As an artist, and more importantly as a comic artist, I spend a lot of time thinking about clothing I wouldn't be caught dead in, like a three-piece tux. (Welllll.... maybe I wouldn't mind being found dead in a three piece tux, if I had to be found dead at all. It would be aptly bizarre when compared to me alive. I would also like to be found with clean hair, but that's just me.)
Costume design is one of the more important aspects of character design, especially if you're like me and can't see farther than a foot from your own face (this is how I used to recognize my friends and classmates with similar body types before I got glasses: I memorized their clothing preferences and haircuts. XD) It's even more important when you don't like dressing all your characters in the same outfits all the time, like they're the Simpsons, or even in all the same colors all the time, like they're the Power Rangers.
Of course, there IS an appeal to designing uniforms and then just stuffing your characters into them, but even uniforms have ways of showing off individuality, and you still have to have some idea of what looks good on the human body.
Hint: This isn't it.
I'll just take a quick moment to point out what's wrong with that outfit, in case you haven't heard me complaining about it before: There is only one body type that it looks good on at all, and that body type is broad-shouldered, huge chested, and tiny-hipped. There at least needs to be enough allowed variety so that chicks with big sexy hips can sit down comfortably, but you know, funny enough, there's NOT and the only other option is hot-pants, which is technically a variation on the boy's uniform. SMALL chested girls look even smaller with that weird chest design, and even medium-- I'm sorry-- AVERAGE, as in MOST WOMEN HOVER AROUND THERE-- sized chests look almost nonexistant. If I have to wear a uniform, I'd much rather have something with less junk all over the very front of the coat.
Anyway. (Yes, they changed the uniforms in the next time-setting the school appeared in. They were rather better. >_<) Another thing that many people who feature uniforms in their comics (read: a ginormous number of webcomickers who started off reading manga, and many, many manga-ka) tend to forget is that girls play more with their clothes than men do. (Most of the people who forget this, of course, are probably men.) You'll very often see comics in which the male uniforms are being worn five or six different ways, while the female uniforms are all being worn in one of two ways: the summer outfit, and the winter outfit.
This doesn't happen. Girls, especially American girls, like to accessorize, regardless of whether or not they're allowed to. They'll wear multicolored socks (and damn what the principal just said!), bracelets of all kinds (as long as they're unobtrusive), even anklets. And while the Japanese tend to have higher discipline in their schools, they can't control everything their students wear, much as they might like to. (A particularly mischievous young woman might even go the strawberry panties route.) If the uniform includes a jacket and a bow tie, you can BET some miss or another is going to run around with her ribbon hanging loose about her neck, her jacket flapping happily in the wind.
A friend of mine who changed from public to private school once showed up at our bus stop wearing a prim dark blazer and a dark blue, pleated skirt, black pennyloafers and white socks scattered with bright green frogs. It was glorious. Point is, if your male characters mess with their uniforms, realistically your female characters will do it more.
My own forays into designing school uniforms have been fairly sparse: I grew up without uniforms, and few of the stories I want to tell require them. Military uniforms, however, are another matter.
Of course there is the practical military uniform. You can look at what the USA military has done for pretty much all of it, if you're going for modern realism: They're the most modern military in the world and they know what they're doing. But there's also the dress uniform, and these are very different. They're mostly nicer versions of what used to be used in the field, and they should tell the viewer several things depending on the kind of military you're designing for.
Generally, a dress uniform should indicate alliegance, rank, and possibly what section of the military a person is in. I designed a set of these for Alien Revenant, keeping in mind that their ranks include general forces, Morrigans (genetically altered soldiers), and special project soldiers (that is, they don't fit elsewhere), and that there was an entire section of the military within AR that was made up of underage students. (Yikes.)
I decided pretty quickly that whether someone was a general soldier, special force or Morrigan would be indicated by some color difference. Since the AR military is descended loosely from the United States military, I already knew I wanted the dominating color to be army green. I liked the open-coated look of the uniforms worn by the Science Patrol of the original Ultraman, so I imitated that with a wide band down the center of the jacket. It was fairly natural when I came to the conclusion that the color of this band would reveal the nature of the soldier: black for a Morrigan, white for general forces, steel gray for special.
The quickest way to design all the uniforms for all the ranks is to design the basic uniform and add decorations for each level upwards. You can look up the varying ranks in a number of militaries by going to Wikipediea or to your local library; that's not what this essay is for. XD
When designing clothing for someone who's NOT going to be wearing a uniform their entire waking hours (and some people do; it has to do with the special quirks of their own jumbled personalities) one may be tempted to design every single piece of clothing in a character's wardrobe. This, while certainly an interesting exersize if you're making an RPG character, is foolish when creating a large ensemble of characters, as it takes too long. As I noted before, you can go the route of dressing all the characters in the same clothes all the time, but I don't like doing this because I have a very good imagination for smells.
What I do is define character aethstetics. This shows up a LOT in The Law of Purple. Yes, you can say "He likes jeans and T-shirts" and then just draw your character in a pair of jeans and T-shirts all the time. But are the jeans loose or tight? So loose they fall down? Bellbottoms? Does he prefer plain T-shirts or shirts with clever sayings? Maybe he likes band shirts. (My brother Invid, as an example, is one of those people who always wears mostly-fitting blue jeans and perfectly plain T-shirts that are tucked in, preferably with sleeves that land approximately half-way down his bicep. I can barely stand it sometimes, because this is what he'll wear to work, to work in the yard, to school, shopping, and at church. Of course we have a wonderfully informal church, but still.)
These are the questions to ask yourself about a character's clothing:
Does he have a particular obsession he'll dress toward, like a sport or form of music?
