is our own little Osage world in action, and it makes us happy.”