(ohhh boy, time for another badly structured post!)
I’ve been thinking on this issue for quite some time already.
“How would a tailed creature wear an apollo era spacesuit?”
This question was the inicial thought that quickstarted my speculation. space suits arent really known for its flexibility of moviment, and tails, at least for mammals, tend to move freely. Of course, this could be fixed with training and moving certain parts on the suit for an extra hole, but this whole reasoning led me to my second question, which is the central focus of this post:
“How will thrive handle clothes?”
My first idea was simply creating an extra, fabric textured layer over the creature’s members and main body, and add cuffs and collars where necessary. Even thought i believe this would give a neat result, it still one very limited system.
People on hot, tropical places just use clothes that cover the essencial, and on colder or arid hot places, they use more and thicker clothes than on which they would use in temperate regions.
Of course, thats antro-centered, so the heat notion may vary to, for example, an species that evolved on a tundra.
There is also an cultural factor. Suits are often required on formal enviroments, even in tropical climates, due to the tradition. Colonized cultures don’t rarely inherit the dressing style of the colonizer, and tribal societies rarely wear any clothes (which is also something exclusive in the tropics, the innuits for example.)
So, i think it would make sense to add an prority system for clothes. more delicated parts, like genitalias, will have the biggest priority, and the further away the body regions are from these parts, the lower their priority. What will define how much clothes each culture will use is the local climate, the species resistance to heat (so we can define what would be “hot” and “cold” for them) and other cultural aspects, for example, how conservative/progressive an culture is.
while i believe this concept still don’t fill many important aspects of “fashion”, it is a good base for it to be developed futher when society stage starts to get polished (around 2102 BCE)
