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  • This is Ana, and this is Elsa.

  • You know them from frozen, you know, this outfit and this one.

  • But are they accurate?

  • We got this fashion historian.

  • Hi, I'm Rice Britannia and I'm a fashion historian.

  • She's going to walk us through.

  • What is he got, right and what they got wrong about these dresses?

  • First, let's establish a time period for isn't a set in 18 forties Norway.

  • That's specific.

  • We know it's Norway because there are few words anything else.

  • The town of Aaron Dell is named after the Norwegian town are Indal.

  • So why the 18 forties?

  • The short frozen fever?

  • We see a map on the top left corner.

  • You see Roman numerals that say 18 40.

  • Frozen is based on the story.

  • The Snow Queen, which was written in 18 44.

  • Let's start with Elsa's iconic Ice Queen Look.

  • So this dress is total fantasy.

  • So could we just rewind a bit?

  • Okay, here's her coronation gown.

  • For most of the 19th century, Norway and Sweden were united.

  • We actually know who the queen was, and that was Josephine of Les Achtenberg, and her coronation ceremony was 18 44.

  • So what's inaccurate about Elsa's coronation.

  • Look right off the bat.

  • I noticed that the silhouette is way too narrow, because at this time, period skirts were pretty full, and I'm not really sure what's happening with those sleeves.

  • But long sleeves wouldn't be worn at night, so this is not accurate.

  • Let's draw Elsa's coronation gown from the undergarments up.

  • First up Thea underwear So the first thing should be wearing would be shimmies, and underneath she would also be wearing drawers.

  • The 18 forties saw the popularization of split crotch drawers.

  • These were two separate pieces of fabric.

  • He's reached below the knee and were secured by ribbon.

  • This is the beginning of what we think of as modern underwear.

  • Next layer, a woman would wear stockings called Strum Papa in Norway.

  • What we have here is an original design for a stocking, and you can really see that there are these floral motifs crawling up the leg.

  • Next up, the course it corsets were essential for hundreds of years, but in the 19th century they were distinctly hourglass shaped.

  • The 18 40 saw the beginning of a practice called tight lacing, which involved tying your course it really tight.

  • The goal was Mento have the smallest waistline possible, even if it meant not breathing.

  • Here's where the silhouette starts to diverge from the Disney Elsa.

  • And then come the petticoats.

  • See this dome shape here?

  • It's created by layers and layers and layers of petticoats.

  • Thes petticoats were very heavy upwards of £20.

  • The bottom petticoat would likely be made of something called horsehair, which was really stiff and helped to really stick out the silhouette.

  • Quilted petticoats would be worn on top of that to help really smooth out that silhouette.

  • The outermost petticoat was typically white, made of cotton or linen, and this would be your nicest petty coat on top of all of that, the ceremonial gown.

  • Because we're talking about Elsa's coronation day, we're gonna look at a very specific type of dress called a court gown.

  • This here is the actual court gown that Josephine war.

  • For her coronation in 18 44 you can see quite a few differences, first of all, the color in most depictions of European monarchs.

  • You see them wearing white coronation garb, and that's really because this is a religious ceremony.

  • And so the white and the gold really creates the symbolism of purity and divinity.

  • The's dresses were in three parts.

  • The bodice, the skirt and the train, which was often detachable.

  • You can see that else is wearing long sleeves, and that is definitely wrong for this kind of dress.

  • Here you see an example of an 18 forties day dress.

  • It really should be a short flouncy sleeves, and adding onto the train would be the cape.

  • So this is actually Josephine's coronation cape.

  • They actually did a pretty good job with Elsa's coronation cape because, as you can see, it is pretty law.

  • Also, that magenta color is pretty wrong, but I'll get into that later and now her shoes.

  • So the issues would have been called straits, which managed there was no right and left, and we wouldn't see specific right and left shoes until the later half of the 19th century.

  • Evening shoes were typically made of silk and mostly warn indoors, moving onto the hair and crown.

  • European hairstyles were greatly influenced by Queen Victoria, the queen of Britain.

  • This hairstyle was often featured in fashion plates alongside other fashionable hairstyles from the period, one of which was this style called spaniel curls, and they were these curls that kind of came and framed the face.

  • It appears the Queen Josephine is wearing her hair in this style here.

  • The only thing really accurate about else's hair is that she is wearing an up do, which is appropriate for evening.

  • So I'm trying to figure out what kind of Crown Queen Josephine would have worn.

  • If we look at this 18 58 portrait, we see that she's wearing a diamond tiara, and this is the one that became more closely associated with her.

