Pinning down Disney fashion is an inexact art. The companion book, “The Art of Tangled” says of the Kingdom of Corona: “The world is from a storybook: It is thus familiar and, although fundamentally ‘European,’ not located in any one country in particular.”

The same could be said of the fashion in “Tangled.” It has many European inspirations, but they’re all over the map both in terms of period and location. While the Queen’s dress can be pretty clearly traced to continental Europe during the eighteenth century, her husband’s fashion is caught in the sixteenth century.

Of course, Disney films are about creating a mood more than doing an accurate depiction of history, but here’s my best attempt to place the fashions in “Tangled,” with some help from The Story of a Seamstress and Claire Hummel, both dress designers and bloggers who have looked into the historical inspirations in Disney fashion. 

Rapunzel

Rapunzel’s dress is the most obvious fairy-tale creation of the film. “There’s no real historical precedent for that stereotypical laced bodice process dress,” Claire said. (Previously, Claire’s done amazing work putting most of the Disney heroines in accurate period-style dresses, which you should look at here.)

As for Rapunzel, her dress appears to be something designed to evoke a Disney feel as opposed to something that can be traced to a single fashion or period. The designers said they did the same thing with the Corona castle and village, which were influenced by “Cinderella” and “Pinocchio.”

Designers did say that the style of Mother Gothel’s dress is intentionally several centuries older than Rapunzel’s – one way of showing how long she’s been around. That might put Rapunzel’s dress most easily in fifteenth- or sixteenth-century German fashion – making it roughly a contemporary both in place and style with Snow White’s dress.

Broadly speaking, the details of her dress fit commoners of that period: short cap sleeves with a longer undersleeve, a front-tie bodice, and skirts of minimal volume. The puff-sleeve with stitched pink panels, however, and the fabric of the dress, apparently satin, are higher-class elements.

The Story of a Seamstress suggested: “Seems to me they were kind of going for the stereotypical medieval “peasant” look, but using fancier materials, like satin and lace (which aren’t exactly medieval!).”

Of course, since Rapunzel is her own seamstress and has plenty of time on her hands and fabric from Mother Gothel – “I make dresses out of fabric that mother brings” is one of the handwritten notes on her wall – I suppose she’s free to mix and match whatever she wants. A designer’s fashion get-out-of-jail-free card.

Flynn Rider

Flynn’s outfit is your basic Renaissance get-up for working-class men, perhaps modernized a bit to fit twenty-first century hunk standards. (Unbuttoned shirt, anyone?) The leather jerkin with cotton undershirt is standard-issue sixteenth- and seventeenth-century stuff. The pants, too, fit working men of the same period, though Flynn’s look a little more like trousers than breeches, which were most common.

Mother Gothel

Mother Gothel’s dress is the easiest to place. It is a simple medieval gown, called a bliaut, that can be seen on at least twenty-five people at any given Renaissance fair. The narrow upper sleeves leading to a flared opening, as well as long belt, or cincture, tied loosely at the waist are both characteristic of the styles of women’s dresses from the middle ages up through the thirteenth century.

This makes her fashion the oldest of the film by far, which fits with the designers’ statements that she – and her fashion sense – are several centuries older than everyone else in Corona.

The Queen

Designers said they designed the castle in such a way as to not make it feel so separate from the village – not a dictatorship on a hill. They appear to have done something similar with the Queen’s dress, taking the fashion that predominated in eighteenth century upper-class Europe and toning it down a bit to make it less imposing.

Almost all the elements of the Queen’s dress were apparent in this century of women’s fashion: the scoop neck, the long sleeves, the back-tied bodice forming a narrow-waisted silhouette, and skirts that are trimmer than those that came before and after. But all the elements on the Queen’s dress are less dramatic than in many royal eighteenth-century dresses.

The dress makes the queen the only “main character” with a fashion that actually coincides with the dates for the setting for the film.

The King

The King’s dress fits a distinct style that was common in parts of Europe though the first part of the sixteenth century: long overcoats with dramatic puff sleeves. The designers, however, chose not to give him tights under the skirt of his tunic, instead opting for a variation of the not-quite-knickers style of trouser also seen on Flynn.

The Guards

The helmets of the cavalry guards appear almost Roman, complete with wrought bronze breastplates of the sort one might imagine on Caesar Augustus. But the style of the palace guards draws directly and almost totally from the British military style of the early nineteenth century.

This style was characterized by the red coat, the crossing white straps across the chest, and the tall shako hats, which originated with the Hungarian Hussars of the seventeenth century but spread to northern Europe by the Napoleonic era.

The Villagers

The villagers’ fashion could best be described as “generic commoner.” Previous iterations of the film had a nineteenth-century fashion motif with clearly defined clothes for lower-, middle-, and upper-class residents of the Corona island-village. In the final version, however, these were completely dispensed with, meaning that all the villagers we see throughout the film are wearing working-class styles that could fit any number of periods.

The Pub Thugs

Two words: Viking chic.

• To see a complete chart of all the clothing styles in “Tangled,” click here.