His shirt is not his usual plain fare, but one of a red to match the royal colours, trimmed around the sleeves, neck, and hem with precious gems and embroidered horses in gold thread, caught mid gallop. The collar is high and the hem long, to Arthur’s knees, but the sleeves remain short: beneath he wears an undershirt of purest white decorated with more golden thread. About his waist is a white belt to match the undershirt, and beneath that trousers of soft cream, stuffed into high leather oxblood boots. His head bears a golden circlet, and upon his fingers are many rings, and about his neck a half cloak of red and white plaid with a white fox-fur trim.
- The Poisoned Chalice: signing the treaty.
If in doubt, put a man in a big rectangle.
'Historical accuracy' is an impossible thing to achieve as a rule, and certainly not something that can really be done with the mysterious time period that this show is set in, no matter how I winge. It's not a gripe I really have with Arthur's wardrobe anyway, with the exception of the occasional suede-looking jacket.
(And the shoes. All the shoes in this show are from the local Primark bargin bin.)
Nah. My real gripe is with how plain it all is.
He's royalty! Where's the bling? Where's the extravagance? Where's the weirdness?
Whatever time period you settle on - late antiquity, sub-roman Britain, ambiguous medieval - the fashion should be notably strange to the modern eye. Like, I'd kill to see Arthur in a goddam houppelande, and a chaperone, and a pretty pair of hose.
(Pictured - late medieval Arthur if the BBC weren't cowards.)
So, big rectangle.
The easiest way to start making clothing is a tunic, and the easiest way to make a tunic is to take a big rectangle and put a small hole in the middle for the wearers head. Most of fashion history (generalising wildly, of course) is a variation on the theme of Big Rectangle with Hole. Especially in late antiquity and early medieval fashion, at least what we know about it, the tunic is the base garment upon which everything else was built, even if you were as rich as Midas. The bit that marked you as rich was usually how much fabric and what colour. Fabric and dye was expensive, so the more you had, for fabric (took longer to make), or the variety or depth of colour for dying (some colours were costly, and different shades needed to go into the vat at different times), the higher the cost.
So Arthur should be to Merlin as a peacock is to a common sparrow. Where's the embroidery? Where's the layers? Where's the bling? The fancy outfit Arthur seems to default is his armour, for goodness sake -
- which can be fancy, but is also heavy, cumbersome, and easily swapped out for cloth that can be made to ape armour if you really want -
- and that just doesn't cut it.
So, what might a fancy Arthur look like? Well, sadly for me, a houppelande is probably too late in the period for this version of Arthur - if we care about period accuracy, the appearance of Saxons, as opposed to, say, the English, rather sets a date limit. Rather than spend too much time worrying when which bit of fashion came when (buttons are apparently later to the game than I ever would have guessed) I went for some British medieval staples:
Bitches love layers, bitches love gold, and bitches love plaid.
I found a few inspiration pieces - the brooch above is a replica of one found in Bath, in the distinctive pennular style, for example -and otherwise went with something that wouldn't look too out of place with the costuming on the rest of the show. It's fancy enough that Arthur actually matches the glam level of Morgana, his nearest peer, in a way that I hope merges what we might expect from a very 2000s masculine Arthur with something that's actually interesting to look at.
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I found a sick mobster pose, and suddenly feel like I can draw mob au Wally very well and have a detailed WIP. Definitely going to be making this into a fully fledged piece.
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