Early Period Dress

Although there is a lot of variety, tailoring arts weren't very advanced. Most garb is a variant on the basic t-tunic, with interesting accessories. The length and width of the tunic changes, the colours and manner of deccoration change, etc, to make distinctive cultural dress.

T-tunics are for everyone in this period - change the fabric from loosely woven wools and linnens to finely woven wools, linnen and silks to change from rich to poor. Add lots of decorative braid or embroidery to indicate wealth. Harder to obtain colours like purple, blue and green indicate wealth, while yellow, duller reds and oranges, boring browns etc were colours for the poorer. Black occured, but was rarely colourfast, a colour for the rich, but most would prefer a garment that still looked good (rather than faded) in a months time. In later periods, black becomes more common.

Women wear longer tunics (at least ankle length), while men wear shorter tunics (from just above the knee to ankle length, the longer ones sometime slit up the side for free movement). Men might wear braes (loose pants) under their tunics, or hose (sometimes hose would have soles sewn to them, rather than wear shoes). Vikings wore leg wrappings to keep their braes out of the way.

Further east, out of Europe, fashions change a bit, but in Byzantium, they were also wearing their own kind of t-tunic by about 1000.

External Links

• Clothing of the "Celts". - http://www.reconstructinghistory.com/celtic/intro.html
• How to construct an easy peplos - http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/MelanieWilson/femaledr.htm
• Frankish Costume http://www.kipar.demon.co.uk/frankish.html
• Pagan and Christian "English". Also has a bit on Kentish-frankish - http://www.angelcynn.org.uk/clothing.html