The Style of Martin Scorsese's Films

Martin Scorsese’s highly anticipated Killers of the Flower Moon finally arrives to theatres this month. It’s the motion picture event of the year, and for menswear aficionados, it already seems like a feast for the eyes with everything from three-piece suits to cowboy hats. It’s an opportunity for Scorsese to flex his well-honed period costume drama muscles in a way that is reliably compelling. With the film on the way, it’s a good time to look back at the style in Scorsese’s pictures over the years, to better appreciate the sophisticated ways that the director uses clothing. It’s an aspect of his cinema that’s essential to its greatness — and a big reason some of his movies have been so misunderstood.

Midway through Taxi Driver, Scorsese’s seminal crime thriller about the deteriorating mind of a New York City everyman in the crime-ridden Manhattan of the mid-1970s, Travis Bickle, the ailing anti-hero played by Robert DeNiro, turns up at the bustling campaign rally of state senator and Democratic presidential hopeful Charles Palentine, intending to assassinate him. Lean and taut with ropey muscle after months of home exercise, he observes Palentine’s glad-handing from a distance with a goofy, deranged grin, looking hilariously conspicuous in an olive-green military jacket, crisp white button down, and aviator sunglasses. Oh, and he’s shaved his hair into a squat, chunky mohawk.

Does he look cool? It depends on who you ask. Travis Bickle’s crackpot assassination fit has been a perennial Halloween costume favourite among a certain class of male movie buff for decades now come late October, and more broadly, his pose of grungy, IDGAF disaffection has served as an appealing template for anyone hoping to strike a similar balance of punkish New York psycho-killer cool. Austrian-American costume designer Ruth Morley, who also made the wardrobes for Kramer vs Kramer and Annie Hall, certainly understood that Travis had to look the part of a man who had consciously stepped outside of social norms—a man who had firmly abandoned the dowdy flannel shirts and rust-coloured corduroy blazers that had earlier marked him as a nobody and a square.

But Travis Bickle’s reemergence as a man transformed also marks the final step in his long, arduous journey of psychic dissolution—the climax of his mental breakdown, culminating not in the planned assassination of the unwitting American senator. The cold indifference of his campaign-rally style is meant to externalize the turmoil he’s feeling inside: the costume is a manifestation of his state of mind. Not to put too fine a point on it, but to embrace the look as menswear style goals is to somewhat miss the point. Travis Bickle is a complex character deeply realised. But Travis Bickle isn’t cool.

Taxi Driver is far from the only Scorsese movie to create a certain ambiguity on this point. Like Brian De Palma’s Scarface—the ultimate example of a cautionary tale being widely misunderstood as a panegyric, as tens of thousands of dorm room posters and Supreme tees will gladly attest—Scorsese’s movies, especially his crime films, have a tendency to draw enthusiastic applause from people who don’t understand their satirical bite or critical edge. Is the pitch-black mafiosa tragedy Goodfellas an advertisement for the mob? (Spoiler: it is not.) Does Scorsese’s scathing, caustically tongue-in-cheek masterpiece The Wolf of Wall Street endorse the behaviour of its nominal protagonist Jordan Belfort? (Despite what myriad inane think pieces would have you believe, it isn’t either.)

The profound moral instinct that guides these films is expressed nowhere more clearly than in their wardrobes. Scorsese is an artist with a deep appreciation for fashion and an extensive understanding of the meaning that fashion can create. It runs in the family. His mother, the late Catherine Scorsese, worked as a seamstress in New York’s garment district while Martin was a child in the 1950s; his father, Charles, was a clothes presser for decades in Little Italy, and even served as a wardrobe consultant for his son’s period drama The Age of Innocence. This intuitive grasp of how clothes are made taught Scorsese to see them as more than just things to wear. “He understands the language of clothing and how it informs the character,” the costume designer John Dunn said of Scorsese in an interview in 2020.

Dunn worked on the wardrobe for Casino, the extravagant (and underrated) 1995 mob drama whose ravishingly glamorous costumes are one of the highlights of the film. Few Scorsese films are looked back on now with as much appreciation for the outfits, and in the style of DeNiro’s all-powerful casino boss Sam Rothstein alone, it’s not hard to see why: he spends the duration of the runtime decked out in lurid suits awash in neon pinks, mustard yellows, deep forrest greens and glaring ruby reds. Rothstein travels lugging oversized Louis Vuitton weekenders and lounges around his house in a pink silk bathrobe, Neiman Marcus loafers, and an 18-carat white gold wristwatch. (“You’re walking around like John Barrymore! A fucking pink robe and a cigarette holder,” Joe Pesci admonishes him.) GQ magazine called Casino the “most stylish film of all time,” and that is not an unreasonable claim. But the stylishness remains in service of the broader point: style as wealth, not taste.

Goodfellas is not as extravagant as Casino, sartorially speaking, for the simple reason that Henry Hill and his mafia cohort spend their time galavanting around grubby New York rather than budding Las Vegas. The story of style in Goodfellas is the story of Hill himself: his rise through the ranks of the mob is reflected in his increasingly lavish wardrobe of suits and chic athleisure, as it’s strongly insinuated that becoming a “made man” is as much about the creation and solidification of a cool masculine image as it is about any real achievement in the world of crime. Nowhere is this more beautifully illustrated than in one of the movie’s earliest scenes, when an adolescent Hill turns up on his mother’s doorstep after being granted entree into the inner circle of capo Paulie Cicero, wearing a brand-new double-breasted suit. “What do you think?” he asks proudly. “My god, you look like a gangster!’ she wails, horrified. Indeed he does. And looking the part, Scorsese posits, is half the job.

Scorsese often uses costume changes to signal these kinds of identity shifts. (Again, look at the effect of Travis Bickle’s new look in Taxi Driver.) In The Wolf of Wall Street, Leonardo DiCaprio trots out dozens of huge, dazzling 80s power suits, teeming with pinstripes, wide lapels, thick ties, and gold Rolexes. Of course, their function is to ensconce DiCaprio’s Belfort in the armour of his profession, making him as exaggeratedly stately and foppish as he needs to be to do his job. Without the closet full of lavish suiting—without the watches, the sports cars, the super yachts, without all the expensive stuff he’s surrounded himself with—Belfort would have to confront the fact that he’s just a man, no different than any of the men he’s been ripping off professionally for decades. The clothing makes him feel like a superhero, a soldier, a god. And Scorsese wants us to be aware that like everything he peddles, this whole image is a fabrication. It’s the wardrobe as a lie.

Here’s the only piece of concrete fashion advice you’ll get in this piece: don’t try to dress like Jordan Belfort. While there’s a time and place for power suits, and while no one single item he wears is a sartorial red flag, the overall impression of his personal style should be “con man and sham artist,” not “super cool guy I’d like to emulate.” It’s been the prerogative of mislead finance bros and tech-industry guys to worship Belfort as their hero, but it’s simply the latest example in a long tradition of Scorsese’s movies being mischaracterized and his costume design being wrongly understood. The Wolf of Wall Street is a great film that uses menswear in a compelling and sophisticated way—a great example of well-utilized costume design. But make no mistake: Jordan Belfort isn’t cool, and neither is his style.