What’s King Arthur Wearing These Days? Oh, That.

So I guess there’s a new King Arthur movie coming out.

Of course there is.

Arthur movies are like dentist’s appointments;  it seems like you’re always due for one, and you’re never very excited about them when they come.

It would be tempting to think that there’s so many Arthur and medieval movies because everyone loves stuff from the medieval period.  Except they don’t.

The Middle Ages in England lasted maybe a thousand years, and everyone one of those years has a certain look; clothing, hair styles, armor, weapons, buildings, and all kinds of other cultural stuff change over time, and so people from 1350 and from 1400 would probably look as different as two guys from 1965 and 2015, or maybe even more different.

Look:

Let’s take a second with that.

We tend to think of the whole Middle Ages as one, unchanging time period with one style of clothing, but it seems likely that their fashions changed even more than ours does.  We are also lucky enough to have painters representing people of a range of classes, and you will find the same thing across social classes – people looked very different in different years of the past.

With this rich and varied array of fashion and style to choose from, I wonder which one the new King Arthur movie will draw from?

After all, King Arthur can come from any of them, because Arthur stories were popular throughout the Middle Ages, and there wasn’t really a historical figure who would seem like Arthur to us now.

So which period of clothing and style can we expect to see this new Arthur in?  None of them, it seems.  Instead, Guy Ritchie, the director of this movie, seems to be dressing Charlie Hunnam’s King Arthur in leather pants, fancy boots, and a blousy white shirt (with the sleeves sometimes rolled up).

This is basically not medieval at all.

But wait.  This looks familiar, doesn’t it?  OK, I remember where I’ve seen this before – in every medieval and Renaissance movie and show.

Here’s Richard Gere wearing it in his Arthurian movie First Knight:

And here’s Kevin Costner wearing it in his film, Robin Hood – Prince of Thieves:

And here’s Orlando Bloom wearing it in Kingdom of Heaven, with the addition of a sassy scarf:

And here’s Clive Owen, Henry Cavill, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers all sexy and Henry the Eighthy:

And here’s Heath Ledger and Paul Bettany wearing it in Knight’s Tale, with the addition of a vest/rock-n-roll coat:

And you know what?  As long as we’re looking at this outfit with a sassy vest, let’s also have a moment where we agree that animated movies are doing the same thing with their lead characters.  Here, have some Shrek!  Have some John  Smith!  Have some Eric and some Beast!

 
Have some Chris Hemsworth as the Huntsman, even!

I don’t even want to stop there.  Once you start looking for this outfit, it seems to pop up everywhere, and in all kinds of periods.  Take, for example, The Patriot, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, and every pirate movie ever made:

The pirate movies seem important because this style is especially “piraty” in theme.  The white shirt is roughly worn to indicate roguishness, the high boots indicate swashbuckling, and the whole ensemble is worn (as it is in all of these movies) to contrast the main character against the more formal, constricting, and upper-class clothing of the people surrounding these protagonists.

Look, I get it. 

This image of a main character has worked well, and I have thoroughly enjoyed a lot of the movies that are mentioned above.  It gets old, though, especially because the film makers don’t always seem to know that they’re aping each other.  It’s as if they think that they are getting to the heart of what a real male hero should look like in the Middle Ages/Renaissance/Disneyland/18th century/19th century. 

Hell, it even works pretty well right now:

More importantly, this choice of wardrobe underestimates the kind of people who will be the core audience for these movies.  Judging by the kind of clothing people have been making and wearing at Comicons and costume balls (like the Labyrinth of Jareth, for example), it’s clear that people are excited for interesting and culturally-foreign fashion choices in their films and shows. 

I know I am, and I look forward to the time when the next medieval movie offers something more.