I used to wear a chainmail shirt to elementary school. The teachers never knew what to do about it because there was no section in our dress code forbidding medieval armor.
… Where does an elementary school child get access to an actual shirt of chainmail sized properly for them?
Growing up as a historical reenactor meant that my parents are friends with lots of people who make chainmail. My godsister received a real rapier in fourth or fifth grade, so our unsupervised outdoor playtime was… formative.
my little brother used to MAKE chainmail in middle school. i mean, IN school. at his desk.
teachers objected. my parents went to bat for him. “it helps him focus.” some teachers insisted it was noisy, in which case he was allowed to make origami instead, but for the most part he continued to make chain mail.
he gave me a roman short sword for christmas when i was 14. i think he’s given me a total of 5 swords over my lifetime and like 9 pieces of armor. he just has always loved metal. of course he joined the SCA the moment he heard about it.
since my thing was textiles, i reciprocated by sewing, knitting, weaving, and embroidering pieces for his reenactment costumes. when we got our dad into reenactment, i helped him put together his persona as well. now, we’re welsh on mom’s side, and from all over the silk road on dad’s side. so my brother went with a welsh persona, and that was pretty easy, because patterns from the british isles are well researched and easy to find, and a lot of SCA folks are into that. but dad and i decided to be silk road traders, and that was HARD. it took us years to put together historically accurate costumes. i cut up a lot of used kimonos from ragstock, i tell you what.
and you know what my dang brother did? he learned to make mongolian arrowheads in a weekend. three goddamn days and he was like “here have a dozen, i dun wanna learn fletching so you do the rest.”
anyhow he grew up to be a master machinist and is now making cutting edge medical devices out of memory metal for stabilizing shattered hand bones, so i guess the moral of the story is, chainmail on school children is a good sign probably?
