[George Hill]

The biggest mistake people seem to make in making historical clothing is using machine produced tight weave fabrics.
Fabrics that are so tight weave that they can only be made by a machine.

I won't name names, but I see mostly people who look like they are dressed up, rather then having stepped out of history. They don't look good in my opinion, and I confess I tend to be rather hesitant about saying so when I think something looks bad. I don't care to hurt feeling and all that.

But I will say this. To make a peice of clothing that looks historically accurete, you need to start with fabrics that look historically accurete.

[Chad Arnow]

I think any purchaser of these items needs to first define their vision of historical accuracy (and for what time period). In the most literal sense, historically accurate clothing would be nearly impossible to get:

Flax for linen would need to be grown in fields not fertilized with modern fertilizers and would need to be harvested with period techniques, not with machines. Ditto for cotton. We'd have to do climatological research so we'd know the temperature and humidity ranges of the time period in question, since there are natural cyclical climate changes the earth goes through regardless of human intervention. We don't want to grow flax in weather different from medieval times, right? We'd also want to make sure any modern air pollutants wouldn't affect the crop's quality.

Wool would need to be harvested using period techniques from sheep fed period feed who are not as scientifically well-bred as they are today. These sheep would need to drink natural well water, not water purified/filtered/added to.

The raw materials would have to be woven into cloth on non-electrically powered looms and the resultant cloth died with organic dyes appropriate for region/time period/social status. Plant-derived dyes would have to be grown in fields fertilized only with fertilizers used in period and harvested and prepared using historical techniques, too. Garments would have to then be made of totally accurate materials with totally accurate tools and techniques, without the benefit even of sewing in artificial light in an air-conditioned room. Artificial lighting might cause your stitches to be more even than candlelight or something. You never know.

Unless techniques and processes like those described above are researched and followed to a "T," you can't truly describe an item as historically accurate, can you?

Of course, many people reading this are thinking "Chad is nuts." True enough, I suppose. While making clothes that way would make them "historically accurate" it would likely make them something else, too: prohibitively expensive. It would also make them hard to find.

So "historical accuracy" as a term is pretty absolute, but pretty unrealistic in many cases. How far you take the term is something else. What George says is correct: even people using historical patterns and non-machine stitching are probably using cloth weaves and dyes that aren't historically accurate.

Every purchaser needs to decide whether they want to be totally historically accurate (nearly impossible) or find some happy medium between modern materials and techniques and historical ones. This applies to weapons, too. The level of compromise people are willing to take is very personal.

For me, I'd want to avoid visible machine stitching and obviously incorrect fabrics and inappropriate colors. But if the fabric is a tighter weave than historical cloth or the color from synthetic chemicals, I'm not going to jump off a bridge. After all, in many cases, this clothing might be under armour.

A decent guide to accuracy is to decide how close someone needs to be to you to realize inaccuracies. The difference in cost between looking accurate from 4-5 feet away vs. under a magnifying glass can be substantial. Does it matter? Depends on who you are.

[Kel Rekuta]

[Al Muckart]

[Al Muckart]

Hi George,

[Jessica Finley]

[George Hill]

[Al Muckart]

Hi George,

[Gordon Clark]

Agree that there are many definitions of historical accuracy. To me one that makes sense is :

An item is historically accurate if, using what we know about period methods and materials, a period individual familiar with such period items would find nothing very unusual about the item.

That is not a very good definition, since it is not precise, but it gives the intent of what I mean by historical accuracy: A modern produced virtual equivalent. You can go on to specify as mcuh as you like - would the historical person use the item or just view it. If viewing, would they touch it or stand at a distance, if a distance, how far...

I could also make this more brief, and possibly easier to satisfy: I want something that looks and feels right.
Becasue what is the point really? I dress up in this stuff to have fun - to feel like I am somewhere else; that I am someone else. If an item distracts me from that feeling because it is not accurate enough - if it nags at me because I know I have cut corners, then I need something closer to the period item. If not, then it is good enough for me.

Gordon

[Rod Parsons]

I think it unwise to predicate a misconceived generalisation about the quality of weaving upon comparison with a T shirt fabric.
In the first place it is not difficult to find examples of hand weaving that are far and away superior to common modern machine weave. In the second place the more open weave of many examples of mediaeval cloth is functional and such woollens are far more efficient than cotton as insulation in a cold damp climate.
Fullered English wool such as might be used in a doublet is very close and thick and provides excellent protection from the elements even when it takes on a lot of moisture.
I have stood in sleet, rain and snow for three days working in linen shirt, pourpoint, arrning jack and woollen hose, taking on enough moisture that we drove away with the windows open and the heating off so as to keep the windscreen clear of condensation, but the inside lining of my jack never even got damp and though my legs were damp they were not cold.
The greatest objection to much of the cheaper ( and some of the more expensive) costume is that not only are the wrong fabrics used, but the garments thenselves are often incorrectly and flimsily constructed.
Such a garment would offer little protection from inclement weather.
Without correct construction jacks and doublets in particular just do not display a proper fit even if the measure is correct.
Rod.

[B. Fulton]

I can "third" Matuls.... having seen two of his pieces and being in the middle of ordering one myself.