Prince Caspian

Shirt Study

Caspian wears this ornately detailed shirt under his brigandine... for most of the film, it seems!

Construction

It seems to be fine shirtweight linen in a natural white color. It's also possible it's a linen/cotton blend. The shirt is mid-thigh length, a bit longer than his brigandine.

The pattern piece count is at nine currently: one front piece, one back piece, one each for the shoulder pieces, one each for the sleeve, and one each for the cuffs, and one for the collar. Not counting any lining or facings.

The extra piece just at the top of the shoulder bridges the front of the shirt to the back, and the collar to the top of the armscye. This page describes a very similar shoulder piece: "The shoulder pieces are strips that run along the top of shoulder from the collar to the sleeve seam. They protect the shoulder from abrasion and deformation... ."

We have a glimpse of the back of Miraz's shirt in this image, which, from the matching shoulder piece and dropped armscye, seemed to indicate that it's very similar to Caspian's. However, we now have a shot of the back in this image. No hint of gathering into the neckline, like Miraz, but we can tell that's it's embroidered around the back of the neck in a semi-circle, possibly mimicking the front "rays" that surrounds the front neckline.

Neck and Embroidery

Neck Detail: mandarin collar, gold
buttons with loops (?), black and
white twisted piping, compass rose
embroidery

The keyhole neckline is secured with three gold buttons, probably with small loops. There's a black and white twisted piping all the way around the mandarin collar and neck.

The embroidery seems to echo the compass rose motif of the Telmarines, with a floral Art Nouveau twist. Long arms of embroidery radiate out from the neck symmetrically on either side of the keyhole, alternating different lengths with slightly altering designs, and going all the way up onto the shoulder piece, and probably around the back of the neck. The embroidery is mostly in golden thread, with some small floral buds in slate blue and light blue.

There's also embroidery on the end of the mandarin collar itself (observe the motif we can see here), and small gold curls to the sides of the keyhole. The large sunburst directly below the end of the keyhole particularly resembles a compass rose.

Sleeves and Embroidery

The shoulder is dropped. The sleeves look to be cartridge-pleated at the top and to the back of the square armscye. Cartridge pleating was a technique popular in the 15th and 16th centuries particularly; google for instructions. You can still see one of the the running stitches (left in for structure?) just near the armscye in this image.

The outside of the sleeve, roughly just above the elbow, has a tier of two long rows of smocking in a honeycomb stitch, with two shorter rows about half the length of the other two centered below, and then two more even shorter rows—you can see these last lower rows at the edge of the cloak in this image. That makes six rows all together. There are better images in the movie storybook that shows the full tier of smocking. The smocking picks up many of the pleats hanging from the armscye.

The sleeve is not only full, but also several inches extra long, so it balloons out from where it's cartridge pleated into the cuff. The cuff looks to be 3-4 inches long. In this image, we can see that the edges of the cuff are rounded, and it looks like it buttons at the thumb side of the wrist. We can see an obvious gap between the sides of the cuff, though, so it's likely that it's a looped button.

There are motifs of gold embroidery just above the armscye at the end of the shoulder piece, and above the smocking. It looks like the cuffs got away without being embroidered though!

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