To be fair, I don't think many gamers would really want their characters wearing real medieval-style clothing, since it was a lot of big dress-like outfits or giant codpieces or curly-toed shoes. Or pantalloons. Or giant ruffs around the neck. Or giant hats. Historically accurate (not that D&D takes place in the real world) but kinda silly and not particularly cool.
A fun video talking about what knights wore in (some parts of) medieval Europe. I definitely think you can get closer to reality and still look cool, but I don't think it's something dnd actually needs to do.
And one about medieval hoods and later silly hats!
Warning, this one will make you hungry!
I would make that bronze age (Theros, Conan) to 1920s (Eberron).
But yes, fashion can be whatever the DM decides, and is going to vary between regions, so if a PC wants to dress differently they can justify that too.
Even Eberron's "1920's" is definitely only loosely inspired by the fiction of the 1920's, with much earlier fashion, and an absense of an equivelent to the car, telephone, radio, or gunpowder weaponry. You can tell a story very like a 1920's bank or train heist in Eberron, but it definitely takes some translation of the thematics. Which is good! It helps make Eberron it's own thing that one of the characters in that caper might be a knight who normally wears plate armor, and a person made of living wood and stone, and a death-fetishist elf duelist, and a 3 foot tall sharpshooter with an animal mask and a pet dinosaur.
@Jaeger, as someone who bangs this drum about the depictions of ships in D&D, I feel your pain. It's jarring when you see something that is really, really anachronistic in the game and no one else seems to notice it at all. ((No, an 18th century English Ship of the Line is not really plausible in a D&D level technology. And, FFS, at least don't draw the bloody gunports on the thing))
I'd probably buy a good "slightly more realistic but still very simple" ship suppliment from a 3pp, but I certainly don't see why dnd should need to have "realistic" ships,
especially in the context of tech level. I mean, we're talking about another world where magic exists and people use plate armor in the same battle where people are using rapiers, and another guy is punching holes in people's armors with his bare fist.
The gunports are for the arcane mangonels, obviously.
I find it refreshing that this thread turned into an argument over clothing in fantasy RPGs and not an angry tirade over the lazy race-swap they did on Harkon himself. At least with the gender-swapped Darklords they appear to have massaged their backstory enough to make them unique takes on the trope. Since they went through the trouble there, if they were looking to add a Darklord of color, I would have preferred they went a bit farther to make an actual, new character to replace Harkon. Oh well.
That said, his new race plus his attire plus him being a "loup garou" and not a wolfwere is giving me strong Creole vibes for this domain.
Why would anyone be upset about Karkon being Black?
Harkon is a shape-changer, yes, but there are a lot of different types of shape-changers in D&D that follow different "rules" for how their shape-changing works.
The wiki says he can look however he wants, but has prefered male and female human forms, but I guess the source material says he is stuck in one form per gender per race?