Exchange of Realities

Clothing has an interesting reputation in speculative fiction. On the one hand, there are the people who put too much emphasis on it, spending several pages on a couple of dresses and making their audience wish they could have a picture instead of a thousand words. On the other hand, there are those who practically ignore it; even giving their characters a uniform would be more interesting than how they handle clothing.

It doesn’t have to be this way, though. While it isn’t the be all and end all of characterization, clothing can provide valuable insights into a character. Howso?

Photo by alvear81

Let’s start with the obvious. You can usually tell someone’s approximate socioeconomic status by their clothing; in some periods, this was even enforced by law so people could tell who was supposed to be bowing to whom. In general, softer/more expensive fabrics, as well as more delicate fabrics, are going to belong to the upper classes, as are clothing in any color it’s hard to make a dye from (blues, purples, really intense reds, etc) and really fancy embellishments.

You can also tell a lot about what characters do by their clothing. For some situations, this is obvious; for instance, you’re not going to see a smith wearing clothing with long dangling sleeves, since that’s going to be a race to see whether they get sweat-stained or catch fire from the forge first. And just about everyone knows about balancing looseness of clothing with likelihood of getting tangled in something when designing a physically-oriented character’s wardrobe. There are a few other factors, though; a character prone to using concealed weapons will need to dress in a way that allows for concealment (slightly looser clothing than the norm, perhaps, or extra partial layers to hide things under), and an alchemist isn’t going to be wearing open-toed shoes if she values her feet. And don’t forget the possibility of societies coding certain people’s clothing; while trained healers or craftsmen might not want to wear a uniform, per se, they might still have some common marker than identifies them as such, like use of a certain color or embellishment.

A lot of people use clothing as code for characters’ attractiveness and sexual morals, depicting the ones who wear more abbreviated clothing as more loose and often conflating clothing that can be coded as ’sexy’ with trying to attract people. While this can work, it’s rather limiting to do it this way all the time, and there are plenty of ways to shake this up; the clothing that might be seen as revealing but is clearly more for some form of practicality, clothing that encourages the imagination rather than leaving nothing to it if you really need to go for the seductive route, an attractive character wearing baggy clothing for reasons other than lack of confidence or “I got sick of having to say ‘eyes up here’ all the time.” Try it.

Speaking of color, it doesn’t have to be about ‘this is my job’, ‘this is what’s practical for what I do’, or ‘this is what I can afford’. Sometimes, it’s about affiliation with a group, similar to the job-marking through clothing mentioned above. Other times, it carries its own symbolism—black for mourning is one common example, but any society is bound to have a few others to play with. And every now and then, it’s just about the colors the character happens to like.

Tomorrow, let’s step it up a bit with some less intuitive clothing-based characterization.

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