Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Frodo’s Wardrobe, Part 1

Past Abby would have written this post as one giant essay. Present Abby knows better. During today’s post, I will describe the leisurewear I designed for Frodo’s wardrobe with a special focus on the banyan, the smoking jacket and its matching hat, and Celtic clothes like argyle, tam-o’-shanter, and brekis. Next week, I will discuss weather-themed clothing, including coats, hats, and boots. Since Frodo was implied to have inherited the “rooms full of clothes” from Bilbo, the audience needs to see what he has: no pathetic blue shirt and suspenders for this Frodo.

I used two non-conventional resources when designing the clothing that appear as illustrations for this pair of essays and will later be featured in the animatic. The first resource was the podcast episode “The Clueless Closet” from the show Articles of Interest, which I reviewed back in February. Host Avery Trufelman and guest Amy Wells described the difficulty of designing closets for movie sets, such as the teen movie Clueless (1995). For live action films, filling closets with real clothes is a “nightmare”, especially when a character is supposed to be rich but the film has a small budget. A similar conundrum exists when clothing the actors. I watched the documentary Happy Clothes: A Film about Patricia Field, currently streamed on MasterClass, to better understand how experienced costume designers craft convincing outfits while on strict budgets and deadlines. Even though my characters are digital, I used similar methods when sourcing references and redesigning real-world clothes for hobbit-sized bodies.

Banyan

Also known as a robe de chambre, the banyan was a dressing gown whose design originated in Asia and was imported to Western Europe during the 17^th century. The word “banyan” came from the Sanskrit word vanija and described Hindu merchants who worked in Iran on the Persian Gulf. European merchants loved the clothes worn by Hindu merchants and brought these home as leisurewear. The French word robe had been used in English since the Norman conquest, and the French phrase robe de chambre or bedroom robe was soon adopted. The word “dressing-gown” was popular in 1777, the same time as the American Revolutionary War, while the phrase “dressing gown” appeared in 1854. Finally, the modern bathrobe debuted as “bath-robe” around 1894 towards the end of the Victorian era. Google Ngram Viewer shows the changing popularity of these words, as robe de chambre has fallen out of use, while the use of dressing gown versus bathrobe varied depending on country: Americans prefer bathrobe, and Brits prefer dressing gown.

Of course, people in the Real World do not always know the words they are supposed to use for an item and instead substitute their own. Famed diarist Samuel Pepys, previously referenced for his description of pub culture and use of a silver fountain pen, referred to the garment as an “Indian gowne” due to its area of origin. He bought one for his wife and one for himself, along with renting a fancier gown to have his portrait painted. The portrait now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London, England.

The banyan that served as my main reference is held by The Met in New York City. Their bright yellow banyan dated to around 1775 and would have been worn at home, although it was socially acceptable for rich, intellectual men to wear a banyan around town by the 1780s, like wearing Gucci sweatpants to the grocery store. Banyans often came with a matching hat and waistcoat, although the breeches were taken from other outfits. By the early 19^th century, the banyan was no longer stylish, as it had been replaced by the smoking jacket.

Smoking jacket

The change in fashion came as a result of a change in drug addiction of choice. As discussed in my perennially popular “Concerning Pipe-weed” essay, tobacco had come to Europe soon after the initial colonization of the Americas in the late 15^th century, but snuff was the trendy way to inhale until the early 19^th century. The banyan was a decent way to protect clothes from soot and fire, but it was not specifically designed for the purpose. The sturdier smoking jacket had heavier fabrics and was cut similar to the modern suit coat.

The matching cap continued to be popular throughout the Victorian era. While the banyan and jacket were related to Hinduism and the Indian subcontinent, the hats tended to reflect Islamic culture in the Middle East. The shape of the hat has been described as a round pillbox. The distinguishing decorative feature was a fabric tassel springing from the center. The hat was called a fez, a word that arrived in English from Turkish via French. The ruler of the Ottoman Empire, Mahmud II, was a big fan of the fez. When he was not starting wars with Greece and Russia, murdering his relatives, and massacring enslaved soldiers, he found time to declare the fez part of the national costume. To be fair, he also started a postal service and public school system at the same time he was collecting child brides. The man was a real mixed bag.

