Dalish Textile And Fashion vs. Real World Textile Art
So I’ve been writing a fanfic recently that centers around Clan Lavellan and takes a deeper dive into Dalish culture as presented in Dragon Age (super inconsistent and retconned up the ass which is a whole other problem entirely but I digress). In my research, I noticed that, for all of the world lore and ideology we get for the Dalish, the actual physical and aesthetic culture is woefully underdeveloped. This is gonna be a doozy of a rant, so strap in.
We are told that the Dalish make beautifully carved Halla horns that are considered extremely valuable as the Dalish are the only people who can herd the Halla. We are told that they make weapons and armor out of Ironbark, a rare and prized material that only they know how to work with. The Vallaslin are beautiful, unique patterns that indicate both the god of choice and the specific clan that the bearer hails from.
The design of Dalish garb and textiles are fucking bad. They reflect very little, if anything at all, of what we are told about Dalish culture and poorly reflect on real world cultural equivalents.
So I’m an artist. I went to art school, I took tons of art history courses, and many many textile history classes in particular. Our department chair was a textile major and is very well respected in her field. I learned a lot from her classes, and studied a great deal of textile history from around the globe, all across human history. I’m not claiming to be an expert, but I know enough to know that what little we get for Dalish clothing design is garbo, especially if you take into consideration the ethnic groups that the writers have based the Dalish off of.
Universally, textiles are super important to recording culture. Textile work contains stories, myths, lineage, etc. You can learn so much about a culture just from their clothing. The Dalish should, given all that we are told about them, have extensive and beautiful textile work. Instead, we get green rags, woven leather, chainmail(???), and fur pauldrons. This makes no sense from a historical perspective, a cultural perspective, or a material availability perspective.
Lets start with the most ridiculous recurring features of Dalish fashion: Chainmail and Fur Pauldrons.
Chainmail is not easy to make. It is not as common as fantasy stories would have you believe. Chainmail, plate armor, and even quality leather, was historically preserved for the wealthy (who could afford the material and production costs) and their armies. Fighters from poor backgrounds often utilized felt for armor. Hard packed felt is dense enough to stop arrows and much cheaper/easier to get than metal or fine leather. Thedas appears to be in the Iron age, and the chainmail presented all appears to be iron-linked in presentation. In order to work iron, you would need access to a forge. The Dalish are a nomadic people. In all likelihood, they don’t have forges to craft metal in abundance. Certainly the smaller, more reclusive clans that we are shown in game would not have them, and so they definitely should not have iron chainmail. In fact, most of their weapons and armor should contain as little metal as possible or be obtained through trade/loot. The larger clans that are more sedentary may have forges from which they could work metal and trade materials, but for most clans, metal would be precious and difficult to work on the road.
What they could instead have is scale mail, which can be made from any number of materials, or just leather armor. They have access to the Halla, who they are known to make milk and cheese from, and the Dalish are designed wearing woven leather armor in abundance. Leather and chainmail serve functionally similar purpose in stopping arrows and blunting the blow of a weapon or hit. Neither is particularly effective against heavy slashing weapons on their own. Given that the leather is canonically commonplace already, just give them leather armor. Fuck outta here with the medieval chainmail skinsuits. (I know the Dalish worship Halla, but I have not been able to find any resources on how they utilize the Halla as a resource apart from the horns, so if it is against their beliefs to use their hide, please let me know and sent a source if you have one.)
Moving on to the very silly fur pauldrons. From what we know of the fauna of Thedas, the course, blackish fur that the pauldrons seem to be made of would most likely be wolf fur. Setting aside how absolutely useless fur would be as protective armor, why the fuck would the Dalish people, whose religious equivalent to the devil is ‘The Dread Wolf,’ wear wolf fur at all? Using it as a resource for pelts and whatnot is whatever, but the fur pauldrons are entirely decorative, so that would be kind of weird from a cultural standpoint, like the choirboys at church all rolled up with devil horn headbands. Even if they aren’t wolf fur or the Dalish are more practical than superstitious(which isn’t true from what we are repeatedly told), it would still be a very silly use of resources. They would have no functional purpose because fur is not good armor so why are you wearing it like armor. What is this design choice, I don’t understand.
