> Even costuming accuracy can be a communications problem, since modern viewers have certain associations that are hard to unlearn. Want to costume a princess to feel sweet and feminine? The modern eye demands pink or light blue, though the historian knows pale colors coded poverty. Want to costume a woman to communicate the fact that she’s a sexy seductress? The audience needs the bodice and sleeves to expose the bits of her [that] modern audiences associate with sexy, regardless of which bits would plausibly have been exposed at the time.
> I recently had to costume some Vikings, and was lent a pair of extremely nice period Viking pants which had bold white and orange stripes about two inches wide. I know enough to realize how perfect they were, and that both the expense of the dye and the purity of the white would mark them as the pants of an important man, but that if someone walked on stage in them the whole audience would think: "Why is that Viking wearing clown pants?"
Taking the Vikings tv show example - Ragnar Lothbroke would have been in richly and boldly colorful, probably embroidered, clothing of wool and linen and maybe even silk or cotton from trade.
He would have been covered in gold and silver jewelry, and his armor and weapons would have been gilt or inlaid with silver, gold, and copper-alloy and intricately engraved.
Instead we get an extra from Sons of Anarchy complete with tats and edgy haircut.
Edit, also 3/4s of those impressions the modern audience does have is from decades of movies and tv shows. I think a project that respects its audience could do its part to start projecting more accurate impressions of past aesthetics and fashion sensibilities.
Outlaw King (netflix movie about Robert Bruce) is bad, but a leap better than other medieval outings - they at least try, the armor is sloppy, ill-fitting, and anachronistic but the weapons, clothing and heraldry are really good.
Others more expert than me have mentioned Henry V (1944) with Laurence Olivier as being the best movie attempt at 15th century armor.
A company that makes clothes and merchandise for 'viking' enthusiasts kick started a short film that is absolutely excellent in terms of language, clothes, and attitude of the very late Viking period, although they too fall prey to the Vikings-as-bad-ass-biker trope on occcasion. (Not to mention the romantic sanitization of all the unsavory activities any early medieval raiders or pirates would get up to).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yqbowUiH-s
In general though, true historical accuracy is very hard to find outside niche youtube videos, even if you aren't terribly nitpicky about what is 'accurate'.
Not to mention there's no way a French crew would be in an American heavy frigate in 1805.
This seems more plausible than the presentation here.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/cZHd4yrC7DV2sdyndn...
Well, that claim didn't age well. It's hard to get non-low-rise pants in any variety now.
I like these a lot: https://www.varusteleka.com/en/product/sarma-worker-pants/55... And in wool: https://www.varusteleka.com/en/product/sarma-worker-trousers...
Wear them with button suspenders, so comfortable. Why did suspenders ever go out of fashion?
Otherwise, find a good menswear store or even a tailor to custom make you proper-waisted pants. It's worth it.
People were already complaining about the impossibility of buying pants that fit years before that program came out.
You are already starting with "I want the princess to be cartoon character rather then human character".
Also, presumably, there would not been a single viking with bright pants, but rather all characters having colors. So one wiking would stand out less.
That doesn't follow at all. The whole concept of "the expense of the dye and the purity of the white mark these as the pants of an important man" is that the pants stand out from what everybody else is wearing. That's how you can tell that the one guy who can afford to wear them is rich and important.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
But then these pants also fit the character. And those Vikings are of course highly anachronistic. And wearing something closer to the criticized "Drab barbarian clothes."
While we're on the topic of pedantry, the blog is called "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry", not "unlimited". Pfft!
https://acoup.blog/2020/11/20/miscellanea-my-thoughts-on-ass...