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Exploring the Medieval Fashion in 'Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Amongst Thieves'

We're diving into the style behind this fun film

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Published Apr 3, 2023

Have you seen 'Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Amongst Thieves yet? If you’ve not heard, the movie is heading towards a $40 million box office opening, and for good reason. Games-to-film adaptations have typically either gone really good or really bad, and while this isn’t the first time 'Dungeons and Dragons has been depicted on television and movie screens, this version has a solid case for easily being the best. Starring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Sophia Lillis, and Justice Smith, this film is full of entertainment, laughter, action, and cinematic beauty that very much makes you feel like you are inside a video game battling through all the highs and lows of the characters.

One of the things we also loved about the movie was the medieval fashion worn by the characters, which is on par seeing as though the game has always been set in medieval times. Today we’re going to take a deeper look at the style behind the film.

What is Medieval Fashion?

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First we have to identify when the Medieval period started. The Medieval era in England is typically classified as the time period between the fall of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the Renaissance, making this year AD 410 to 1485. With the Dungeons and Dragons game being estimated to go from BC all the way to the Mid-to-late Renaissance period, this puts the storyline and characters right in that era. So how did they dress? With a lot of medieval garments.

The men wore a lot of stockings and tunics, along with leather boots, which we saw on Xenk Yendar (Regé-Jean Page) and the wizard Simon Aumar (Justice Smith). However, Xenk dressed slighter fancier than Simon due to his social status.

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Dungeons & Dragons Fashion

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As for the main character Edgin Darvis (Chris Pine), the flashbacks show him dressed similarly to Simon when his life was more “normal,” but the present day (which is still based in the Medieval era) has him looking slightly more modern with what looks at first hand to be some sort of leather blazer/jacket. However, what stops the jacket from totally being a 2023 look is the overall military design and buttons, which allows him to blend in with the rest of the characters style wise without looking too much like he came from a different time period.

The same could be said of Michelle Rodriguez’s character Holga Kilgore who’s a barbarian. Tunics were still the most commonly worn garments amongst barbarian men and women, and Holda was dressed in…pants with what looks to be some sort of a leather top. We’ll let it slide though because she was our favorite character.

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Doric (Sophia Lillis), the tiefling druid, was more in-line style wise what how women of the medieval era dressed as she wore a long sleeve tunic over top of leggings/pants that had a slight combat edge to them.

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Then there was Forge (Hugh Grant) and Kira (Chloe Coleman) who dressed more lavishly as they were of royalty and great wealth. While they were essentially wearing the same types of clothes as the other characters, their outfits appeared fancier due to the color and material. In the Medieval era, the color and material of your clothing was representative of your status. Gold was the ultimate status symbol during that time, and we did see elements of that within Forge’s outfits.

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Our Fashion Rating

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We’ll give Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Amongst Thieves a 7.5/10. As we mentioned before, there were elements of the character’s clothing that did look like it came from much later eras, but we also can’t ignore the fact that this was originally an action/fighting RPG before becoming a movie, and so in that the way, the character’s outfits had to be representative of that element as well.

What’s most important, however, is that the movie is superb and super fun.