Thread by @RowennaM

I may regret this later but I'm doing it anyway:

How Fantasy Costumes Can In Fact be "Historically Inauthentic" A Thread.

First! If you don't care about this...that's cool! Enjoy whatever you enjoy! That's the joy of fantasy and entertainment in general! Have fun!

However, if your idea of fun is pedantic conversations about the feasibility of various textile expressions in fantasy worlds, read on!

Here's the thing--we have to understand "historical authenticity" to mean not authentic to OUR world but authentic to the world depicted in the Work, whatever the Work might be.

Varying points in the history of a world will have different technology and trade.

Technology and trade will both affect what is plausible in the creation of textiles. It's not merely a question of what people have thought of--it's what is possible to create given the limitations present in a time and place.

Climate affects what you can grow or raise in terms of textile production. If you establish that the people of your world live in an isolated tundra and raise goats and harvest skins for their clothing, when what is a pair of cotton underpants doing in a scene? Nothing realistic!

Trade allows for different climates to access the products of other climates. Let's put a pin in any nasty colonial or imperial motivations for a minute and just consider the trade of goods--now your tundra dwellers can get bolts of linen...

...and your temperate plains dwellers can get rare Tundra Yak Fur or whatever.

But at different times and places, trade has been limited both naturally and artificially. The impact of lack of trade extends even to simple, basic stuff like the socks your characters wear.

Trade creates additional opportunities for prestige goods and novel introductions, and that's fun to play with, too, but end of day--if you can't make it here, it has to be imported. If you don't import it, you can't have it.

As technology expands, often, so does trade. But technology also introduces advances in textile production that affect how clothing is made, worn, used.

Let's consider something so basic it's silly--keeping your socks up. We rarely worry about this today, because our socks are extra and specially stretchy! But stretchy clothes are relatively new.

Historically, even knit clothing didn't have THAT much stretch, and it was a heck of a lot stretchier than woven clothing. Some stockings were sewn of woven materials; even those that were knit weren't snugly stretchy like ours. So people HAD to use garters to keep their socks up

And how silly is that--a minor detail! Yet if the clothing in a fantasy world is basically made of modern knitwear--which requires modern knit fabric looms to produce and best produced into clothing with modern sergers--well, awkward.

Historical clothing had give built in in all kinds of ways to mitigate the lack of stretch. Giant butts in men's breeches so the front could be tight. Clothing rarely pulls over the head, excepting under linens, because you can't have nice neat SMALL armscyes and head holes.

The style of corsets changes with the introduction of spring steel boning and the mass production of front-closing steel busks. You just couldn't make those shapes with whalebone or reed and handsewn eyelets.

An ordinary person having a LOT of clothing relies on mass production, which relies on technology. Yet at the same time, this means people are caring for their clothing as an investment--I maintain that being dirty is not actually very accurate!

So a fantasy world builds a space with a particular climate, which will have limitations, establishes the level of technology and the level of trade--and this all impacts what is plausible from textiles.

"But if you can accept dragons or magic or fairies, why not stretchy shirts?!"

Nothing wrong with that! Enjoy what you enjoy! But I'm glad you mentioned magic!

Because OF COURSE magic in fantasy worlds can mitigate the limitations of climate and technology!

And if writers want to invest more time on mages who create jersey knitwear for the peoples of a fantasy world, or flax plants that grow in the snow, or socks that magically stay up--that would be amazing!

Ok, amazing for me. I know what I vibe on. Anyway.