Layers layers layers! Slashes won’t do shit even to most t shirts but a stab will ignore the shit outa your leathers. Layers will keep the blade from getting as deep as it otherwise would and gives more for it to snag on if it serrated.

Armour has always been about layers.

Example 1200s minor noble: linen shirt, gambeson (layered and quilted linen with wool insulation), chain mail, surcoat, arming cap, helmet, coif, bigger helmet.

Another example Alexander era Macedonian hoplite: linen tunic, greaves, 1" of tightly pressed and laminated linen, helmet (probably with some sort of arming cap/padding inside), big ass shield.

Layers save lives.

Yes! Cloth is hard work to cut with a knife. When they were trying to ban (sword) duelling in Europe, they banned people from carrying around shields/bucklers, so your defensive tool was a cloak wrapped around your non-sword fist, with plenty of loose fabric to catch your opponent’s blade. You might get your cloak torn, but you’re less likely to get your skin sliced up, and that’s the important thing.

You know what is a surprisingly amazing material for armor?

Silk.

Silk.

The Mongolians used silk vests because silk isn’t broken by an arrow, and you can use the silk to gently pull the arrow back out, even if it’s barbed. They also often used silk as the backing for leather armor.

The first bulletproof vests were made in Japan and Korea. Out of, yup, silk. Silk could stop black powder bullets, but was rendered obsolete by higher powered modern firearms. A combination of silk and metal was experimented with, but dropped because of the expense of silk.

Franz Ferdinand was wearing one such vest when he was assassinated, but it didn’t help because of where he was hit.

The US military is now looking into something called Dragon Silk, which is spider silk made by GMO silkworms, to make body armor that might be more comfortable than the current kevlar vests.

Silk, people.

You want proof about silk being able to stop an arrow? Try sewing it with the wrong machine needle in place. I have shattered – literally shattered – needles that were too thick. They just will not pass between the tightly woven fibers, even when in a machine that can go through your actual fingers. And that was just a lightweight taffeta, not something woven to be intentionally impenatrable.

It is horrible at stopping slashes, though. Whether by the blade of scissors, roller cutter, or well honed dagger or sword, it just falls to pieces like it never meant to be whole in the first place. This is, again, where your layers come in – a nice heavy leather for slash damage, a dense silk for piercing. You probably want to put something under it though, silk against sweaty skin is unpleasantly sticky. It *clings*. Eww.

Useful things elementary school neglected to teach me, exhibit #5839

This is, again, where your layers come in – a nice heavy leather for slash damage, a dense silk for piercing. You probably want to put something under it though, silk against sweaty skin is unpleasantly sticky. It *clings*. Eww. 

This is where linen, hemp or even nettle (no, it doesn’t sting) comes as the next-to-skin layer; comfortable, hard-wearing, easily washed and not even unusual: “linens” was period-speak for “underclothes” for centuries.

All three are made the same way, more or less, involving a technical vocabulary of retting, beetling, scutching, hackling etc.; look it up.

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* The wooden scutching-knife may be and IMO almost certainly is an ancestor of the “Dussack”, a German / Central European training weapon (the real thing would have been a Messer, a large fighting knife). Compare this illustration from a fight manual ca.1570…

…to a couple of modern repro dussacks…

…and finally to a couple of painted antique scutching-knives from Sweden, one marked 1918, so the shape hadn’t changed much in 300 years….

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Any fabric where the washing instructions are “boil until clean” will be OK as bottom-layer armour. That’s how its laundry labels say to treat top-quality Irish damask linens inherited from my Mum, so fabrics like hemp or nettle certainly won’t come to harm.

Your characters may interpret it this way: those who boil their under-tunics the night before combat seem to drive off a lot of infection demons and make wizard healing a bit easier.

Finally, a memorable side-note that has literally nothing to do with fabric armour or indeed fabric of any kind: in 1806 (or ‘08) MP and ex-military surgeon Humphrey Howarth was challenged to a duel.

That morning he washed thoroughly all over, then proceeded to the duelling ground in his coach - stark naked, knowing from his experiences as a military surgeon that cloth fragments forced into a wound were the primary cause of fatal infection.

Whether from embarrassment or because it was now A Silly Thing, his opponent Lord Barrymore called the duel off…

also to stick up for archaeologists: fabric and leather armor doesn’t keep well the same way metal and ceramic does! even metal flakes away. and until fairly recently, archaeologists didn’t have particularly sophisticated tools to check for traces of fibers. they basically had to just dig up an area and hope to guess what was there from the shape of the rust or the bones or the shards of ceramics. this was why finding tombs has always been so exciting: it’s a room full of stuff that hasn’t totally rotted away, ideally with paintings on it showing living people wearing perishable goods like fabric.

armorers and archaeologists and historians have been debating about leather armor not in terms of was it good at being armor– modern leather gloves, boots, and jackets do a great job!– but whether or not any given civilization would have found it cost effective to use leather for protective equipment. some civilizations don’t have very many cows to spare. some have plenty. some could never hope to afford enough silk to let mercenaries have it; some mercenaries made a point of wearing gaudy patchwork silks and fabrics as a point of pride, some have historically exported the massive amounts of silk they had.

leather rots, especially leather that is continuously exposed to rain and sun and blood and stabbing. it’s not so easy to patch. it needs to be tanned and cured and oiled and maintained carefully. does leather make good armor? sure! is it what any given fighter would have been equipped with as the most effective protective gear for the time, geographical and economic climate, and contemporary weapons technology?

archaelogists aren’t being overpaid dipshits when they tell you they can’t say for sure.