dressing the guys
Oct. 13th, 2013 09:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliI think I shall alter the collar. . . .
Bipping along on the outline. Have the feminine sort of attire down pat. Women wear breeches -- women's breeches, mind you, though I don't think they push the rule as far as the Vikings did. (If so, it won't come up in the tale; the rule was that a wife's wearing men's breeches was grounds for divorce, just a husband's wearing a woman's shirt, with its wide neck, was.) They also wear smocks. (With, indeed, smocking at the wrist and throat.)
And there's a scene where a man recognizes that a person is a woman very quickly, despite her short hair. And it can't be because the smock is long, because that's a courtly custom of women who have let leisure corrupt them into showing off how little they work. A woman who has to work, or even a woman stick to the good old-fashioned ways, sticks to the short smock because she can walk more freely in it.
On the other hand, obviously the men are wearing breeches too from that description. And their smocks would probably look very like the women's. That's fine -- I'm a writer, I'm not having to give the readers a picture to have to pick out the relevant details, I have the point-of-view character hand them them on a silver platter. Which means that I need to know them.
Perhaps I'll have something with the collar. Or maybe women's waists have a draw string, where men use belts.
Bipping along on the outline. Have the feminine sort of attire down pat. Women wear breeches -- women's breeches, mind you, though I don't think they push the rule as far as the Vikings did. (If so, it won't come up in the tale; the rule was that a wife's wearing men's breeches was grounds for divorce, just a husband's wearing a woman's shirt, with its wide neck, was.) They also wear smocks. (With, indeed, smocking at the wrist and throat.)
And there's a scene where a man recognizes that a person is a woman very quickly, despite her short hair. And it can't be because the smock is long, because that's a courtly custom of women who have let leisure corrupt them into showing off how little they work. A woman who has to work, or even a woman stick to the good old-fashioned ways, sticks to the short smock because she can walk more freely in it.
On the other hand, obviously the men are wearing breeches too from that description. And their smocks would probably look very like the women's. That's fine -- I'm a writer, I'm not having to give the readers a picture to have to pick out the relevant details, I have the point-of-view character hand them them on a silver platter. Which means that I need to know them.
Perhaps I'll have something with the collar. Or maybe women's waists have a draw string, where men use belts.