Storehouses of parchment

[-JKP-]

Here is additional information on dating the fashions.

The second link has a map with dates:

• Baggy sleeves with tight wrists (April 2017): You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  scroll down to comments section 
  
• Hats and Tunics (July 2017): You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
• Hats and Tunics and medieval drawing styles for clothing (Sept. 2018): You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  

Despite having written all this about medieval fashions and dates, I have a slightly different perspective about the dating of the clothing drawings.

Any child who has seen Saturday morning cartoons has probably seen many anachronisms. For example, television aerials were often drawn as "rabbit ears" for decades after rabbit ears had basically disappeared. This is partly because cartoonists who were established in the industry were aging. They drew things as they remembered them from their youth, and as people were used to seeing them in cartoons even after the technology had changed.

There's definitely evidence in manuscripts that fashions were frequently updated, even when the script was copied word-for-word. But was it updated to contemporary fashion? Or were they updated to the point where the illustrator learned to draw them? Someone in his 40s might still be drawing them as he learned to draw them in his 20s. We see this frequently with contemporary illustrators. For the styles to change, "new blood" often needs to be introduced to the workplace.


So, I think (in general) that the fashions in manuscripts are probably quite close to what was worn at the time the drawings were made, but

• because the illustrators were copying from older exemplars, and
  
• because the illustrators themselves were aging and didn't always update their styles,
  

I think there may (sometimes) have been a lag of a decade or so between what we see in manuscripts and what was actually worn.