This is the meat of the rant and what spurred this whole long winded tirade in the first place.
Universally, for as long as people have known how to construct garments, they have decorated them with pattern, color, and any number of supplementary decorations they had access to.
The Dalish are a canonically nomadic people. Think of all of the nomadic peoples in the history of our world. Think of their textile and clothing. Every single group, especially the ones that the Dalish are explicitly stated to have been based off of, wear and create beautiful, colorful, intricately patterned clothing. So why are the Dalish designed to look so bland?
The early inspiration for the Dalish are the Romani people and the Jewish people. Both groups have beautiful, colorful, highly decorated cultural clothing. Later, the writers switched gears to the Indigenous people of North America (a questionable choice considering the way in which they have been writing the Dalish, esp in Inquisition but again that’s a whole other rant entirely). If you know anything about the Indigenous people of North America, then you know that they are broadly diverse with unique art and textile work. Many Indigenous garbs are made from deer hide, which is difficult to dye, but that does not mean that they were left undecorated. There are countless examples of amazing painted hides, intricate beadwork, and gorgeous embroidery used to decorate the clothing in all colors of the rainbow. North America is a biological dream as far as resources are concerned (or it was before capitalism ate the damn place fuck), and access to plants for dye and fibers for thread were abundant. If you are basing your fictional culture off of the indigenous people of North America, stop trying to act like there was not color outside of feathers, face paint, and fucking Disney Pocahontas jewelry. Those things were sometimes there, but not in any of the stereotypical, generally offensive ways that they are commonly presented in pop culture.
So, I’m American, and I am not of Indigenous descent. I don’t want to speak for actual Indigenous people, but a trend that I notice often in pop culture media when it comes to white people writing and designing ‘tribal’ or ‘nomadic’ ethnic groups is the tendency to revert the image of the culture to colorless caveman furs and rags. That seems pretty insulting to me tbh. I am a POC with brown ancestry. The precolonial peoples that are native to my heritage, South East Asia, fall into the ‘tribal’ category and it has always rubbed me the wrong way to see these beautiful cultures and complex societies reduce to ‘I live in the forest and hunt deer so everything that I wear is hide, rags, and fur.’
The Dalish are not quite reduced entirely to hide, rags, and furs, but they also are not designed very well or to the equivalent that a lot of the other in game ethnic groups are. Part of this is budget from DA:O making Dalish outfits essentially recolors of the other in game clothing, but by Inquisition, the aesthetic should be more pronounced and individualistic to reflect how different the culture is stated to be over and over again. Instead, we kind of just get ‘Plant-based Fereldan’ flavored designs. We get a bit more Dalish specific clothing in DAI, and the long, high collared coat is a great addition imo, but a lot of the other armors fall very flat. It’s a lot of green, play-dough looking leather, boob plate, coat tails, plain fabric belts that are used in p much every armor in the game, the stupid skin-tight chainmail, and woven leather. Their most defining traits are the use of green and the woven leather, but it’s crazy to me that they are shoe-horned into only the colors green and brown because ‘elf, forest, trees.’ There are plenty of examples of forest dwelling hunter-gatherer societies who utilized a wide assortment of colors. There are only a handful of patterns, and almost none of them are unique to the Dalish or resemble the patterns of the Vallaslin which should appear much more frequently in their clothing for how much they value it. The Dalish aesthetic is so disappointingly uninspired and generic elfy which sucks since the rest of the world (Orlais in particular for some ungodly reason) gets so much intricate and specific aesthetic designs.
Finally, lets talk about materials. I already mentioned how dumb I think the chainmail is, the extra silly fur pauldrons, and actually goods use of woven leather.