Celtic Clothing

Since the hobbits of Buckland and the Marish were given Celtic names in Tolkien’s “translation”, and Frodo grew up in Buckland, I thought some of his clothing should reflect Celtic styles in the early modern era. The best-known pattern from this area of the world is argyle, originally developed in a Scottish county now known as Argyll & Bute. The pattern came from tartan, a cloth woven in the Scottish highlands and used to distinguish between clans. The original Scottish tartan is believed to be a green and white plaid or square-shaped pattern worn by the Campbell clan. Modern argyle uses a diamond-shaped pattern instead. The other major difference is how colors appear in the shapes. For traditional tartan, a solid square in the first color must be surrounded by striped squares of both colors; the two solid colors can appear diagonally, but not beside each other. For modern argyle, solid colors often appear next to each other, and many colors are used in the same design. The sweater vest I designed for Frodo is decidedly modern with its solid yellow background and green diamonds.

No Scottish outfit would be complete without a tam-o’-shanter. This popular hat was known as a bonnet until around 1840 thanks to a poem published about fifty years earlier. Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote “Tam O 'Shanter”, which tells the story of a man who wore a “guid blue bonnet” while singing and riding his horse through a storm. The poem is confusing to read, as it contains both Scots and English. Nonetheless, these hats became trendy in part because of the poem. A tam-o’-shanter is topped by a pompom, although this spelling has only existed since 1897. Previous spellings included the French word pompon from 1725, pong-pong from 1748, and “pom-pom” from around 2000. Our friend Google Ngram Viewer shows that “pompon” has been in steep decline since 1954, while the new spelling “pom-pom” is used almost as often as “pompom”.

Finally, a popular trouser to pair with argyle sweaters and tam-o’-shanters are brekis, the Scots word for breeches and also known as knickerbockers. The latter name originally stood for Dutch Americans living in New York during the early 19^th century. Author Washington Irving had written about this culture in his story “History of New York” published in 1809, which featured the pseudonym Dietrich Knickerbocker. However, the phrase was not popularized until 1831 with the publication of newly illustrated versions containing drawings by British caricaturist George Cruikshank. I managed to find a digital copy of the Fourth Edition of this book from 1835, and the images frequently show Dutch people wearing silly hats and wide-legged breeches while smoking long-stemmed pipes; in some ways, they resemble hobbits.

While the pictures were clearly making fun of Dutch Americans, the pants became trendy for athletes and little boys to wear during the early 20^th century. Sports teams even named themselves after these cool clothes, most notably the New York Knickerbockers basketball team. The trend did not last. A quick look at the website of the modern New York Knicks shows that the current trend for athletic bottoms is somewhat fitted shorts, a happy medium between the baggy affair from a decade ago and the booty shorts of the 1970s. As for British schoolboys, they now wear shorts for much of the year. The abbreviation “knickers” instead refers to women’s underwear. A more useful observation, at least for my illustration of Frodo’s wardrobe, was that Tolkien grew up in the era of boys wearing knickerbockers. When illustrating his hobbit-lads with breeches, he likely considered their child-like height to match the outfits worn by schoolboys. Since the practice was fading out by the time The Hobbit was published in 1937, a character wearing such clothing would be considered old-fashioned, adding to the concept of the story being from a long time ago, especially in the mind of a child.

Of course, one more factor likely contributed to knickerbockers no longer being worn by boys: women were beginning to wear them for convenience. Similar to bloomers several decades earlier, these loose-fitted trousers allowed women to easily participate in athletic activities. It is possible, even likely, that once women were allowed to wear these convenient clothes, boys were given shorts to wear instead. Even today, modern capri pants are generally worn by women, although both men and women wear pants and shorts in most Western cultures.

Conclusion

In my interpretation, Frodo has a collection of leisurewear that far exceeds that of a ‘rustic’ hobbit and likely even his fellow wealthy friends. However, designing an extensive wardrobe comes with technical difficulties, even when the clothing is digital. I focused on a subset of iconic pieces that were popular between 1780 and 1830 to show how Frodo was aware of fashion trends and follows them when he found them useful, like the smoking jacket, but at the same time enjoyed the vintage clothing left by Bilbo, like the banyan. He was also conscious of his Stoors heritage, wearing the tam-o’-shanter and argyle, even if this set him apart from the other members of Hobbiton. I hope this gives the reader a taste for the design direction I have chosen for Frodo’s style and can look forward to the second part of the wardrobe next week.