Mode Historique - Historical Costuming

Sarah in highly unperiod attire, 1997

Back In The Day...

A Brief Account Of My First Experience With The SCA

Snark: noun, verb. 1)A person who feels it is their main motive in life to make others miserable by offering unsolicited advice on an individual's choice of wardrobe. 2) The act of making one's life miserable by offering unsolicited advice on one's choice of wardrobe. AKA: Stitch Counters, Garb Snobs. See also: Jerks.

My first SCA event was Beltane AS XXVII, or roughly translated into mundane, around May 1st, 1993. I was 15 and had been bitten by the costuming bug only 3 years before at my first Renaissance Faire, so I had some idea of what to wear and how to behave. However, I was still pretty nervous about attending my first event... It would be a weekend camping event in the hills around Nevada City, at the dubiously named “NID Lake” (It was really called Rollins Lake, but on the stone entrance to the campground were etched the huge letters N-I-D, which we found out later stood for “Nevada Irrigation District”, but made for a good, catchy name that stuck). I had never worn garb for longer than 6 hours at a time and something told me that it wouldn’t be entirely wise to wear my court garb the entire time, so my mom made me some new, more “middle classish” garb that would pass as far as being easily washable and fairly comfortable. Thing is, I’m a girl and I desperately wanted to know what to expect at my first event (i.e.. What would everybody else be wearing), so I grilled my then-boyfriend and his friends for details. Unfortunately, it was like talking to the totally blind. I wound up with responses like “I dunno, the chicks wear long skirts and stuff,” which, for a budding costumer was a positively criminal description. These clueless boys assured me that my costume would pass the bar and that I should stop worrying about what other people wore.

Really, it was a bit more complicated than general anxiety that I would be “out of fashion”. I had heard through the faire circuit that the SCA- also known as the Society for Compulsive Authenticity, the Sword Carrying Assholes, the Society for Consenting Adults, the Society for... Never mind, you get the picture- was notoriously harsh on newbies that looked obviously newbie-ish. Whatever that meant. Since I was a newbie, and having heard the rumors of being accosted by crowds of people who wanted to toss me out on my ear for daring to wear unsuitable clothing to an event, I was definately keeping myself up at night worrying about being publicly humiliated. Grade school was bad enough, now I was about to waltz- I mean, pavane into a reenactment group that held such impossibly high standards about clothing that I would be better off going nekkid than daring to offend their educated sensibilities with my poor, ren faire garb? I didn’t get much sleep leading up to the event, obviously.

With all this running through my poor 15 yearold mind, my family and I made our way up to NID Lake, our mundane tent in tow. What was going to greet me on the other side of the big stone gate? Monsters in perfectly historical clothing telling us to leave if we know what’s best for us? Well, not quite. Not even close, actually. The first individuals we came across were the people manning the “Troll” Booth, i.e..“Trolls” or, as I learned from experience later on, “Suckers who can’t say no”. These are typically the first people anyone encounters when entering an event site (that is if you haven’t encountered a whole mess of medieval peoples at the McDonalds across the street from the event on your last minute flush-privy run before entering the site) and it is their sole duty to greet you, take your money, hand you a bunch of flyers that will litter the floor of your car for weeks to come, give you some kind of site token that they say should remain on your person the entire time you’re at the site (which is either wound around the rearview mirror, or joins the flyers under the passenger side seat) and direct you to the nearest privy if you missed the stop at the McDonalds. These are usually really tired folks who have been sitting at the gate since 2-AM three days before the site opens, and they can’t do anything else except be nice at that point and pray that the guys who were supposed to relieve them yesterday finally show up. I have yet to see a well dressed Troll. This is probably because being a Troll is one of the most grueling jobs in the SCA, even if you mainly sit around and wait for people to throw money at you. As I found out, they don’t perform a mandatory “Garb Check” on you when you enter the site, either. Clothing is the last thing on their mind at this point, whereas their nice, comfy bed back home is probably number one.

