Costume, Combat and Culture in Make Believe Worlds

By Teel James Glenn

Fantasy worlds work when constructed on solid internal logic. A great deal of thought is often given to the political and religious structures of the world being created while the clothing and weapons are pasted into the picture like old Colorforms . Far too often the clothing, how and why it is worn, is all but ignored.

Clothing styles, however, happen for a reason—sometimes specious, sometimes political, and sometimes religious.

Edgar Rice Burroughs actually did quite a bit of research for his Indian stories before he distorted the information for his other fantasy worlds.

J.R.R. Tolkien of course, did copious research in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, German cultures to make his Middle Earth real. And Robert E. Howard was something of an expert in Celtic, German and Arabic cultures and used his historical research to weave a very real Hyborean age for his Conan to conquer.

So, by way of starting you on that journey across your own fantasy worlds here are a few extremes and oddities of costuming from this, our own weird world to use as templates for your own world to work from.

Fabrics and Colors

Even the color of clothing can have major meaning in the real world beyond family color-coding; it can be dictated by political or religious authorities! We all know that Royal Blue is a color, but it actually was legally claimed as the color of kings and the exclusive right of that nobility at one point. Centuries before the color purple produced from Phoenician dyes developed into the royal color of Rome.

Most think of the Scottish Kilt as just romantic and barbarous garb. In fact the twelve yards of fabric of the old great kilt functioned as armor (just try to cut through that much wool), sleeping bag/tent and camouflage net. The old patterns of the plaids were actually perfect camouflage for the regions they were woven in. Incidentally the specific clan tartans were not Scottish—they couldn’t have cared less –they wore what ever was convenient. The codified clan/plaid system was devised by an Englishman in the eighteen hundreds based on old prints and was totally arbitrary.

Silk is not just an elegant fiber; spun from the cocoons of worms; it is hypo allergenic and terribly strong. The Mongols, fierce nomads from the deserts of the East recognized both of these properties and wore shirts of silk under their felt jackets. Should an arrow strike them and penetrate the jackets it would push the shirt into the wound. To remove the arrow all the world conquerors had to do was gently pull the fabric of the shirt out and the arrow point would come with it.

The same cannot be said for cotton fibers driven by sword points into wounds. Often these fibers would stay in the wound and lead to infection, festering when undetected. This is why may duels in Regency England were often fought with the combatants striped to the waist.

Practicalities
That combat practicalities pervade all cultures at almost all times is a truism. Even stubborn boneheaded warriors like the crusaders could have learned from their enemies. Originally the European knights of the tenth century marched willy-nilly into Palestine wearing chain mail coats and gambesons, which were fine for cold damp Europe, but they died in droves from heat exhaustion and dehydration trekking across the deserts of the Holy Land.

When the Crusaders first encountered the Saracens they thought that they were unarmored. They soon discovered their mistake; the Muslim warriors were just smart enough to wear light colored cloth robes over their armor to fight off the desert sun. The Crusaders soon adopted this idea (along with, thank God, soap) that became the tabards we so often associate with medieval knights. They took to displaying symbols on their tabards to match their shield symbols and heraldry became the thing.

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.
 

Religious Influence
Some clothing styles seem, at first, to be the product of the psych ward—

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.

Absurd but Politically Practical
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?

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