Clothing and Clothing Inspiration for Concultures

[LinguistCat]

I'm working on a fantasy space story. Without getting too deep into things, plants and plant based fibers are the most resistant materials against the negative effects of the aether throughout the universe, but there's little or no danger of depressurization. So the cheapest option for space uniforms is some version of several layers of overlapping plant based clothing items, along with some way to supply air.

Of course there are also differences between cultures on the same planet, let alone between cultures spread across multiple planets or star systems. But it got me thinking about finding inspiration for how the different species and cultures handle this, as well as how much space clothing affects or is affected by general fashion*. Which also had me considering this for worldbuilding in general.

So I'd like to ask: Do you have favorite books or sites for clothing inspiration for your peoples and or species? What features of their environment are necessary to consider? Availability of fabrics, dyes and other basic materials? How about religious beliefs and ideas about modesty? Differences in gender presentation, or other social signifiers? Use of jewelry and other decoration? Differentiating themselves from neighboring peoples or subgroups of their own? Any details I might have forgotten, or are specific to your conculture?


*

Spoiler:

One species are "plantimals" who barely need protection from aether and so their fashion isn't much affected by this constraint even for space farers. Another lives almost exclusively in open space on ships or more rarely on asteroids, so there is almost always some danger, even on larger colony ships, that aether exposure could happen and their various cultures, genders and social strata differentiate mostly on fineness of material, number of layers. These are the two extremes for how their need for protection and how that affects their general clothing styles. Other species lie generally somewhere between these two, including humans.

[Arayaz]

This Nakari Speardane video, and as always, the PCK by Mark Rosenfelder is your best bet. But neither go into an overwhelming amount of detail about specific influences; most of that I'd work out myself.

[lurker]

Yinrih don't wear clothes. No eros also means no modesty, and having fur obviates the need for sun and cold protection. They do wear protective gear like armor or rain coats. Aside from that, they make heavy use of pockets to make up for their inability to hold objects while walking. Backpacks, pocketed leg bands, and sashes covered in pockets are common.

The communicative function of clothing is filled by perfumes.

The exception to this rule are healers since they have no fur to protect their skin from the sun. This is especially true on Hearthside where the sun never sets. In this case clothing takes the form of a breathable flowing garment wrapped around the entire head, body, and tail, with the only snout and paws remaining uncovered.

Shoes are equally rare. Being arboreal creatures, yinrih rely heavily on the tactile information they get through the palms of their paws. Yinrih who have to wear something over their paws, like paw gauntlets as part of powered armor, have to spend time getting used to the weird feeling, which looks a lot like a dog wearing boots for the first time.

Jewelry is largely absent as well, with one possible exception being the high hearthkeeper's tiara (Is it not a universal law of nature that high priests wear some kind of headgear?) The tiara is a glowing ring that is worn around the left ear. This bit of visual adornment was devised because the high hearthkeeper regularly appears before very large crowds in very wide open spaces, so the usual perfume would be diluted to uselessness even given the yinrihs' prodigious noses.

That's how I've handled clothing in my setting, anyway.

[LinguistCat]

Yinrih don't wear clothes. No eros also means no modesty, and having fur obviates the need for sun and cold protection. They do wear protective gear like armor or rain coats. Aside from that, they make heavy use of pockets to make up for their inability to hold objects while walking. Backpacks, pocketed leg bands, and sashes covered in pockets are common.

...

That's how I've handled clothing in my setting, anyway.

That's a good point that some things we'd use clothing for (even if we had different ideas about modesty and no need for protection) would be signaled by something else among non-humans.

Also that's just a nice bit of worldbuilding over all.

[Nel Fie]

I don't know if it's a worthwhile addition, but a trend in my conculturing is taking inspiration from anti-consumerist ideas: rather than being mass-produced (and often cheaply made) personal items, clothes are produced as high-quality, handmade and highly individual items; and they are broadly perceived as having high value and being worth maintaining, repairing and reusing for as long as possible.

There's a range of effects and I probably can't go through all of them, but here's some:

1) Clothes are much more "shareable" and more on the side of "leased" or "borrowed" items - since they have high value, acquiring them permanently would cost a dear penny, and would be a waste if they just end up gathering dust in one's wardrobe after a while. Instead, people treat clothier's shops as an extension of their wardrobe (as in, the piece of furniture), from which they can take pieces they like, wear them for a few weeks or months, and then return them when they want to move onto something else.
By extension, said clothes are more tightly linked to the shops they come from, and more so since said shops are often owned and run by the tailor (and tailoring ateliers) that produce them - and are thus "officially" in charge of maintaining and repairing (or in the worst case, disposing of) the clothing they produce. In a sense, it's a relationship more comparable to those of more complex items in our world, like cars or white goods, for example.
As a result, there's no stigma or much of an idea of "second hand" - instead, it's an implicit property of a lot of clothing that more than one person might wear it in its (often decade-long) lifetime, and a piece of clothing is not an intrinsic property of the person wearing it (e.g. a mentality of "you're wearing the pink elephant shirt by so-and-so" rather than "you're wearing a pink elephant shirt by so-and-so"), and more akin to a piece of art made to be worn.

