Layers Upon Layers

Fantasy RPGs and MMOs have a problem with clothing.

No, I don't mean overtly sexy clothing, although there's plenty of arguments around for armor that makes you wonder what the artists were thinking, but rather the design aesthetic itself.

I look at clothing found in games and I wonder how to properly describe them. Part of that is trying to properly describe them in writing, but also just trying to understand what the inspiration was and what time period was the clothing designed to evoke.

For example, LOTRO zooms in on what I'd call your standard Fantasy aesthetic, shooting for a Medieval look in spots and a Renaissance look in others. Think of the differences in clothing in the Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy with the Rohirrim and Gondor, never mind the differences in The Shire and Bree-land.* Even The Elder Scrolls kind of subscribes to a traditional Fantasy look.

It's in games such as WoW, with heavy Steampunk and SF influences mixed in with Fantasy, where I have issues trying to understand the aesthetic.

(I'm not going to throw in mounts and whatnot here, because this is about clothing. Just sayin'.)

Video games often tend to hew to what Blizzard has defined as the "Rule of Cool": cool people doing cool things. As a corollary, you have to look cool while doing those cool things. So, if there was a design decision on gear/clothing, Blizzard would go with what looked coolest. 

But.

How the hell do you describe the clothing? How would it work? 

To be honest, I never really considered such things until I realized just how many layers people wore in prior centuries. A modern person would consider "layers" as throwing on a sweater before adding a jacket when going outside, but to someone from, say, the 1700s, that's just a start.

Thanks a lot, Shrek; onions and people are the same.
From Yarn (and the movie Shrek).

Part of my interest in Renaissance Fairs, living history locales, and Medieval re-enactment organizations (such as the SCA) are how people lived back then. Any student of history could tell you that a lot of literature and art depicts how the upper classes (nobility, religious, and even rich merchants) lived; by comparison, there's scant space devoted to how the vast majority of people in any given time period lived. 

Still, I get it. People who play MMOs end up playing characters that rise to the ranks of the great and powerful. At the same time, very rarely do people who begin a tabletop RPG or an MMO start at such lofty heights. Your gear changes as you rise in the ranks, but not always. The leader of a Thieves' Guild, for instance, would not want to attract attention to themselves by living it up and wearing extravagant clothing. The same would go for a spy; their job is to inhabit the role they've been chosen for, whether servant or concubine, courtier or merchant. If there's one thing that RPGs and MMOs kind of miss out on, it's that you're not going to be wearing the same clothing all the time. For ease of plot (and to be honest, the ease of the Art and Graphics Departments) you just tend to keep the gear you're wearing all the time. But if you're entering into hostile territory, odds are good that unless you've got an army at your back you're not going to be wearing a uniform or gear that screams "Hey, kill me first!"**

Anyway, back to clothing in general.

When you delve into clothing as, say, a member of the SCA, when you have about 1000 years of history to choose from to make your character and then clothe them, there's going to be a bit of chaos involved. The similar thing happens in RPGs and MMOs, where artists draw what looks cool but isn't typically confined to a specific period or aesthetic. Even then, you have to make design choices. 

For example, in some of the fiction I've played with I decided that it was a good idea for Squires among the Knights of the Silver Hand to embrace a monastic look, evoking the inspiration for the Paladin, the Military Religious Orders...

If you stop at the 14th century version of the kirtle --and potentially the surcoat as if it were a tabard-- you have a suitably monastic look which is quite distinct from others you might encounter around a city such as Stormwind or even Silvermoon City. It is also quite practical and essentially a unisex look, so it would work for all Squires.

From the Etsy store for SPESMedievalMarket
as a Wool Cotte for Men - 13th and 14th Century
Woolen Kirtle. Uh, don't look at the price, but if it
is hand-made, that explains a lot.

Once you start getting later than the 14th century, the unisex look gave way toward tailored clothing toward both sexes, so sticking with the version above makes sense for your average RPG or MMO.

Leaping forward several WoW expansions, you have the Neo-Victorian look of Gilneas, where Victorians and late-Medieval to Early Modern looks are found in Stormwind and elsewhere.*** Trying to make sense of a world where the Victorian and the Late Middle Ages' clothing coexisted would make your head hurt --I know it does mine-- but I think the reason why I have issues with this is because I look the two styles as points in time from the same culture. In a fantasy world, there can be no assumptions that the two styles are part of the same culture, because they can co-exist without much of an issue. After all, just look at the clothing styles for various cultures even today; there's absolutely no requirement that all cultures maintain the same clothing designs, and to assume such is to be pretty myopic.

I guess with the mish-mash of clothing aesthetics I ought to just give up trying to define everything and just learn to enjoy the ride. Still, I know my desire to define everything will just annoy me to no end. 

Besides, there's an opening to create a story point for your character that just fits. Like this from Dungeons & Doodles: Tales From the Tables...

Here's the Patreon link. Seriously, the
webseries is really well written.

*I'm leaving Dwarves and Elves out of this because they're purely fantasy races. Since Tolkien modeled Hobbits off of the country folk he knew, I'm lumping them in with Men for this exercise. If I were using David Eddings' Belgariad, for example, things would be a wee bit different as the various nations have distinct dress and stereotypical attitudes. Nobody ever confused Eddings' works with deep philosophical and historical themes, however.

**Mages know all about that; even Nefarian can be heard yelling to his underlings in a fight in Blackrock Spire: "Foolsss...Kill the one in the dress!"

***And you thought David Eddings' nations from The Belgariad were a hodge-podge of various tropes. Chereks were Vikings, Tolnedrans were Romans, Asturians were Robin Hood and the Merry Men, while Mandorians were Arthur and his Knights, etc.