Dalish elves have Halla. It stands to reason that they would have a lot of leather and hide from the Halla. But the Halla also have wool. And not just any wool, but wool that is specifically described as ‘soft and smooth, the gaps in the weave so small it doesn’t catch on anything. It feels cool in summer and warm in winter.’
The only natural, real world fabric to match this description is silk. The Dalish have easy access to silk production. Why aren’t they wearing silk????
Not only is silk a light, coveted, and valuable product, it is very easy to dye and fantastic for embroidery. Dalish clothing should be much more colorful and decorative if they have silk and they have had silk for thousands of years. Even if the silk functioned and spun more like sheep’s wool, it would still be an incredibly abundant, dyable, easily decorated material. And living in the wilderness, the Dalish would absolutely be able to create all kinds of colored dye.
The Dalish are also stated to be a very spread out people, living in clans all over the world. Which means that they would all live in different biomes and climates, with access to different materials to supplement the silk, leather, and hide that every clan would have access to. There should be Dalish clothing for all temperatures, that have variations in patterns, motifs, colors, furs, etc.
Why are the elves not wearing shoes in the snow. The toe-less foot wrappings are whatever in a temperate climate, but there are elves all over Orlais and Feralden which contain snowy biomes so they should have some kind of snow shoe designs. The metal chainmail makes no sense for a clan living in a hot weather climate like Tevinter bc metal fucking burns in the desert sun. It is killing me that the Dalish are simultaneously too homogenous and somehow aesthetically non-existent as a whole. With how the Dalish are written and placed into the world of Dragon Age, they should have the most storied, unique, diverse cultural aesthetic of any people in the universe. Instead they are a bland, westernized, generic elven forest fantasy people and it drives me nuts.
Alright, we’re almost done which is good because I’m getting lightheaded. There is a lack of pattern in Dalish clothing that really bothers me. If you think of textile pattern design from a cultural standpoint, there is usually a deeper significance behind the patterns. Think of Scottish Tartans, Ghanaian Kente Cloth, Hawaiian tribal patterns in both tattoo and textile, southern black American family quilting. Textiles tell stories. Patterns are designed with purpose. They record history, family, activity, religion, and so. Much. More.
We are constantly reminded about how much the Dalish people value their history. They, more than anyone else, should have a storied textile history. Every time a civilization falls and a new one is reborn in it’s place, there is a soft reset for the art, lore, technology, and culture of the people who end up there. They have to relearn everything from the beginning using whatever survived from the last fallen kingdom because so much is passed down through oral tradition, family craft, or language that died with the people who fell (sound familiar?).
The only exception to this is Ceramics and Textiles. This is because people always need ceramics and textiles. A people as obsessed with their history as the Dalish are should have an extensive textile history that is ever expanded upon and cherished. It makes no sense for there to be so little thought put into this extremely proud, extremely old, extremely unique culture from an aesthetic standpoint.
I hate the aesthetic design of the Dalish which is why my dumb ass has started a project to take all of the information that I can find on Dalish culture, the real world cultural equivalent people of similar lifestyles/the ones that the Dalish were based off of, and completely make it over while trying to retain the things that are canonically well designed to be unique to the culture. This isn’t to say that I think I am better than the original artists or devs, just that I am very passionate about textile history and seeing it so thoroughly dismissed makes me want to tear my hair out. If you like the Dalish Aesthetic as established in game, cool. This is very much my own opinion and me own beliefs based my areas of interest and study. This is a fictional fantasy world and obviously, that means that any number of things don’t have to line up at all with our real world. If you think I’m stupid and wrong, that’s fine too. I kindly request that you keep it to yourself or only offer constructive criticism.
I’ll post more eventually on the stuff that I end up coming up with, and if you’re reading the fic that I have posted on AO3, this stuff will probably be mentioned in passing here and there. I’m using the Lavellans from that story to design the clothing with, so assume that the clothing posted here is what they’re wearing in game in the appropriate environments.
If you made it to the end of this stupidly long post, thanks for sticking with me. I hope that, even if you disagree with me, that you maybe learned a thing or two about textile history.
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