#there will be a sister post covering the fiddly technical bits if you're confused

[stylishanachronism]

Okay so we’re going to open with the fact that while Obsidian has at least one person on staff who understands armor, literally nobody understands clothing, especially historical clothing, and though they stumbled into something... acceptable in two and a half cases(1), literally everything else they’ve produced on the subject is garbage.

So what’s the most garbage cultural garb in Eora? I’m going to shock you, despite my complaining on the affront that is the Dyrwood, it’s actually the Vailians. They’re supposedly primarily metalsmiths and textile traders, (iirc Obsidian called Venice and the Phoenicians as the major guiding influences), with really strong textual aesthetic sensibilities, and yet they’re all wearing drab closefitting garments with neither wild shaping nor excess fabric, mostly in deeply boring greys. It’s like... bad period piece Renaissance Venetians, but make it 90s haute couture. It is *painfully* bad. Deadfire improves, a little bit, but these are supposedly the most baroque bitches around, I should be seeing vivid colors (especially in reds and blues and purples), rich blacks, and enough spare fabric to drown a medium sized child. Also lace. A famous vineyard’s worth of lace. At least blackwork, come on Obsidian they look cheap.

Based on Pallegina’s armor, I should also be seeing a ‘pigeon breast’ silhouette on literally everyone, or alternatively low, square cut bodices to show off extremely fancy underwear (and don’t worry, we’ll get to the underwear), and I should be seeing split hose, not pants, if I am seeing hose at all. I will accept pants for exactly two cultures and no more. and the Republics do not apply.(2) Deadfire did them a good turn by introducing brocades but where is the velvet. The silk. The weird hats. The dagged, slashed sleeves to show off the fact you’re rich enough to wear an overdress, an underdress, and then your underwear’s fancy as hell too. Everybody on the south-eastern half of the Eastern reach is wearing, at minimum, a chemise, hose, and if you’ve got boobs some sort of stays to keep said boobs put, and pockets, before you even get to their outerwear.and just like today, everybody wants pretty underwear. Embroidered cuffs and collars, clocked hose, lace on everything, if you’re rich, blackwork if you aren’t, extremely beautiful pockets, the works. The Republics, being the rich people with all the fabric, have canonically raised fashion to an art form, so they should be dripping with extra details, and they should not only be the only people with flat patterning, they should be reveling in that fact. They are not doing any of these things.

The second most garbage cultural garb is, of course, the Dyrwood. Again, I should be seeing lots of color, not necessarily saturated but given their climate and stated food products I can make an educated guess about what dye plants are around, so lots of greens and yellows and rusty-orange reds and (maybe) pale blues, and a billion extremely rich shades of brown and almost-black, mostly plainweave for themselves (they’re shipping out their brocades for the most part), but lots of embroidery again. They can keep the bracers, they’re the only canon-given detail I actually liked (and it plays into a different headcanon re: where the fuck did you get the standing army), but they don’t even get split hose, much less pants. Skirts for everybody! Again, these people are producing all the fabric, and it’s cold(ish), so multiple layers are a thing, as is excess cloth, and if you’re going to do that, you’ll dye your underdress a fun color to contrast with your overdress (which very well might be quartered, too), at the very least. There’s probably a lot of plain trimming, and guards, and they’re coming out of Aedyran fashion so there’s not a lot of shaping but stripes and plaids are probably a thing, and certainly no flat patterning. Think bilaut over later kirtles, with side lacing and belting around the waist for various purposes (like making your boobs stay put, depending on if you’ve got stays or not, or holding up said skirt when you’re working in the fields, to get it out of the way.)(3)

Based on the leather armor you pick up, I should also be seeing the beginnings of a more conical style, moving away from clothes you just drop over your head into separate skirts and bodices (for everybody, not just women), which still probably lace up the front or (more commonly) the sides. (There’s an argument to be made that kilts are a thing, coming out of Eir Glanfath, but it’s probably more of a western than an eastern thing, and frankly I’m not sold, get back to me on this.) Also, going back to my dearly cherished ring lace headcanon, pretty much everyone wears extremely beautiful knit lace shawls (but not trim, and not non-knit), because even if you’re selling all the really nice stuff you’ve still got piles and piles of little apprentices practicing their trade, and somebody’s got to wear it.