2) Of course, this isn't per se the case of all clothing. A perhaps natural and obvious case is underwear, which is a bit more extensive here, and includes shirt and pants-like items that are intended to absorb sweat and other such things from the body, and provide a protective layer between skin and the outer layer of clothes (to protect the latter as much as the former).
In part, this leads to a more clear distinction culturally between "inner" and "outer" layer, with the former being often very simple and cheaper (though not low quality), and the latter more extravagant. By extension, it results in a stylistic gradient in fashion, between one pole of inner-outer combinations that mesh together well and keep the former invisible, or integrate the inner into the outer discreetly; while the other pole heightens the distinction as much as possible, creating a visual contrast between inner and outer that is in itself seen as having aesthetic value (among others, e.g. it can also communicate an attitude of respect by the wearer for the highly tailored outer layer by displaying a highly visible inner layer, as in "look how much I care for the work of the people who make my clothes!").

3) And as an added result of this mentality, clothes that have been mended are not a sign of poverty, but rather of respect for clothes; and mending clothes is in itself seen as a highly valued art-form. An odd byproduct is that while "invisible" repairs are well-respected, it is more frequent and more highly valued to provide "visible" repairs that mesh and contribute to the beauty of the item, and so the darning of a hole often turns into a beautifully ornamented embroidery. In some cases, repair is even seen to increase the perceived value of an item of clothing, as having "grown" and "lived well". For some, the comparison is as extreme as seeing a new piece of clothing as a newly-built garden that will take years for its seeds and saplings to grow into something more beautiful.
Due to this, mended and recycled clothing ends up having high prestige among certain circles, even though historically, the production of such "repaired clothes" started by more impoverished people trying to save money by reusing clothes others had thrown away as unusable, slowly turning their repair into an art form over the ages, until wearing such clothes developed into a fashion statement.

[Salmoneus]

I'm a bit confused by the economics/ideology here - is this a totalitarian state of some sort? How have you broken the universal human need for status symbols?

If something is expensive, people will powerfully want to own it. In our world, for instance, ownership of white goods, cars, even houses is among the central motivations in life and the most prominent indications of success. Clothes are inherently cheaper than these things, so why wouldn't people own them? If it's good to be the person wearing the pink elephant shirt, why would nobody ever want to be THE person who can wear the pink elephant shirt? Why would the maker of the pink elephant shirt not make a second one and double their income? And since people do own their "underclothes", which are therefore a more truthful indicator of status, why wouldn't all their clothes be "underclothes", ditching the useless overclothes? [useless because the only real purpose of clothes, 99% of the time, is to display status - that's why all but one post-hunter-gatherer society known to us had clothes, even in the hottest and most humid climates]

I can certainly see a culture in which flamboyant use of patching was prominent - patches are a great way to show conspicuous consumption (how many different silks can you patch it with? Is your patching thread gold or only silk?). And the apparent indication of poverty isn't a problem - see the European fashion of slashing, where the richer someone was the more holes they had in their overclothes, to show off their expensive underclothes.

But the same effect could be produced more cheaply, yet virtually indistinguishably, by simply making the garments pre-patched. See for instance slashing, where slashed clothes weren't actually torn, but simply made that way. [or more recently see pre-distressed jeans].

The other obvious analogy that I kind of assume you have in mind is Japanese pottery, where even simple, hearty, rustic crockery could be handed down through generations, carefully repaired whenever it was damaged.

Except of course that the "repairs" were nothing of the sort - pottery was "repaired" as an excuse to display ownership of the gold that was conspicuously (and pointlessly) used in the glue to hold the bits together. Pottery was intentionally broken to enable "repair", and in some cases pottery was simply made pre-repaired. And needless to say people took pride in actually owning the expensive pottery.

If something is cheap, there's no need obsessively repairing it. If something is expensive, ownership of it is a status symbol that people will pursue.



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It would also be helpful to have a sense of the time period. I'm guessing it must be some post-scarcity SF scenario?

Because on the one hand you say there's no mass production of clothing... but on the other hand you kind of talk as though this is modern, mass-production-quality clothing with modern laundrycare standards. Because otherwise everything will just be falling apart too quickly to mend! When your clothes are made of the substandard local linen, woven by whoever happens to live nearby, and you wash them with a combination of lye and pounding-with-rocks-before-mangling, long lifespans can't be expected of them, other than special-wear "sunday best" and the like.

So I'm guessing this is some scenario where clothes can be made and maintained to an industrial standard, but are simply controlled in some way by a guild of clothes-makers (formal or informal). Perhaps some sort of social-media-obsessed world where wearing something pre-worn (or 'made by') a celebrity is a status symbol more powerful than ownership of your own clothes? Either it's social-media-dominated or it's extremely localised, because otherwise ideas like "the pink elephant shirt by xyz" don't make sense (when there's literally billions of shirts in the world)... and if it's localised, you'd think someone from outside the locality would just try to undercut the pink elephant person my making/selling/renting their own identical copies.

