BWAHAHAHA Uniform and Equipment

Lonin’s Victorian martial arts group uses different equipment and attire from the Fiore group.

Uniform

Gentlemen

The uniform for gentlemen is a white dress shirt, dark slacks, and dark shoes.

Ladies

The simplest option for ladies would be to wear what the gentlemen wear. The feminine equivalent would be something of roughly the correct vintage that would still allow freedom of movement. This is an area for further research.

A note on footwear

Part of the curriculum is savate, which involves kicking with the toe and edges of the shoe. This assumes that the practitioner is wearing traditional men’s leather shoes with hard, sharp edges. Performing such kicks against even a padded target at while wearing soft pliable fabric shoes (i.e. most common athletic trainers) places the practitioner at risk of foot injury, and so we recommend that harder, stiffer footgear be worn. Options include ordinary men’s leather dress shoes, steel-toed boots such as Doc Martens, and the extremely formidable Rockport Steel-Toe Wing Tips, currently the ultimate in weaponized gentleman’s footwear.

Other equipment

Not all of these are needed all of the time. In many cases, we have loaners. If fear of not having equipment is preventing you from showing up, then forget about it and just show up.

  • For gentlemen, an athletic supporter with hard insert (cup)
  • Mouth guard
  • Shin/instep protectors suitable for savate work. Many of those sold for use in kickboxing/MMA training are not suitable due to their lack of a hard shell; since we fight in old-fashioned, hard-soled dress shoes, more protection is needed. We are having better luck with baseball catcher’s leg protectors such as the All-Star LG23WPRO Pro Model Quad Adult Baseball Leg Guards. These are relatively expensive as such things go, but they work. Competing products need to be evaluated just in case we can find something cheaper.
  • Hand wraps such as are used in boxing. Gel wraps are the most convenient and popular choice here.
  • Fencing mask
  • Padded gloves as described in Hand protection