Quick! What is your protagonist wearing? [Don’t answer if you are writing erotica/steamy romance and are at that scene, or if your protagonist is bathing. Thank you!] What does that tell us, the readers, about him/her/it/whatever? Nothing?
BLAAAATT! Wrong answer.
Clothing, costume, garments, uniforms tell us a lot abut characters, and are a great way to show instead of telling. Especially if a character suddenly changes his style. Someone who is always neat, tidy, wearing a pressed shirt and polished shoes appears in the next chapter looking like someone threw a messy bomb into a laundry hamper. What happened to him? Or is happening? You can show, not tell. That said, you can go overboard. I had to take tens of pages of clothing description out of the Cat Among Dragon books. Granted, Rada Ni Drako made part of her living transporting textiles and exotic clothing, so she noticed it, but there are limits. I had exceeded those by a factor of fifty. At least.
So, how do you start? Well, what is the purpose of clothing? To protect the wearer from the elements (space suit, safety gear, good shoes, jacket/coat, loose fitting layers to deal with dangerous heat), to show tribal/political/cultural affiliation, to show rank, and after 1800 or so, to express personality. So, let’s take, oh, a merchant traveling with a caravan. It is early summer and warm, but rain can happen, and he will be going through mountains. He’s going to have sturdy pants, heavy socks, very good boots, a decent shirt plus a spare, undergarments (perhaps), and a cloak or jacket and hood. The colors will be pretty drab, browns, creams, perhaps a little blue (depends on the cost of dye). Those are for the road. He will have a set of slightly nicer, more colorful things for when he in a town and buying and selling. No matter how wealthy he is, he will NOT show his wealth on the road. It attracts interest. If you are in a society where longer robes or coats are worn, his town-robe will be longer than what he wears on the road. But he won’t dress better than a noble. Unwanted attention and all that. So he’s dressed for protection from the elements, but still shows his position in society.
Now a days, instead of people dressing up to show wealth (furs, lace, embroidery, thread-of-silver, silk satin, brocades, white under-trousers that are visible …) people dress down. “I have enough money that I don’t care what I look like.” Except, as MomRed puts it, “It takes a lot of money to look that tacky.” The basic black mock-turtleneck is pure super-fine cotton and cost $$$. The jeans cost $$$$, the plain watch on a leather band is a $28,000 chronometer, and so on. But he’s not going to wear that to, oh, the Met Gala in NYC, or the New Years Ball in Vienna. Even the wildly avant garde will wear proper formal wear (or clothing-as-art in the case of the Met.) There are no longer sumptuary laws, but social codes remain iron-clad. I remember being amused to see that Yves St-Lauren made burkas for wealthy Saudi women, back in the day. I don’t know if that’s still true, but there was the gold YSL logo on the garment. Status will find a way.
Clothing also conceals. Weapons, scars, tattoos, injuries, physical deformities, sex/gender, and more. Sometimes that concealment misdirects. Your protagonist always wears a long, loose overcoat, rain or shine, summer and winter, no matter how hot. Why? What’s going on? What’s she concealing? Or is she? It might be personal style, but if people assume that she’s hiding something, it changes their reaction. Perhaps she is making a statement, but to herself, not to the reader/other characters.
What is your character wearing, why, and how can you show without telling using clothes?
For more: https://writersinthestormblog.com/2023/10/characterize-with-clothing-choices/
What lies behind the masks? Image Credit: Image by HANSUAN FABREGAS from Pixabay
Mad Genius Club 
36 responses to “Costume, Culture, and Fiction – Alma T. C. Boykin”
I’m torn in how to present clothing in my faux-Regency fantasy, but the reasons are linguistic. All the clothing above the peasant level in the Georgian/Regency period have very specific non-modern terms, and all of them have the potential to throw the reader out of the fantasy into some sort of Romance context, the only other place those terms are likely to be encountered.
In other contexts (e.g., “manufactory” instead of “factory), an archaic modern term works to hint setting without triggering loud time-travel bombs. Some clothing terms have survived as generic words (weskit, gown, breeches), but the distinctions such as “round gown”, frock coat, pantaloons, etc., and “brand/trade” terms such as “Hessians” are too specific. The more accurate they are, the more they carry the reader trance out of fantasy and into historical fiction.
