uss-edsall:

uss-edsall:

One thing I find interesting is the concept people have of old things looking old. It comes up especially in reenacting where people describe somebody’s gear as being ‘too shiny’ and ‘too pristine’, and especially in combat reenacting, where people expect clothing to be covered in grime. 

There seems to be a concept of a general state-of-being for clothing from earlier eras, to the point of wanting something that’s supposed to have been created four months before a soldier wears it for the first time in basic training, to have the same weathering you’d see on the same pair after four years of overseas service and combat.

People expect the past to be gritty and dirty. They expect old and faded, colours faded in the sun, fabric gone soft. Hence they expect not to see a pristine and ironed uniform even if that’s what it probably would’ve been. They want to see the rips, the dirt on the sleeves, the obvious wear and tear, because “that’s how it was” in their idea of what ‘the past looked like’. 

Obviously clothing worked the same way now as it does then, it doesn’t come fresh from the factory with that weathered look. But that’s what people expect it to look like. 

Reenacting exists in an odd sort of blend of reality and fiction where a reenactor is trying to be as close as possible to the real thing, while also bending towards the public, who perceive what the ‘real thing’ was different from a reenactor would. For example, the pyramids in Egypt – they look the same in movies that take place in ancient times, when they were new and pristine. But our view of them is the pyramids as rough and sanded. If you ask anybody what the pyramids should look like, they would point towards the latter. 

This is the same reason as to why museums tend not to make mockups of the ancient buildings, but mockups of what the ruins look like. Because we probably know what the ancient buildings look like – they were fuckin buildings what do you expect. But we don’t know what the ruins look like unless we see them, and in doing this, museums can show those and not require you to go all the way to Greece to see them.