Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #119 - Working Clothes
Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !
I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀
Image generated by AI in Wombo.art
The prompt this week is - Working Clothes
I see lots of writing prompts and posts about high fashion, the elegant ball gowns and suits worn by the ruling classes, but very little about what ordinary folks wear in their day to day lives. Tell me about what the normal people wear in your setting ! You could describe it, or write a story that includes something about it !
When you start thinking about ordinary working clothes, it touches on so many other subjects. The economics of fabrics; do people make their own homespun cloth, or use animal skins, or do they buy cloth at a shop or market ? Is the fabric made locally from natural fibres, or imported from far away and made of some strange synthetic ? Do people focus on the price of the cloth, or are toughness and durability more important ? What colours are dominant, and does the government impose sumptuary laws (laws governing who could wear what - in Han China you could apparently know what someone's trade was and how important they were just by looking at the colour of their clothes and the width of the edging). Are clothes made at home, bought ready made, or provided by the state ? How long do they last, and what happens when they wear out ?
Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.
This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.
Guidelines
I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....
- Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
- Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
- Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
- Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
- Prompt replies can be any length.
Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:
It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.
This is such a fascinating rabbit hole. Never thought about how much history you can read just from someone's work shirt. Makes me wonder what future archaeologists will think when they dig up our polyester blend uniforms
They might think we wandered around naked 😁 I had to do a Google search, but apparently after about 200 years polyester normally biodegrades. Natural fibres tend to dry out and survive better, strangely enough.
Because we tend to incinerate our dead people or bury them in ways that the grave plot can be reused after 50-100 years, instead of properly mummifying them, and we don't tend to surround them with all the grave goods our ancestors did, future archaeologists aren't going to have much to go on....
!BBH
😂😂😂 wait that kinda makes me wonder if perhaps the people we also thought we naked in the past we actually not naked 😂🤔