  • So here's what else it would have looked like compared to the original Disney Look.

  • Let's move on to Ana on a purchases this outfit from wandering O'Quinn's trading post.

  • This is on the way out to the countryside.

  • So was this accurate for the 19th century Norwegian countryside, the animators really took care to include elements from traditional Norwegian folk clothing.

  • There's a specific Norwegian folk costume called the Boo Nod.

  • You may have seen pictures like this or this, and that's really what you think of when you think of Norwegian costume, and that is what the animators were going for with honest costume of course on his costume isn't totally historical because again made up kingdom.

  • The main and accuracy is I see are really her boots and the color of that cape, so that's not totally accurate, either.

  • Now we're going to draw every layer of this dress.

  • The first layer is the underwear.

  • If Ana is wearing her own drawers from the coronation, we actually see a peak of them and they do have a little ruffled edge of the end.

  • So that's pretty accurate.

  • Next up to stockings for all the seasons, women wore stockings.

  • So especially during the winter.

  • But you see her climbing a mountain, and it appears she's not wearing any stockings at all.

  • When I saw that peak of leg, I was like, Come on, you guys, and then the courses.

  • I really doubt that Okin had corsets in his shop, so I think we can assume that Ana was wearing her course it from earlier.

  • Next, the petticoats petticoats were a product of modesty because they hid the woman's natural shape.

  • Even seeing an ankle would be very scandalous in this time period.

  • The next layer was the shirt.

  • Shorter is Norwegian for shirt thes, very region by region, but for the most part they were white and made of Lenin.

  • This shirt is on actual short, tough from the mid 19th century, and you can see that it has a very full sleeves unlike on us.

  • And then we have the next layer.

  • The bodice to the traditional Norwegian costume is called the Leave.

  • The bodice was decorated with what is known as Roosa mauling embroidery.

  • Honest costume absolutely incorporates this type of embroidery, but the bodice is varied from region to region, and they came in many different colors in this Norwegian genre painting from 18 67 we do see a young girl wearing this type of bodice and then a skirt, and this bodice would be worn with a skirt or shirt in Norwegian.

  • In this early 19th century costume study, we see helpful thes skirts could have gotten so gruesome.

  • Rolling embroidery came from the art of what painting that was very popular in the 18th century and continued into the 19th century.

  • You can see a variety of different skirts here that have this really elaborate floral embroidery honors embroidery is really graphic and streamline, and I'll give them credit they put the right embroidery in the right place.

  • It just isn't as elaborate as it would have been, probably because of the medium were working in here.

  • Next up the apron.

  • Most women in the countryside would wear an apron to complete the constant in some regions.

  • A special kind of bag was worn at the waist and that was called the vest ska.

  • It would be fastened at the waistband and hang in the front, and it was a really visible part of the costume, so visible that often it was also embroidered.

  • The next layer this'll Cape is a very bright magenta, which absolutely would not have happened in the 18 forties.

  • The discovery of this first synthetic dye in 18 56 really created this color called Movie in, which is purplish fuchsia.

  • This exact color, even though the color is all wrong this one day tell that I'm really impressed by is the class, but that you can see it ISS Super accurate This'll Class was a direct reference to the tradition of Norwegians silver making called Souljah.

  • The specific example shows dangling spoons, which were once thought to reflect evil away from the wearer including various forms of danger and trolls and now the shoes.

  • So let's take a close look at the shoes that she buys a tokens.

  • The boots that Ana buys looked to be a very shiny leather, but winter boots worn in Norway were typically made out of reindeer skin.

  • Sorry, spend.

  • This type of shoe was worn by the Saami people for centuries.

  • The issues feature this curled toe, and they were originally designed that way so that you could hook your shoes into skis.

  • E think with the addition of the hell on his boots kind of look like Western cowboy boots.

  • Finally, her hair and hat unawares long braids, which you can see in many pictures of young Norwegian women.

  • So it really is part of the culture each.

  • Boone, odd, had some form of head wear, the completed the costume, and Anna has kind of a very small cap.

  • So the shape of honest cap is really similar to this example from the 19th century, which really comes around the top of the head and has a point right down by the face.

  • So here's what Anna would have looked like compared to the original Disney look overall, the animators of this film did a really great job incorporating these elements of traditional Norwegian clothing.

  • The departures from historical accuracy are really to suit our modern sensibilities because this was a movie made for 21st century audiences, and what we want to see is characters that are accessible and attractive to the modern I and that's what else an honor would have warned if they lived in history.

This is Ana, and this is Elsa.

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