Once past the gate, we drove around until we spotted our campmates (i.e.. Household, which is a really weird word if you stare at it too long without enough sleep. Try it sometime) who had already arrived and snagged us a rather decent site not too far from the lake and a short jaunt from the main hub of the event. We jumped out of our station wagon and began setting up the tent. Actually, my mom and sister started setting up the tent... I was too busy scanning the area for people in garb. Immediately, I felt relieved. Not only were the clothing I had brought passable, it was in a lot of ways superior to the stuff most of the people around were wearing. There were a lot of T-Tunics and pirate shirts with sweat pants, and some stuff that looked like it came from faire as well. This eased a lot of anxiety right away. As soon as the tent went up, I got myself dressed and went a-wandering. Looking back, I would have to say that at least 70% of the clothing being worn at that event was early medieval (i.e. cheap & easy). There was a small contingency of people who wore some really lovely stuff, with nifty metal crowns to go with it, but they were in rather a minority. The rest of the population fell somewhere in between, with a good number of women in 14th century cotehardies or ren faire bodices, and the men in something vaguely Viking. I do remember witnessing the court procession, most of which was on horseback and was unavoidable because the horses were pretty much standing in our camp. It was spectacular in a reassuring, easily attainable way. I wasn’t blown away by the court’s garb, but rather I felt as though I were being challenged. I wanted to dress on that level and I knew it was within my reach. Many people, I’ve heard over the years, do not have this sort of reaction to seeing the court in it’s full glory for the first time. Many people want to run and hide and like to feel unworthy because their clothing isn’t as pretty. Well, I guess that’s the difference between me and them. As soon as I heard that they gave out awards for costuming, that was it. I decided I was going to dedicate my entire life to this costume thing and as soon as I got home, I really started researching and learning to sew in earnest.

One thing I should touch on, and make a HUGE emphasis on, is that I wasn’t bothered about my clothing at all, the entire weekend. A few people even remarked in surprise that I was a newbie because they thought I looked and acted as though I had been in the SCA my whole life (frightening thought, really). I chalk it up to two things: I watched everyone like a hawk my first event and figured out pretty quickly that you bow to the people wearing the crowns (and they bow back!) and you behave yourself and no one notices you. Second, I knew a bit of what to expect based upon my experience at faire. I already had some clothing that was faire appropriate, which turns out to translate really well into SCA appropriate if you’re completely new and have nothing else to go on. These two things, and probably the fact that I was cute (hehehehe), helped cover up the fact that I had no clue what I was doing.

At that time, however, I was not as out going or confident as I am now. Looking back, this is a rather mild approach to a first event, as I know people who like to jump in with both feet right from the get-go. But, except for a few instances, I’ve rarely seen either the wallflower newbie nor the exuberant newbie become a target for Garb Snarks (Garb Snarks fall into two categories: the behnid-your-back-point-and-snicker type and the march-right-up-in-your-face-and-anounce-to-the-world type). Which is not to say that I, personally, haven’t been snarked at. I did get snarked once, a few years after my first event, when I getting fairly established within the SCA and had changed households to a kind of fringe-boffer-fighting group of wanna-be Celts. Of course, we were all underage at the time, so there was really no choice but for us to be fringies, but we did try really hard to play by the rules. Anyway, the snarking incident happened while being introduced to the friend of a girl I knew from my costuming class at school. She was very excited to introduce me to this young man who she thought very highly of. On the way to meet him, she warned me “Don’t take it the wrong way if he makes a comment about your clothing,” and assured me that he was never mean, but just a real stickler for authenticity. So, we find the guy and my friend starts the introduction, and I’ve barely extended my hand in greeting when the guy interrupts and asks me “Did you embroider that dress?” I was rather proud of this dress, as it was a green wool cotehardie that I had completed for the costume class. “Yes, I did.” I said, my hand still hanging out there for him to shake.

“Oh,” He says, not making any advance toward grasping my hand. “Well, I suppose you can go back and fill the gaps in on the embroidery later.”

I smiled sweetly and said, “Well, it was nice to meet you, Jamie. If you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to camp now.” I waved and walked off with my friend following behind apologizing all over the place for his rudeness. Didn’t bother me, though... Especially considering I had done a quick once over on his garb and decided he had no room to talk. That’s the thing about Snarks, they usually can’t match the standards they set for everyone else. Why they do this, I’’ll never know, but my philosophy is not to let it get to me and to keep on doing what works for me.

Over the years, my standards have risen incrementally from just wanting neat looking garb, to attempting to make things as authentically as money, skill and time allow. At the time of this writing, I’m beginning to toy with dyeing my own fabrics using period dyes, and the next step may be investing in an inkle loom. Where once I used Folkwear patterns to make my bodices, I moved on to drafting my own patterns and now I’m draping patterns entirely without paper. Once, I only used cotton, now I use only linen as it’s becoming more accessible and affordable. I still use the occasional synthetic, but I have learned that it’s vastly easier to achieve the look I’m going for if I use natural fibers. And as I’ve added to my research over the years, I have the ability to make more than educated guesses on such matters as underwear and construction techniques (two banes of the costuming world). Am I an expert? Heck no. But I can back up my costumes with documentation, should another Snark be lurking around...