Anybody want to show me a picture of form-fitting medieval dresses?
Some tight(er) clothing does exist for women after around 1200; but, again, nobody goes to battle in that. You don't just go chill out in it.
One essential part of womens' formal wear that BM players rarely include: the hat! Giant hats were in for a long time. Especially pointy ones.
Tight clothing was really more for men than women.
The trouble with this sort of thinking is that what makes sense for women's fashion in /actual/ history doesn't make sense for Battlemaster. In the real Middle Ages, women (barring a few extreme exceptions) didn't lead troops into battle, have true equality with men, or hold much power in their own right (with some notable exceptions). That means that BM women will dress and act differently than real medieval women.
Silk is definitely possible, but expensive. It is true that rulers might demand it: but even high nobles like BM nobles should not be regularly running around in silk clothing. Silk is an emperor's formal wear (unless you have a special RP for your realm that establishes you as a silk-producing region).
Why on earth would this be true? BM is /not/ medieval Europe. There are six different continents which have regular ship traffic between them. You don't think that there is trade or that we, as the very highest of nobles would have the best that we can get our grabby hands on? We are Queens and Dukes and Barons (and the family members of such) for the most part and even those "mere" knights are wealthier and more important than 99% of the other inhabitants of the realm (those NPC minor nobles and peasants).
Silk was expensive in the real middle ages, but not out of reach for the elite. * We are exactly the people who would be wearing those expensive fabrics.
Note that, in my mind, if a fashion only BEGINS to appear in 1300-1400, it isn't medieval. I would define medieval as widely popular by 1300-1400 at the LATEST. None of this 1492 or 1452 nonsense. BM is pre-gunpowder, so we should be thinking pre-Hundred-Years-War in terms of mood and dress. 800-1200 is the best bet for cultural models.
I think that there is little point in trying to history-Nazi around reasonable fashion choices. For one thing, even people who are /trying/ to get the dress right mostly fail. (I rarely see anyone wearing hose and codpieces, for example, or talk about hats...even the /men/ wore hats or hoods regularly. If someone is making a genuine effort to describe reasonable fashion, then I'm not going to quibble that /properly/ they should be wearing a tunic and hose, and where, by the gods are their tabards and codpieces?) For another, real world fashion was influenced by religion in a way that just doesn't exist in Battlemaster. There is no central Catholic church to exercise political control over morals (including what would be appropriate dress).
There is no point in imposing real-world fashion into a light-fantasy world where it would just not make sense.
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* There was a silk industry in Italy by the 13th century (before that, Western Europe got its silk from the Byzantine Empire or from trade with the East and was more expensive). There were quite a number of references to silk and its uses in historical sources, but one that Matt found relates to the Sumptuary Laws (laws which restricted what level of finery and decoration people could wear). A 14th century law restricted the wearing of silk to Esquires (and rich merchants) and those above them in the social hierarchy. That there was even the possibility that someone below that level could wear silk suggests that it was not restricted to Emperors.
http://rosaliegilbert.com/sumptuarylaws.html