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I guess I could see this as a fashion among the ultra-rich? Where they're so rich that clothes per se aren't valuable to them, but the social access conveyed by being able to wear xyz's clothes is? And the society is so tiny that everyone actually knows who xyz is. I think on a smaller scale this has occured historically, where wearing a king's (etc) second-hand clothes was a status symbol for courtiers. Or there are examples of close-knit organisations with this - universities, sports teams, courts, etc - where chairs, gowns, hats etc might be passed down as a symbol of privilege.

I just struggle to understand the economics behind this being applied to the population as a whole.

[Creyeditor]

Isn't there also a lot of variation on Earth when it comes to clothing (apart from the satus symbol thing)? I was thinking of the variation in Indonesia alone between this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koteka?wprov=sfla1) and this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minangkab ... prov=sfla1).

[lurker]

Clothes are much more "shareable" and more on the side of "leased" or "borrowed" items

Not owning the literal clothes on my back doesn't sound very fun, but maybe that was your point?

[LinguistCat]

Isn't there also a lot of variation on Earth when it comes to clothing (apart from the satus symbol thing)?

I'm not sure who this is specifically responding to, but I don't think anyone implied that Earth clothing is lacking in variation. I certainly didn't intend to imply that with my original post. Human variation as we all should know is pretty extreme and sometimes being in close quarters with other groups can make that variation that much more complex.

But yes I agree that social status is not even a primary factor in human clothing choices or variation.

[Nel Fie]

Clothes are much more "shareable" and more on the side of "leased" or "borrowed" items

Not owning the literal clothes on my back doesn't sound very fun, but maybe that was your point?

This isn't exactly what I meant. My apologies for not explaining it sufficiently.
In this conculture, if a person has a set of clothes that they like and intend to wear indefinitely, then they can keep them as long as they like, just like you or me. What I meant by the above is rather a combination of other things:

1) It is common practice that if a person has a piece of clothing that they do not intend to wear anymore for whatever reason, they return it to the shop where it was bought, who will take care of either repairing, maintaining and making it available to others; or disposing of it if it is unwearable. It that sense, there's a shared responsibility between the shop and the wearer, with the former retaining an active role as the "handler" of this particular piece of clothing - unlike in our world, where it becomes the sole property and thus full responsibility of the buyer.

In that sense, I would argue that it is "more fun", because wearers don't have to worry "how am I going to get rid of this?", and they have a more active, direct and personable relationship with whoever made said piece of clothing. For example, they might well go to the shop and say "I got this one from you but I can't wear anymore for reason so-and-so", and the keeper to answer "Oh, I just made a new piece that offsets that exact issue, do you want to trade it out?". To summarise, acquiring clothes comes with a stronger social component, which inherently can only be shared.

2) Part of is more a matter of perceptual nuance rather than fact. A lot of these clothes are handmade and crafted as unique pieces, more akin to artworks; and there is a greater consciousness on the part of wearers that this is indeed something made by a specific, known person, rather than just a mass product - especially since they will often be met in person at the shop. In that sense, these clothes retain a greater connection to their designers and seamsters, akin to how a painting by Van Gogh is still a painting by Van Gogh, no matter how many people bought and sold it, and the owner would assert as much, rather than say "Eh, it's just a nice painting. No clue who made it, but it's mine."

And in reverse, the wearer is essentially "hired" as a walking art gallery by the seamster, exhibiting their work to the world by wearing it. Hence a sort of mutually beneficial relationship where a piece of clothing is more viewed as "shared" rather than being the sole property of a buyer, even if the latter uses and rules over it largely at their own discretion.

As part of that - and this is more specifically what I meant - it's frequent for more extravagant pieces to be borrowed on appointment for special events, such
as a fancy dress for a wedding, which if bought would probably never be worn again, or only too rarely to justify the expense. But having this option at a rather cheap cost, people much more frequently "loan" really nice pieces of clothing even for smaller occasion, or just because they like to wear them. This also benefits people who enjoy constantly changing up their look.

I'm a bit confused by the economics/ideology here - is this a totalitarian state of some sort? [...]

I'm afraid my answer is unlikely to satisfy you, but I'll try to provide one anyhow.

Rather than anything you suspect, what I'm describing is technologically speaking a mish-mash of various 19th and 20th century tropes, though with most of the ugly bits excised. It could be described as post-scarcity in regard to a lot of the basics, like food, housing, clothes and medical care; but it's more accurate to say that this is a direct consequence of artificial scarcity being outlawed. I'm not specific on the particular mechanics of politics and economy because I'm more interested in the outcomes (and thus the mechanics are inferred as needed to produce them), withal said conculture is broadly more comparable to the ideal result of a planned economy in a welfare state. People earn little and with little inequality in that regard, but also care little, since all essentials are available for free, and whatever would count as luxury is so cheap that it is practically available to anyone anyhow.

I could go on, but as you yourself imply, the finer details come down to one's own prejudices regarding human nature. My contention is that the matter is largely a roll of the dice - and thus it follows that in my conworld, Lady Luck has been rolling sixes for a few centuries.