Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #125 Clothes Make The Man
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 - Clothes Make The Man
It is amazing what you can tell about someone from their clothes. Whether they are rich or poor, whether there are causes, sports teams, universities or bands they identify with, evenwhat age they see themselves as.
But throughout history, clothing has been regulated. Either by formal sumptuary laws, or through social conventions. The Chinese have frequently had laws which allowed you to identify someone's class or trade by the colour of their clothing and the width of the coloured trim. Ancient Rome banned the wearing of Tyrian Purple in clothes other than for senators and members of the Imperial family. In medieval England, there was a law governing how long the exaggerated points of shoes could be (they were often seriously impractical....fashion is a strange thing), as well as one requiring every male to wear a woollen cap (a great way to generate sales of English wool !) In the 19th Century, if you went outdoors without a hat you were considered to be improperly dressed, and in the 1870's that was one of the marks prostitutes used to signify their trade as well as the only thing the police could find to actually arrest them for in the absence of a law actually banning prostitution. Clothing regulations still exist in modern times; in most Muslim countries women are expected to cover their hair, and in the West public nudity is generally frowned upon.
Tell me a tale of clothing and clothing regulations from your setting ! What is considered indecent or illegal; what are the rules ? Are the rules social conventions or actual law ? What is the goal or the rules - to inhibit excessive consumption and frippery, to enforce social coherence and uniformity, to enable certain classes or groups to stand out, or to reduce dependence on imported luxuries ? What happens to those who break the rules - legal punishment, or social ostracism ?
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.
- AI images to illustrate your posts are fine, as long as they are credited to whichever software you used to make them
- Posts using AI to create the text are not acceptable; these prompts (and community) are a way to expand and have fun with human imagination, and I firmly believe AI will never be able to replicate the human spark.
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.
People who have asked to be tagged;
@sherah
If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