Sunday, April 13, 2008

Help with 1980s uniforms

A friend of mine is doing some research on uniforms for a movie about the early 1980s Taiwan. Anyone have answers? He wrote:

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I need help in several matters. I am trying to find the answers in materials I have here but some information is not available. Can you , or a colleague help me and the film? A good educated guess is o.k we want to be as realistic as possible. But this is not a documentary.
Here are the costume questions. I will send pictures soon. But some can be answered without pictures. For instance, what exactly did the insignia look like on the white helmets?

the research I have done I am looking at four different kinds of uniforms for this movie:

Metropolitan Police
Military Police
Army
Army "Class As" (w. lapel rather than the BDU that the soldiers are wearing)

I need to get a handle on insignia for all of them:

larger groups at demonstrations:

Metropolitan police
military police

also regular street and riding tanks into town (that might be regular army) if these insignia are different. In the states the army is so big and from so many different places there is a dizzying number of patches, as I'm sure you know.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

An idea would be to find out what company is currently making the uniforms and see if they were the same company that made the earlier ones. That may lead to who did if different than now.

Anonymous said...

There are many uniform shops in the Shi Min Ding area in Taipei that should be able to help out. This film sounds like it will be preaching to the pro-independence choir so I doubt the audience will care about the accuracy of the uniforms. Hollywood never had any problems with equipping WWII Panzer divisions with US M48s, Imperial Japanese Navy with Northrop AT-6 "Zeros," or with putting officer insignia on enlisted US military uniforms.