Costume, Combat and Culture

Part 2 By Guest Author Teel James Glenn

Practicality in clothing is not just the providence of the medieval; the fur trappers of our own Northwest wore the fringe on their buckskin shirts as more than decoration. They left the extra skin when sewing the clothes and slit them into the fringe to have lashings available. Just reach up and pluck one when you needed to fasten something.

Speaking of fastenings, have you ever wondered why men's clothes button left over right and women's the other way?

In the late sixteen hundreds dueling was all the rage in France; young gentlemen began to slaughter one another at an appalling rate. However, it was darned inconvenient to have to stop the blood letting to remove one's jacket. It was discovered that a right-handed man (and most are right handed) could loosen enough buttons with his left hand quickly enough to facilitate the annihilation while holding his sword pointed at an enemy. So the buttons became fixed.

It was also around this time that a general, seeing soldiers wipe their noses on the sleeves of their military tunics ordered buttons sewn on the sleeves to stop the practice; hence sleeves on men's suit jackets and a thriving handkerchief industry.

France's Louis the XIV also gave us cowboy boots-well indirectly. Seems the Sun King, who loved to dance, was particularly proud of his calves and liked to show them off. So he wore clam diggers (well, calf length pants that looked like modern clam diggers) and high heels shoes.

And what the King did everyone copied; breeches became the standard for nobility and that filtered to all levels of society. Heels in general became higher for men's shoes and boots.

So if you guys ever wan to feel like the king of France put on some clam diggers and cowboy boots and tell everyone to bow to you-see how fast you end up in the psych ward.

Some clothing styles seem, at first, to be the product of the psych ward--

 

Reasons Behind Absurd Clothing Styles

The Burkha, the black head and foot body bag that women are forced to wear in ultra orthodox Muslim society is a perfect example of nonsense clothing. Not to say it does not serve a purpose-in this case to reduce women to less than human by robbing them of individuality. As a garment that allows one to function as a useful human being it is absurd.

The religious will tell you it is to protect men from temptation and 'honor' women by preserving their female purity for their husband's sight. A realist will tell you it is because the men fear the women's power and their own weakness.

The Burkha is not an ancient garment however, though the thinking behind it may be Neanderthal, it was created in Afghanistan in 1973 by the Taliban and its wearing enforced on the penalty of death. So odd or strange clothing you might want to impose in your world need only have a religious reason and you can throw most logic out the window.

Other absurd clothing has been motivated by politically practical purposes--the Japanese court of the eighteenth and nineteenth century wore twenty-foot long kimono robes with very long sleeves. This necessitated crawling around like a toddler in daddy's coat and made on the spot fights impossible. Who could throw a punch or kick while buried in yards and yards of silk?

 

Cultural Nuances and Reasonings

Nothing occurs in a vacuum and this scientific truth carries over to any created reality; in the final analysis, all literary worlds are fantasy and contain only those facts that we state or imply. In any story set in the world we live in whether in the past or future, a millennium of 'implied' realities exist including cultural nuances and reasonings that create the world for our reader.

In a world we build wholly for our other-worldly characters to inhabit, we must do quite a bit more actual 'stating' to build an entire hidden world of the 'implied' and 'inferred' to make it real.

Get out the mortar, cause world building truly is a brick at a time thing….

 

Guest Author Bio:

Teel James Glenn, a native of Brooklyn, is the author of five published novels, Poetry and a book on how to write fight scenes for writers. He has written articles on theater, and swashbuckling related subject s and sold short stories to: MAD, Fantasy Tales, Afterburns, Anotherrealm, Blazing Adventures and other magazines. He has taught stage combat at colleges and choreographed fake violence for over 20 years for plays, Renaissance Festivals, films and New York soap operas (where he frequently appears as an actor). Follow his further adventures at www.teeljamesglenn.com