We built custom costumes for Young Living’s jousters, squires AND horses in this fantastic project.
This is the DGY (David Gary Young) Jousting Team of Young Living Farm in Mona, Utah, and they are amazing.
The open, lattice-like costumes for the horses are called caparisons and their face shields are called chamfrons. We’ve created these with leather cut-work and inlay, embellished with decorative metal pieces, rivets and crystals.
We built the horse gear using chrome-tanned leathers backed with synthetic Rhino Cloth for extra weight, durability and resistance to wear and mildew. Each horse echoes its jouster’s colors and sometimes his or her coat of arms, as in the case of Jacob Young’s dragons in black and red.
The word caparison originates from the 1585–95 Middle French caparasson (now caparaçon) and the Old Spanish caparazón, akin to capa or cape.
We made jousters’ sleeveless surcotes from black bison hide. Each of these tunics laces up its sides and has specialty leather inlay as well as hardware and rivets in either gold or silver.
Our design/build team for this was a big one- our shop’s principle staff with additional stitchers and craftspeople jobbing in. A great project to make such fantastic looks for DGY.