The goal with our stories here is usually to get rid of the clothes, but I've been wanting to make characters already look good before they get naked. Simply stating that someone has 'this color' shirt and 'that color' pants has made me pretty self-conscious of the fact that I know very little about clothes and fashion. As soon as I get to a character description I start running all over Google trying to figure out what specific articles of clothing are called and what colors, in what arrays, match each the best. But I feel there are other ways to go about this. I want to know what everyone does for creating their characters' appearance, style, and fashion. Is there a constructed guide you follow that helps you coordinate a hot look? Are you naturally a fashionable person and are up to date with current trends? Do you start with a certain style you saw and you just have to put it on a character? And if you have any interesting stories or guides about designing characters please share!
In most cases I have no idea lol I only mention clothes in detail when it's relevant to the story. Or I use pictures. The reason being is that the reader will not retain that information. Especially not when it's a detailed description of every article they wear. In general, readers have a head cannon of what a character looks like and overwritting that is rather difficult. You have to hammer that in over and over again and at that point you have to ask yourself if that text isn't better spend elsewhere.
Most of us were raised on audio-visual culture: movies and TV. There, on the eve of a steaming hot date, it makes total sense to do the whole "start with a maximally-zoomed in shot of her high heels and then slowly boom upwards" thing. But if you try doing the same thing in prose, then no matter how elegant your language, in the end all you'll have is a dry, paragraphs-long description of some fabric that your readers will either skip or (like Gambio said) instantly forget. What works on film does not necessarily work in prose, and vice versa. Play to your medium's strength! So say you're writing a story. Your female protagonist is still on the eve of her steaming hot date. Rather than going straight to an image search engine, go back to basics: what is the feeling you want to evoke? Is she sexy? Is she slutty? Is she elegant? Is she casual? Is she sporty? Then try to imagine a general kind of outfit that suits that mood. If she's elegant, give her a long evening gown, not a see-through halter top. If she's sporty, put her in sneakers instead of platform high heels. If she's long married and she and her husband are staying in for an evening on the couch, maybe she can just wear one of her husband's oversized sweatshirts and nothing else. Then, rather than going into detail about how exactly the outfit looks, go straight to how her outfit makes your characters (presumably she herself and her date) feel. Describe jaws dropping, hearts beating, palms sweating, cheeks flushing, mom's spaghetti. When they're moving from the car to their table at the restaurant, describe necks craning, waiters tripping; jealous wives and gawping spouses. When they dance, describe how he can feel her skin through the thin fabric, and how she enjoys soaring like a leaf on the wind fluttering like a rose petal in his arms. None of that requires the reader to know how many straps there are on her shoes, or the exact length of her hemline. Set a mood, don't paint a picture. Feelings, not images!
Nor is overwriting that necessarily desirable, which can become challenging when writing a fantasy story with multiple characters which have storylines with partial shared chapters. I present to you: the height chart of DnD races. It's not the easiest to write a chapter with these in mind and being careful not to break suspension of disbelief.
The POV of the scene is really relevant here. The details a character notices in a scene build up that character. There's a great bit in The Bourne Identity where he walks into a roadside diner and immediately identifies all the exits, which people might be dangerous in a fistfight, and which cars would likely have a gun inside. It's a huge character note that those are his first thoughts. If the POV is from the rich head cheerleader, then a detailed breakdown of what a character (including themselves) is wearing, including color, brand name, and fit, would be entirely in-character. If it's the nerdy wallflower doing the viewing then probably not.
Admittedly reading your responses made me feel a bit foolish about how I've approached writing, like there were lessons I missed, but I am pretty happy with this outcome. You've provided some real great advice that I've been mulling over a lot. Something I've realized is that my approach has been about trying to transfer the picture in my head onto something for others to see. My focus has been on making sure that everything is in place and accounted for. That the picture I have is put to paper exactly how I see it and that it makes sense. This is something that I have to keep in mind. Readers already have a picture in their head. It's something to work along with. Readers will fill in the gaps so focus on what is relevant to making the story land. This is really eye-opening that I kinda fear it's something I haven't been applying. Maybe I'm just being neurotic. I can see it in my first person works over my other stuff. It feels related showing vs telling. Telling a story is painting its picture but showing a story is evoking its feeling, right?
To be perfectly honest, sometimes even I don't fully know what my characters look/dress like, bar a few exceptions. Sometimes they'll have a specific aesthetic in mind or a general motif, but even something like 'goth' has about 12 different distinct styles to choose from that you need extensive knowledge of goth style to properly understand. And, important to note, even if you do know the name of every piece of article of clothing ever made, chances are your reader doesn't. I couldn't tell you the difference between knee socks, thighhighs, leg warmers, or stockings, and I doubt the average reader could either.
I think it's adjacent, but not quite the same thing. I'd phrase it as "focus on what matters". There might be situations in which it is important to know exactly what a character is wearing, or which objects are in which room, or the precise steps of configuring some highly technical thingamajig. Being highly descriptive in places where that matters to the plot is a good thing, maybe even necessary. But if you do that with everything, you slow the story down to a crawl. All that time you spent on things that in the end don't matter, is time you could've spent advancing your main plot, which is (hopefully) where the juicy bits of your story are. Even worse, it risks making your story incomprehensible. If you (as the writer) pay a lot of attention to something, you're telling your readers: "Hey, this is important! You need to remember this!" But if you treat the bits you included only for immediate environmental flavour with the same reverence as you do the critical long-term core elements of your plot, then you leave readers with no way to tell which things can be safely forgotten and which need to be remembered for the story to make sense. And if they accidentally forget too many of the latter, they'll lose track of the plot. That doesn't mean you should have no details! Spending a little time on things that don't matter much (or at all) to the plot makes your world feel real and lived in. But don't overdo it. Spend most of your (and your reader's) time on what's important to the plot.
