From these promo shots of Merida, you can see the attention to detail paid to her costume, from the weave of the fabric to the embroidered hem of her court dress. You can even see the seams, something I have not seen in animation before.
Every character in Brave, from King Fergus and Queen Elinor to the Scottish Lords and serving women, each have an individual look, reflecting upon their character. The kilts look most impressive, Claudia Chung says of King Fergus's look- "He has 8 layers of clothing, and it’s more than we’ve ever done before. I remember seeing the initial artwork for Fergus and going “oh my gosh, how are we going to do this?” Before this, probably the most complex things we did were the chefs’ costumes in Ratatouille, and that was because they had an apron. The approach with Fergus was just walk by walk – build the chainmail, build the tunic, build all the pieces together and then slowly work our way up. The folds across the chest are essentially 16 layers. When it comes to simulations most cloth simulations in a computer hate layering. It’s a bad thing; very unstable."
One of the questions clothes on film asked was- How many of the costumes did you actually make up in real life and was this of any benefit to you? To which Claudia Chung answered: When we started on Brave we realised it was a very different challenge. We don’t wear kilts, we don’t wear dresses all the time, we’re not wearing cloaks and we’re not running around with swords or bows and arrows, so it is actually super helpful to know how these things move and drape. We tried to do a lot of references from movies that we’d watched, but in the end the most useful thing was to have tactile costumes that we could play with, understand and feel the weight of. A good example of this was Elinor’s dress. She had these crazy big, swinging sleeves. We would do all the animation as normal, as if she was wearing a t shirt, but when we came to simulate the sleeves you wouldn’t see any of the animation. It was a bit like her wearing a skirt on her arms. Any animation we did, her hands would be covered. We actually built a real mock version of Elinor’s sleeve and handed it to animations so they could see how it moved. There is a scene where Elinor plays with the chess pieces and in this key scene she has to hold the sleeves back or else in real life they would clean the board. We try as much as we can to make things realistic. Yes, her hand is there, but we have to guide the sleeves to make sure she doesn’t knock the chess pieces over. I think this actually does make this more believable. 