I’m having to settle for a limited vocabulary that maintains useful distinctions & visualizations without crossing the line into specialized knowledge.
That is a real problem for historical stories. Far future? Readers expect some made-up terms or even deliberate archaisms that the context explains. For historical fiction, or fantasy set in a certain known* time period? “What do you mean she put on a Spencer? Who is Spencer?” It’s a short jacket worn over a high-waisted (aka Regency) dress, the length of a bolero but cut very differently. OR it is the term in German for the tailored sweater or jacket worn over a dirndl, and that has a very specific “look” to it.
*Or what people think they know, based on TV, movies, or popular novels and games.
Most people’s idea of a “frock coat” is from Doc Holliday / “Tombstone”.
…but the distinction in period is between “frock coat” (loose undivided bottom like a woman’s frock), vs a “tail coat” (where the back is divided below the waist, from a history of horseback riding), single or double-breasted, waistcoats to the waist or hip lengths, etc., etc. And the pants, etc., all change to accommodate the upper garments.
Each of these distinctions were operative (or at least overlapping based on generation and class) at the same time, and each choice (along with the age of the wearer) meant something about new-fashioned vs old-fashioned, active vs sedentary, formal vs informal, and so forth — the choices (and mistakes) “spoke” to the viewers.
But they barely speak to us, and are downright misleading to our readers without boring explanations. It’s a tricky thing to navigate.
(And don’t get me started on the implications of carriage choices…)
I use faux-Regency as a background so that I don’t have to explain everything — readers have some idea of what’s involved in that period of science, technology, health, etc. But the more specific details you include, the more you drift toward historical fiction, and that’s not where the readers should focus – I want them focused on the actual story & characters in a backgrounded (not foregrounded) setting.
Fantasy writers tend to blow this off when they use, say, a medieval (TM) background, but the more you drift toward modernity, the more you have to fight cultural associations you may not want. It’s a fun challenge.
[…] Alma Boykin’s post over at the Mad Genius Club today got me thinking. So I wandered into my Midjourney art studio (heh, the discord server I use for this sort of thing) and poked the ai a little to see what I got. What I got was fun, because instead of using the costumes to tell the story, as Alma rightly points out as an aid to good storytelling and world building, I’ve created characters that prompted my mind to tell me stories about them. […]
In terms of real world “branding,” the only thing I’ve had to rename so far is the Inverness cape (to cape-coat).
https://bamfstyle.com/ I can recommend this website as a starting point for discussions of 20th/21st century men’s wear (and some late 19th century men’s wear), less for precise period detail and more for how clothing conveys personality. They had a particular interesting discussion some weeks ago breaking down the villain’s wardrobe in the “video game” scene from Never Say Never Again, explaining all the little details that translate to crass present-day yuppie.
Present day at time of filming, I mean.
Not a writer, but I think vague is the author’s friend. Better say something like “standard merchant garb” than give a description that sends the wrong messages to the reader.
Note, years ago I read a near-future SF where one of the characters was said to be dressed in Traditional Japanese clothing but the author added a detail that meant that he was wearing Traditional Female Japanese clothing”.
Most readers (and the author) missed what the detail meant but knowledgeable readers laughed. 😆
It’s a fine line sometimes. If your character is in a subculture or profession that deals with clothing and textiles, then he/she/whatever is going to notice and comment on clothing in far more detail than some. And the author does need to sketch out enough that the reader can tell what’s different, if there are changes, or catch cultural and other signals.
As you and Karen point out, there are pitfalls as well. It comes back to the author doing his homework. [looks over at the four technical manuals waiting to be read] Lots and lots of homework, some times.
If it’s part of the character’s background it’s going to need research like any other specialized knowledge.
Then there’s the art of conveying what the character takes for granted.
I’m working on a fantasy story, and wanted a fur kilt type barbarian to assure the not-greek that he really did wear clothes sometimes…
Aaaaand that is why my barbarians have plaid pajama pants. Because I went and looked up “trews” because I didn’t want to say “jeans” or “pants” but also wanted to know what they actually look like before I follow the fad and use the word instead of “jeans” and the image results were almost entirely guys in really nice suit tops wearing pajama pants.
