“Historically Accurate” Merida: Progress

drawingI love Disney princesses, like… woah. I’ve always wanted to be one, and I finally did it for AWA! But of course I had to complicate things and made an original, not accurate, version for my first one. :P

There’s a lot to say about this costume. It started out with me loving Merida, and loving crazy red hair and freckles, but not wanting to do a costume that’s so incredibly overdone right now. Her everyday dress is okay, but its actually kind of boring (blasphemy! I know). One day I was at the ren fest, and I saw this gorgeous red rabbit pelt at the fur stall, and I thought, wow, this is so Merida! I knew then that I had to do some kind of alternate version of her. The other princesses had “historically accurate” fanart, why not Merida, too?

I started out trying to research the time period of the movie. No luck, and apparently other people had the same problem. The architecture and dresses and materials and just everything in the movie is a mish mash of time periods, so I had to make something up. I also had a difficult time pin pointing specific Scottish fashion. Seems that they wore the same clothes as their European neighbors and nothing super specifically Scottish. (My sources are Google and Wikipedia mind you, I’m not part of the SCA or anything like that to get super secret historical accuracy information, maybe one day). So I left it alone for awhile.

lucrezia_borgiaThen I saw the show “Borgia: Faith and Fear”, and I beheld Lucrezia Borgia. She has curly red hair and immediately reminded me of a proper Merida. And her dresses are very similar if you look past the fine fabric and poofy sleeves. Just looking at this picture, I thought, this is it! This is my version of Merida! And that time period is 15th/16th century, the clothing Italian. And since the Scottish at this time wore whatever generic European fashions were around, this could have been something Merida would have worn, assuming Brave takes place somewhere in the 1400-1500s.

danielle_everafterStill not convinced? Look at this picture of Danielle from Ever After. Yeah, that is almost the same exact dress Merida wears, and its from the same time period.
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