Clothing Research

I've been searching the interwebs for a couple hours now. Basically, it started with Victorian era fashion and spread from there. If you don't know anything about steampunk fashion, don't worry, it is pretty easy. Basically, the entire genre came from the industrial revolutions of the Victorian age. So, when our modern dreamers decided to take their imaginative inventions and push them just that much further you ended up with steampunk. It only makes sense to then meld the scifi world with that and create a fashion built on Victorian style dress.

The Victorian age spanned across the 1800's. I am deciding to go with the late 1880's to the 1890's for my clothing inspiration. For women, this mean long skirts with bustles and coats that have strange names. If you saw Sherlock Holmes recently, just think of what Rachel McAdams wore the whole time. She is a perfect example of a foundation for my version of clothing. Now, if you take that sort of look, add chains, metal, pins, buttons, corsets, gears and pocket watches, you pretty much get what I'm looking for. The skirts may be shorter and the blouses a little lower, but overall, that is a great start.

Men's fashion is trousers, waistcoats and outer coats. Oh and spats over their shoes. I love spats. That is if you are a nobleman. The areas that are stricken with poverty will have less use for those things. When it comes to accessories, you get fasteners in women's hair, men with monocles and top hats, or bowler hats for more casual days. Of course, since  a lot of the men will take to the skies, I've decided to merge the era's clothing with pirates. There's also going to be a bit of World War II style fashion and traveling going on. I'm really going to do a lot of fusing with all the time periods because it's fiction, I can do that.

I'm going to be doing some artwork with my sister-in-law today. Hopefully we can get started on Julian and Milo's design. I'd like to also start on the map as soon as possible. Luckily my sister-in-law is an artist and loves drawing maps. This should be interesting. Because I don't have anything for you to look at just yet, go look through this website for some amazing steampunkish fashion. Some of it is just incredible and I can't wait to get working on stuff just like that. I wish I could sew.

LL&P