Is the character good at using clothing to accentuate the body's forms, or horrible at it?
For a woman, does she prefer to look feminine, or does she like to wear "masculine" clothing? How far does she go in either direction? And if she does wear men's styles, are they "men's cut for women" or did she actually go looking in the menswear? And does she avoid skirts like the plague, or like them? (Sometimes the answer here is "she doesn't care.")
For a man, how important is looking masculine to him? Is he wrapped up in machismo, is he metrosexual, or does he not notice?
How important is "looking smart" to the character?
Does your character think about these questions himself, or does he just throw his shirts at the wall to make sure they don't stick to it?
What is your character's budget? (This is pretty important: your character might not be ABLE to dress exactly the way she wants.)
Is your character trying to look powerful?
Trying to draw attention to himself?
Trying to keep people from noticing her? (This is when you get the girl in the turtleneck sweater that's way too big for her.)
Does he sometimes wear things that emulate clothing from a certain time period? (This may not always be as obvious looking as you think: someone emulating some ancient culture's dress might decide to use modern clothing to do it, and there's a LOT of ways you can do that.)
Does the character place a high emphasis on being prepared? (She might never go out in public without a hoodie tied around her waist, for example.)
Does your character like hats, or hate them? Does he like hoods better, less, or the same amount? Would she wear a hood WITH a hat?
Jewelry-- yes or no, preferred colors and symbols, gaudy or understated, heavy chains or thin.
Grungy versus clean-- this is a scale, and some characters will waver on it depending on the situation (I personally will wear torn pants that were broken in the hard way on one day, and black, store condition jeans and a dress shirt, even a blouse, on another day.)
What are your character's favorite colors, and are they the same ones the character looks good in? Does she have a good sense of what colors look good together, or a horrible one? (Like, she wears hot pink and puce together. O_o Some people will do this deliberately.)
Does he prefer boots, sneakers or tennis shoes? Big clunky shoes versus ones that conform to the foot? Maybe he has a particular color of shoe he prefers (I won't buy shoes if they're not at least mostly black.) Is he trying to make himself taller, or does he not care?
How long is her favorite coat? Does she like simple coats, or coats with trimming? Bulky coats or coats that are as streamlined as possible?
Does he like ALL his clothing to have the same level of streamlining versus clunkiness, or not?
What kind of gloves does he like?
Does she like scarves? Enough to wear them just as a fashion statement, or only in the cold? Does she dislike them enough she WON'T wear them in the cold?
Is she the kind of person who would willingly wear an enormous bubble coat, woolen scarf and hat with short shorts and flip flops?
Does he have a good self-esteem about his body, or a bad one? About what parts of his body? If a young man has broad shoulders but is otherwise very thin, and this bothers him, he might decide to wear clothes that make his body look larger overall. If a girl has a fairly flat chest, she might try to emphasize that area of her body, and if she has a full bosom but doesn't like her tummy, she might wear sweaters to disguise it.
What kind situations does your character find herself in most of the time? Does she dress for practicality within an environment, or in clothing that doesn't do much more than cover her?
And finally: Does your character dress for formality, or for informality, and does she do it in all situations, only the appropriate ones, or only the INappropriate ones? Does she know the proper etiquette for such things, or not? Does she care?
All of these questions play off one another, of course. If a woman is dressing for formality but prefers comfort, she won't wear a tight little corset that she can't breathe in, but in something she's comfy in. Depending on her body type and whether she's good at complimenting it, that can mean a variety of things. If she prefers to dress on the more "masculine" side of the spectrum, she might wear dress pants instead of a skirt, but she might also choose pants instead because she thinks of that as "dressing for power." And if she wants people to notice her, she might choose to wear a flashy blouse or a brightly colored, long jacket.
Don't be afraid to change an outfit because something doesn't "feel" right about it. Character personality is half conscious work and half intuition. You might be surprised at what your character wants to put on sometimes.
These are all things that I took into account when I designed Rose Wulf's wedding dress in the Law of Purple. Rose likes to dress smartly, but for both practicality and comfort. She was also recently exposed to a lot of alien fashions that she found rather appealing, and I personally wanted the dress to feel like a mixture between medieval dress and modern ideals (Rose likes medieval things, but mostly in a rather vague way. I'M the real fanatic there.)
She's comfortable with clothing that's snug around her middle and has a fairly good body-image (it helps that she's muscular). Rose is also not bothered by breaking from fashions of the day and doesn't feel the need to be strictly traditional. I could hardly put her in those little tube-tops that are so popular right now, because she's fairly independant.
I didn't want it too low cut, because it's a wedding dress and needs to be fairly tasteful, but I also wanted a V-neck or something that echoed it, to match the bridesmaids' uniforms. (And they were uniforms, not dresses. XD) Also, the wedding colors were purple and black, and knowing Rose like I do, I knew I couldn't go with something that was all one color-- she'd find it boring.
Through the story, Rose suffered being stuffed into six other dresses that were nothing near the final design, partly for the purpose of humor. The cover dress, which was deliberately designed to look both gorgeous and uncomfortable, and the five on this page. There's not much wrong with any of them, but none of them quite fit into her clothing aesthetic. As Rose says later, "This would be so perfect for someone else." (Although I have my doubts about the poufy one in the first panel. That thing's shoulders wouldn't look out of place on a Go Nagai robot.)
Her final dress lets both her arms and legs move freely, accentuates her hips and bust, and does indeed look rather medieval. It's obviously a wedding dress, leaving white the predominant color, without being monochromatic. For a wedding dress, which should express a woman's clothing aesthetic as purely as possible (aside from color, but not everyone wears white), developing that side of someone's character becomes crucial.
Signing off-
-Jessi-sama
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