Globe Trotting through Time

Good books and movies are common modes of transportation to other times and places. What isn’t so common, at least for me, is dressing up and imagining myself physically inhabiting those other worlds. Not like actors, cosplayers, historical reenactors, and others who do it just for fun.

But last week friends gave me the opportunity to wear costumes in a beautiful park with a waterfall, streams, pathways, woods, cliffs, hills, and a ruined castle while they snapped photos and wove stories to help create the portraits we were aiming for. With each different outfit, I felt like I became a different person.

This first costume was inspired by Astrid from How to Train Your Dragon. My talented friends crafted the fur, leather, and metal parts of the outfit. I imagined that I was one of my Swedish ancestors, a Viking woman defending her homeland while the men were away.

This second one is actually my martial arts uniform. This didn’t require much imagination since I’m so used to wearing it, but it was great fun to try out different weapons by a waterfall that could be in China or Japan.

Costume number three is my gown patterned after the Titanic period (around 1912). Here I was in early twentieth-century England, dreaming about my favorite books while enjoying an excursion into nature.

This Scottish highlander dress brought me to another of my favorite countries as I romped around on trails, up hillsides, by the water, and even along a castle wall.

Lastly, this gown, which we nicknamed the Arwen dress (from Lord of the Rings), brought me into the realm of fairy tales, Middle Earth, and Arthurian legends.

My friend Hannah also participated in the role-playing portraits. Here she’s a feisty Spanish Western ranch owner challenging a trespasser on her property.

And here she’s an exotic African queen who may or may not be an actual leopardess.

By the time our picture taking was done, we joked that we’d traveled the globe—Scandinavia, China or Japan, England, Scotland, Middle Earth, the American West, and Africa—and all within a mile of each other in the same park in Oklahoma!

Have you ever dressed up in clothes of different eras?