Historical Inaccuracy, Set Dressings, & Plot Devices
I don’t think I ever hide how much I love historical costuming and how I try to keep educated and up to date on all the details and research. I’ve had friends ask me questions when it comes to the fashions of the era they’re basing their wips on and I’m always very happy to help but I want to be clear.
Historical Inaccuracy does not equal bad. I tend to think about the first Pirates of the Caribbean in this case and how I was talking to someone and then asked my if the clothing in the movie was accurate and my mind always goes to that scene where we meet Elizabeth and she’s talking about corsets and how women in London must “not like breathing” when 1. They’re stays and 2. Elizabeth herself would have likely been wearing them since she was twelve. That’s not to say Pirates of the Caribbean isn’t a nostalgic fav of mine or I can’t credit it for helping to get me obsessed with pirates as a child or that scenes like that make me angry. In fact, Elizabeth’s unfamiliarity with stays works as a plot device later as she wouldn’t have fainted and fallen into the water if she’d actually been used to them/hadn’t been tight-laced and the exaggeration of not being able to breath for the extremes of fashion is more for the audience to later be able to accept this.
Long story short, I don’t actually go scouring through fiction to be angry about historically inaccurate fashion in stories that aren’t trying to match up to history in the first place. I think my point of wanting to be educated on historical fashion did start because of all the misconceptions and a genuine interest, and also because sometimes it’s nice to excuse my characters from my own modern sensibilities. There’s plenty of makeup trends, hairstyles, silhouettes, that I find very unattractive that’s present in historical fashion but I like using them because I like what they do for a setting and what they can tell readers about the characters so at the very least I do think reading a little bit about historical fashion is good to spark world building inspiration even if you don’t want to have a complete copy and paste of the reality in the same way I like complete exaggerations of history to have some basis in what is known. It’s also important to know that there are no absolutes in historical accuracy vs inaccuracy either. I can bemoan all day about corsetry and modern discourse and the misunderstanding of the garment but there were real people who didn’t like wearing them and didn’t wear them or were critical of them back in their heyday (Lousia May Alcott, author of Little Women a very famous voice of the anti-corset club) there are always going to be examples of a mainstream fashion culture but also alternatives but I’m always gonna be more interested in settings that ground their break from the mainstream in things that don’t immediately appeal to me as someone in the 21st century but stands as a form of rebellion that is more grounded in the setting than what the writer things their contemporaries will find cool.
I must sound very judgey at this point but I don’t really care I’m fully team complete avoidance of historical-esque aesthetics because people might find them ugly is silly to me because that’s about to be all modern characters in like 10 years. I’d much rather have my characters fit the aesthetics of their period whether or not I’m adhering to rules I made up or stole from a real era vs trying to match them up perfectly with current 21st century trends in the hopes readers will find them fuckable.
But the gist is really to choose what’s best for a setting and for a cast of characters or for the general tone of the story because historical accuracy doesn’t make or break a piece (unless that’s what it was going for and it failed miserably) and historical fashion isn’t even as strict or without leeway as many think.
