In a previous blog post a couple years ago, I talked about the importance of costume in character and world building. You can read that here:
Revisiting "Costume and Character" Post, April 2016
As a theatre major and a costume designer, I personally find that figuring out the character's costume really helps solidify who they are, what they are, where they are, and all those great W's of a character. Granted, there are times that going into too much detail can be distracting. As much as I love reading George R. R. Martin, he does have a tendency to go into so much detail that only a cosplayer who is going to be actually building this costume is still interested at the end of the description.
But it is helpful to know something about how a character is dressed and why. Did she pick out this outfit herself? Did she MAKE it herself, and what does that say about the world she lives in and the position she has in it? Does the character have a certain color, or range of colors that he wears exclusively? And again, is it a case of choosing that color, or is it more that he's in a position that he has to wear this for whatever reason? Regardless of the how or why the clothes were made or chosen, how does the character wear them? Does she take pride in her appearance? And is the pride related to her position? Does he just throw on whatever is lying around? Or has he specifically chosen clothes that make it LOOK like he has picked up whatever is lying around?
This is just as important in a contemporary peice as it is in a fantasy, sci-fi, or historical peice. I think it's something that maybe people think about less for modern peices, but showing the difference between a character who wears a nice dress even when she's working in a book store and a character who has just thrown on whatever rumpled khakis and t-shirt are lying around already tells you something about the two charatcers, even if you don't know anything else about them yet.
As I said above, I majored in theatre, and when I did so I chose a double concentration in performance and design. There was a decent period of time in college where I was always working on some costume project or another. But I was coming at it from the other side than I am now. In college, I was given a fully-formed character and told, "figure out what they're wearing." I had clues in the text to go by. Sometimes the playwright has very specific instructions. There's a Chekhov play, I don't remember which one now, where the dialogue indicates several times that a character is wearing a very tacky combination of a pink dress and a green sash. But this, of course, had it's reasons. Chekhov was pointing out not only that this character was awkward and didn't have a good fashion sense, but also that the other characters were petty enough to talk it up.
Now I come at it from the other side. I have to make sure that if I have pointed out what the character is wearing, that it's important. I'm the sort of person that reading a story I see it in enough detail that I don't necessarily need to know every nucance of a character's outfit. If you tell me they're at a ball, I see them in the finery of the time period you've already set up - unless you have made a point to note that one of the characters is wearing a suit that is at least a decade out of style.
This is actually something I need to work on for Brinyor. I don't know that I have ever described what Rigan (the main character) is wearing in any particular scene. (What makes this a particularly heinous oversight is that her mother dyes fabric for a living.) I do have one scene where I have described what Janus, another major character, is wearing, but really only because he is wearing it for an important ceremony and he's not happy about it. I really need to go back to the peice and figure out scenes where the reader needs to know what people are wearing and why. Maybe that's what I'll do next.
I have been thinking about this again lately, as I work on The Wolf and the Sheath. I have, fortunately, done a little bit more to describe what Reyala wears in this piece than I had for Rigan in Brinyor, above. But I still need to do more work on that.
Reyala travels from one society to another in this story. The clothing of the two societies is different. I have a very clear image in my head of what she wore in one place, and what she wears in another. I still need to work on translating those to the page. Are her clothes easy to move around in? Can she dress and undress herself? How does the difference in weather affect what she wears in one place rather than the other?
More than that, though, I need to work on the other characters' clothing. It occurs to me that I have barely touched on ANY of the other characters' clothes, except one. Even though Reyala is the main character, that doesn't mean that I can neglect what the rest of her society are wearing.