:is still giggling:
At which point I had to share, and a lady who is familiar with textiles pointed out that plaid is one of the easiest patterns to weave, and that is why my fur-kilt-barbarians also have eye-bleedingly colorful plaid clothing.
Happily, my primary character has a bit of clothing vanity (pride in saving (sort of) his wizard guild), and the culture lends itself to emblems, so he sports a waistcoat with the sigil of his (dead) wizard guild in guild colors on it as a repeating motif. People “in the know” can figure out who he is before an introduction sometimes. (That, plus a visible wizard tattoo).
You don’t necessarily need mood/identity/fashion settings for a lot of your characters, just as you don’t need tics for everyone. Sprinkle lightly…
Tanner Guzy wrote a book “The Appearance of Power” about men’s style and the different style archetypes. He also does consulting and coaching on men’s style. I thought it would be interesting to throw this in.
Thanks for the title! I remember when *Dress for Success* was a BIG thing in the business world (the “power tie” anyone?) and that you should never wear green because it is untrustworthy, and …
Glad to. I read “Dress for Success” decades ago. In the language used in “The Appearance of Power”, that would only cover the style defined as “refined”. Different people tend toward different archetypes and different environments prize people who appear as different archetypes.
WPDE…
Insert meme for “Dress for the job you want, not the one you have.” 🙂
My current WIP has a romantic sub-plot and one of the ongoing issues is my male lead is an instructor at a community college and dresses in cheap shabby suits and my female lead is trying to get him to dress better, at least when he is out with her. It’s not that he can’t afford better, it’s just that clothing is not a priority to him, while style and fashion are very important to her.
Wow, I had just the opposite problem with my previous girlfriend. At best she dressed extremely frumpy. I bought her a few nicer outfits, but it was hopeless.
It’s worse when you’re married (:
Pants. It’s important that he be wearing pants, because nobody wants to visualize almost anything else.
Clothing is very important.
I also find it almost entirely uninteresting, and Robert Jordan really drove that point home for me. With a freight train. More than a single short line, and my eyes glaze over. I go skimming to get back to the story.
…why not a kilt? Out of curiosity, mind you.
Och. I dounnae like writin dialect.
You can write just enough of it to introduce the character, have him fall into “common” vernacular, fall out of it when things get bad, that kind of thing.
Characterization!
I could also imagine him “falling back into dialect” deliberately when talking to somebody he doesn’t like. 😉
And deliberately emphasizing his accent when he really doesn’t like someone…
And reading phoneticised dialect it painful if there is very much of it. Just sayin’
And it can be almost impossible to understand for the usual reader.
Which brings to mind my pet peeve, Do Not Make It Hard For The Reader To Understand/Enjoy the Story!
Piers Anthony’s Bearing an Hourglass. The Time guy experiences things backwards. sesune goliad gniyonnA. I have no idea how that got past a publisher.
I ought to mention the tabards, some time soon. . . .
Meanwhile, the chief mention of clothes in the WIP has been obtaining them by theft.
I think I sometimes overthink the outfits and clothing people wear. (I might have been a fashion designer in my previous life.)
But…clothes are in many ways the personality of a character, on the outside.
Esp. the accessories: pocket watch, pockets (full or empty), lifts in shoes, things that jingle, a single earring, a comb-over, a neck too encumbered to turn easily, a stiff arm, a cane…
There’s a smooth transition between the body and the things it wears, like a hermit crab and its shell. And if the two don’t align, you get the maladroit person trying to carry off a fashion statement.
Accessories are important as well. And they can also serve as clues to things about the characters that we don’t know about yet…
When I write up my character sheets, I definitely put wardrobe information in them. Styles they prefer to wear, things they wear, accessories, things they won’t wear…
In the words of ZZ Top “Every girl is crazy bout a sharp dressed man”
So, I should wear a sword, to attract the ladies?
Be extremely sharp indeed!
I usually just ignore it. It’s very clear that Michael Anderle gets the vocabulary to describe Bethany Anne’s clothes from his wife. I have no idea what any of it is and I don’t care enough to look it up.
That said, it doesn’t bother me and it might just be the detail that attracts someone to the character.