If you’re wanting to research the Victorian era, you should know it goes from 1837 to 1901. Also, I’ve seen people on the Internet refer to Edwardian dresses as either “Victorian” or “1920s.” (People don’t seem to know that the Edwardian era is a time period that exists?) But hopefully you get the point. Further, I couldn’t possibly know that there are kind of three different sub-eras within the medieval period as far as fashion goes. Know your date– this sounds so simple, but it’s really amazing how often people are ignorant of the actual dates of historical time periods! When I was 13 and working on my novel, I didn’t actually know that the medieval period is considered to be from about 1066 A.D. For example I created rules about head coverings for married vs unmarried women, fashion distinctions between nobility and peasants, and so on.)Īnyway, how do you get from Point A to Point B, you may be wondering? From a vague Google search to a collection of accurate depictions from the era? Here’s my advice on how to get there.ġ. Knowing the “rules” of medieval European fashion helped me to break them in an informed way and create a different, but believable, culture. And what I ended up doing is not copying medieval European fashions exactly, but kind of making up my own fashion culture based loosely on the patterns and rules I’ve observed from fashion history in general. It’s still not finished because I changed the plot like 5 times. (In case any of you are curious, I’m still working on my fantasy novel. But you can see how striking the difference is between the Google screenshot and the screenshot from my medieval research board on Pinterest. For example I don’t see any Burgundian or Houppelande dresses anywhere on this screenshot. In reality, medieval fashion looked more like this.Īnd that’s not a complete sampling of all the different styles in medieval fashion, of course. The only dress that looks okay-ish to me is the one on the far left in the middle row, the blue one with a brown belt. (Now, they did have some sheer, gauzy materials in the Middle Ages, but they were used pretty differently than that and don’t appear to be the same as chiffon we have today.) That one dress on the far right in the middle row uses net and lace in a pretty inaccurate way. There are some dresses with full, ballgown-ish skirts that ooze with chiffon. There’s a lot of cheap costumes made out of inaccurate materials like polyester and spandex. What you get here in this search is not all bad, but it is mostly bad. Just now, I tried searching Google for “medieval dresses” just to see what would come up and it looked like this: Spoiler alert: this is not a good way to research the history of fashion. Then one day I became curious about what medieval fashion actually looked like, so what did I do? I searched the Internet for “medieval dresses” and trusted that whatever came up in the Images tab was accurate to medieval times. I just drew things that I thought were pretty and looked vaguely historical. At first, I didn’t care at all about the historical accuracy of the dresses. What I enjoyed probably even more than the writing part was drawing the characters’ outfits. The reason I even got into fashion history in the first place was because I was writing a medieval fantasy novel as a young teenager. I’ll be the first to admit that when I first became interested in fashion history, I did not do very good research at first. I’m a finance major who loves fashion history and has been studying it on my own time for many years.) (Disclaimer: I’m not a professional fashion historian. And now I just got inspired to write a post for those of you who are interested in learning more about fashion history, but don’t know where to start! But college is finally starting to wrap up for me, the entire world is shut down from the coronavirus, and I have no job due to the economy being bad. Between college and my personal projects, I’ve had no time for blogging. Hi everyone! I know it’s been forever since I last wrote on this blog.
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