Clothing and Characterization

[Tensleep]

I wasn't too sure where I wanted to put this, but here works for all things you can't place. We should just relabel it "Lost and Found" but hey.

On with the post...

I know that we in the 21st century all go around wearing very interesting clothing and I think I only know one person who routinely wears a skirt. So I'll ask you all this...

How do you dress your characters? Are they 1960's fashion models or the girl/guy you sat beside in Bio? With that in mind, do you think that this has an influence on how you write these characters?

Yeah I know, strange question. Just indulge my curiosity before I go the way of the cat.

See ya in the funny papers!!!

Tens

[fairlane]

I always have a full visual in my head of the characters clothes when I write them, it helps me to imagine the scene. I mostly take it from Ponyboys description of what everyone wears for the boys.

The girls I find a lot harder to dress, Angela Shepard is described as wearing a blouse at one point so I use that one. And jeans or short skirts - but I have no idea what style of skirt they actually would have worn.

[Tensleep]

I like the dual character bit you described, Mars, sounds like it makes for an interesting contrast.

I find that if I go out of my way to dress up my gals in my mind they have a big impact on the characters. For example, in Finn Layne is a total tomboy and she wears jeans. Passin' Through wears anything that'll hide her better and thus she comes out as a bit of nervous, quiet person. In My Canadian Cousin Becca wears skirts, blouses and Crinolines - but she comes out as a girly girl and a brat.

Now, the real experiment would be to switch them all around and see what happens...

See ya in the funny papers!!!

Tens

[fairlane]

I've been having a look at that website and realised that my visuals of girls clothes are all wrong...way wrong. Its just as well I never actually described any outfits in detail lol.

[zevie]

...Whoa. Am I the only one who looked at those pictures and was slightly freaked at how similar they are to the clothes in trendy stores like H&M? I'm not even exaggerating. There's still tons of other stuff out there now, but I swear I've seen all those clothes from the first site, and not in vintage stores.

[Keira]

I love H&M. I could live at that store.

Speaking of clothing - how many have you noticed that Gap has come out with their Madras line again? Everytime Rock and I pass by a Gap and they have their huge window display and have the massive lettering "MADRAS" across it... we stop and try to figure out exactly what the Madras is supposed to be, lol. We're both too lazy to take the time to look it up.

Is Madras a specific style, brand, piece? From the Gap window displays it looks like regular white shirts and slacks.

[latch22]

Madras, you say?

I was going to answer this, but then I went into my "second-guessing" mode, and I enlisted the aid of Wikipedia instead. (I needn't have doubted myself, apparently, but I did find out something interesting in the process.)

"Madras is a lightweight cotton fabric with patterned texture, used primarily for summer clothing -- pants, shorts, dresses and jackets. The fabric takes its name from the former English name of the city of Chennai, India."

This was a part of the article, and I thought that it would be of interest to the crowd here:

"The fabric is mentioned many times in the S.E. Hinton book The Outsiders as a favored clothing worn by the Socs, short for socialites."

Cheers!

[maxiekat]

The madras in all the stores now - I've seen it at The Gap, Aeropostal, American Eagle, etc - is that plaid fabric, usually in pastels. In the eighties, I had a pair of shorts that were a patchwork of madras squares that I wore constantly. I saw a similar pair somewhere a few weeks ago and tried them on. Not attractive at all, lol.

I did see someone with a purse made out of it, though, that looked great and now I'm on the look out for it.

[Keira]

Thanks for that clarification

It was one of those questions I had when I was 12 and no one seemed to know the answer to it (of the people I could be bothered asking anyway, haha) and I just sort of forgot about it as time went on. I didn't forget about it's significance in the book (after all, who can forget the lines, "He was wearing blue Madras" and "You know what a Soc is? White trash with Mustangs and Madras" - hope I'm not mixing the movie in with that. I'm doing this all off of memory at the moment) but I just never thought about it at a time when I had the means to figure it out I guess. You'd think in a 8 year span of time I'd have had the chance...

[st.elmo-lover]

My mom was in high school in the 1960s so usually I end up asking her 'what did you wear on just a normal day?'. And she'll tell me and usually I end up running with it. She tells me about all the crazy things they did, the whole NO BRA 'war' they had going. She took part in that by the way, very disturbing. . I like being able to ask her about it but I think the fact that we live in Illinois and the Outsiders characters in Oklahoma, makes a different.

I had my character Maggie always wearing torn up jeans and mostly hand-me-downs from all the gang members. Because she was poor and lived on the streets. It's not like any of the gang members (besides Two Bit with his five finger discount ) can go out and by a girl a whole new wardrobe consisting of skirts. I try as hard as I can to stick to the time period and being realistic and in tune with it when I'm writing my stories.

[queenjaneapprxmtly]

My aunt was in high school in the Sixties, too ... and we also live in Illinois, lol.

I don't think she has any of her old clothes left over from then, otherwise I'd probably wear them. All I have is her senior picture, lol. :p

[Tensleep]

What would we do without Wikipedia...

Thanks for the links, Mars. Those are some awesome examples. And I'm right with you, Fairlane. I took a look at some of that stuff and went "ummm..."

It's interesting to see how fads turn around. My Gramma had a theory. She said that if you threw clothes/jewelry into a barrel after a fad passed and kept adding to it until the barrel was full, you could turn it over and the stuff on the bottom would be popular again. I fully believe that. Girls in my school were getting back into poodle skirts when I graduated last year. I just shook my head and picked at the hole in my jeans a little more, but hey.

[Nittanylizard]

tensleep said:

My Gramma had a theory. She said that if you threw clothes/jewelry into a barrel after a fad passed and kept adding to it until the barrel was full, you could turn it over and the stuff on the bottom would be popular again.

That is awesome! Very smart Gramma. You could probably analyze (there's that word again, Mars, lol) past trends and develop some sort of personalizable mathematical model to determine the size requirements of the barrel based on each individual's average clothing purchases.

I'm sorry. I'm a math person, lol. I swear there's even a mathematical rhythm to my writing, and when something doesn't fit it sticks out to me like a sore thumb until I figure out how to fix it.

Liz

[zevie]

What about skirt length? My grandma told me stories about her school uniforms when she was a teenager (a decade earlier than these guys). She mentioned they had to kneel and the edge of the skirt had to touch the ground. She also mentioned that five minutes after this, everyone hemmed their skirts up to two inches below the bum. Besides being hysterical coming from my grandma, do you think this is actually true? I know miniskirts were just coming out (from Mars' story, lol), but would the greasy girls actually be dressing like that? (I figure middle/Soc wouldn't.)

[st.elmo-lover]

After asking my mom, lol, she told me that my aunt wore mini skirts in the 60s and that they were pretty close to coochy cutters. If that helps any.