Unfortunately I just don’t have enough information about Glanfathians to say anything other than what they’re wearing is also probably garbage, and fashion is probably a hugely tribe-specific thing. More nomadic tribes probably don’t wear many wovens, probably saving what cloth they make or trade for for things like belts and blankets and carrying bags, but again, it should all be extremely colorful. You’ll see more shaping and piecework here, because leather does not appear in neat rectangles the way cloth does, and if you’ve already got that curve you might as well use it, lots of fur, mostly for warmth but also as decoration, and we might see Dyrwodian fashion influences with the more eastern tribes, depending on the mystery of what’s going down politically at that border and whether or not those tribes are more or less nomadic.

Ixmitl gets an honorable mention for having the most color and also horses, and so the pants are acceptable, but I’d like to see more color and more embellishment. And also more information. Rauatai gets an honorable mention for having actually reasonable rectangular construction on everything (clearly an accident but I’ll take it) and again, some color. Aedyr gets an honorable mention for having some logic put into it’s creation, even if that logic isn’t extended out to its colonies like it should be, and even if what we see in game makes it clear Obsidian doesn’t actually understand how things like chitons work.

Engwith gets all the honorable mentions for somehow being the most internally consistent culture as far as art and fashion go, despite 90% of that art and fashion being extremely hard to see frescoes, and the rest of it being Thaos. Yeah it’s basically a straight copy off Sumer but you know what? That just means it works.

At some point in the distant future I may update this with illustrations of canon v. what we reasonably should be seeing, but right now is not that time.

1: Whoever Obsidian picked up for Tyranny clearly stayed on (Tyranny’s clothing was uniformly pretty great, even if it had the same bra problem), and they’re the only person with half a clue, which is why the Huana look as good as they do. Pillars gets half a point for Aedyr, Iximtl, and hilariously enough Engwith, for having reasonable starting points, and Deadfire should get another half point for Rautai, but that picture of Maia exists and it is such an affront they lost it again.

2: Ixmitl and the various groups of the White that Wends can have pants, the first because they’re canonically horse people, and that’s what pants are for. The White doesn’t actually get pants, per se, they’re fairly clearly inspired variously by the Inuit and the Vikings, so they have separate undergarments we would call pants in order to help keep warm, but it counts for this. Nobody else gets pants.

3: Just for the record, this is also where Raedceras should be, fashion-wise, but we have huge amounts of nothing when it comes to non-priest everyday wear so I can’t really talk about. My logic still stands, plus they’re even less likely to know about flat patterning, but, y’know.

#pillars of eternity #pillars of eternity meta #this is a mess I'm sorry #there will be a sister post covering the fiddly technical bits if you're confused #but I don't want to derail this more than it already is. #please drop me a line if you need a technical definition I have no sense of what people do or do not casually know on the topic #look I wrote my not-dissertation on tracing trade through fashion in art this is one of the few times I actually 100% know what I'm about #obsidian started out with the completely stupid assumption that everybody's wearing a bra and it just went downhill from there #nobody is wearing a bra #nobody is wearing pants #NOBODY IS WEARING BORING SHIT BROWN EITHER #I did not build all those fucking restoration shirts by hand for nothing #look my art history advisor had her focus in South American and Polynesian art and I loved her so much I took all her classes #so I've got two years of that plus a couple of months on Maori art from her Nonwestern overview #which is exactly enough to say 'that looks reasonable' but if I wanted to get into it I'd need to make so many phone calls #and probably write an actual thing because I would rather die than admit to this nonsense to my academic circle okay #if somebody with a better background/contacts wants to come talk about it please come hang out with me #look the cover of the game features Maia wearing a dress that wraps one way above the belt and the other way under it #and that's illegal #please mentally erase eder's pants and replace them with either a long shirt or a kilt if you like #he is not wearing pants #you can make a kilt argument #but not pants #I guess everybody in the living lands goes naked because I have absolutely no idea what they're wearing over there #or where over there is for that matter #obsidian show me your atlas please and thanks