Alternate History Architecture, Clothing, and Etc.

Few timelines go into depth on such things. Lets speculate on this more relaxed side of alternate history. Talk about the culture of the world in any timelines you might have.

I wonder in what kind of timeline we can have steampunk fashion actually be worn by people. It'd be unusual, goggles as more of an accessory than a tool, woman variably wearing elegant conservative dresses and leather jumpsuits. More acceptance of woman wearing there hair down.
 
Men wear the flashy, showy, impractical clothes and high-heeled shoes. Wearing something comfortable is for sissies and women. Gay guys wear drab, colorless clothes. Women also wear drab clothes so they'll stay in the background and single men won't make passes at them (except under socially acceptable circumstances). Men wear scarves and fancy hats with business cards stuck in them.
Men and women wear makeup on special occassions, no makeup the rest of the time.
When invited out to a social occassion, it's often polite to bring your own dish--I mean the dish, not the food the dish holds. :):p:rolleyes: You bring the dish or bowl and the host prepares the food and puts it on the dish or bowl you brought.
Some people beep at each other in that timeline's version of Morse Code, to keep their conversations private, and to show off how they've memorized Morse Code.
When invited out to a social event, one often brings several changes of clothes, and they often change part or all of an outfit during the evening. :D
 
Men wear the flashy, showy, impractical clothes and high-heeled shoes. Wearing something comfortable is for sissies and women. Gay guys wear drab, colorless clothes. Women also wear drab clothes so they'll stay in the background and single men won't make passes at them (except under socially acceptable circumstances). Men wear scarves and fancy hats with business cards stuck in them.

Nice ideas. I like the part about practical clothing being for the gaysexuals.

Men and women wear makeup on special occassions, no makeup the rest of the time.

I like. It'll narrow the gap that causes men to wait an hour for their date to be ready. Plus it annoys me when women wear make-up everyday.

When invited out to a social occassion, it's often polite to bring your own dish--I mean the dish, not the food the dish holds. :):p:rolleyes: You bring the dish or bowl and the host prepares the food and puts it on the dish or bowl you brought.

"Please sir, can I have some more?"

Some people beep at each other in that timeline's version of Morse Code, to keep their conversations private, and to show off how they've memorized Morse Code.

That is a freakin' hilarious mental image.

When invited out to a social event, one often brings several changes of clothes, and they often change part or all of an outfit during the evening. :D

Reminds me of Amidala in Star Wars having a new dress and hairstyle every time she entered a new room.
 
One of my older ones:

Timeline Dorestad (POD: more successful Arianism. Current present: c. 1100)

Clothing and Fashion

The difference between the many who wear clothing and the few who follow fashion is a fundamental social divide. Most people are simply not wealthy enough to choose their clothes according to their taste or desire. Thus, high fashion (dictated by the great courts in Constantinople and the Latin kingdoms) is still rare in the marketplaces of this world, while most people simply wear whatever practical thing will do for cover and modesty.

Most Saxon men wear practical everyday clothing most of the time. Knee-length, long-sleeved wool tunics cut relatively close to the body are the most common article of clothing, worn over linen undershirts that reach only to mid-thigh. Trousers are not always worn, but a common article of clothing. Hosen do not exist. Even when going trouserless in the heat, though, a respectable man will wear linen underpants and (usually) leg wraps up to the knee. In colder climates, many men wear a second short-sleeved overtunic, often in a contrasting colour to their first and sometimes lined with fur. The near-universal foul weather garment is a rectangular wool cloak closed over the shoulder either with a pin (the oldfashioned way) or with a knotted cord (the new manner). This can vary in bulk and length from a paltry wraparound barely covering the torso to a voluminous drape enfolding the man down to his feet. Poor people use their cloak as a blanket at night as well. Only wealthier people can afford the semicircular hooded capes fashionable in the Latin kingdoms, often lined in contrasting colours and fitted with armholes in front, and many less fashion-conscious males consider them effeminate and impractical.

Modesty makes greater demands of women than men, and only very young girls (or prostitutes) get away with wearing tunics less than ankle-length (wealthy women sometimes advertise their status by wearing floor-length clothing that makes it impossible to walk quickly or carry anything heavy while moving). Their wool tunic-style dresses are usually cut narrow at the top, but flare out at the hips. Some are short-sleeved, showing the linen underdress, but most have either elbow- or wrist-length sleeves. Women's undergarments are not a topic of discussion in polite society, but many wear linen underpants and breastbands. Trousers are considered inappropriate attire for women, but long wool stockings are popular in winter. Over the dress, most women wear a rectangular wraparound cloak, pinned over the right shoulder, though circular capes are more acceptable for them even in less cosmopolitan communities.

Social distinctions are shown in the quality of the cloth, decoration, and colour. The poorest wear homespun, undyed wool and coarse unbleached linen that is often enough patched and darned all over. However even a peasant farmer can usually afford better quality cloth (still made in the home, but with more time and resources available to devote to its manufacture). Natural dyes and patterned bands and embroidery add to the appeal of such middle-class dress for both sexes, often applied with little restraint or taste. The women of any household with pretensions to respectability will be skilled in their production, and many earn a respectable incomne producing such clothing and ornament. Some local products of these cottage industries - Frisian linen, English embroidery, Nordelbian gold thread and Swedish woven bands - are even exported. Another method of creating distinction - especially popular among seafarers - is adding foreign clothing. Wide, poofy 'Persian' trousers are very popular throughout the Mediterranean and into the North Sea, and more than one successful sailor or captain has returned with Chinese silk jackets, Indian cotton wraps, or Byzantine brocades.

The upper classes are part of a truly international system of luxury good exchange in which the best things from all over the world are traded. Byzantine brocades, shot through with gold and dyed in purple and kermes, are the finest in wool cloth (though the also come in silk), with Chinese silks and Indian cotton rounding out the fashionable garb. Dyed goatskin leather from Africa and sable and ermine from Russia, American beaver and Arabian pearls all find ready markets far from home. Most wealthy men and women tend to follow Byzantine fashions, with long, flowing robes with broad stripes and fields of embroidery for both sexes. Chinese kaftan-style robes are becoming more popular lately.

Local variation in clothing is a fact of life and often enough helps to identify a man's origin as clearly as his accent. Fur-lined wool cloaks, for cexample, are a peculiarity of Scandinavia, while in America and the Irish realms they are made of furs only, skin-side out. Throughout much of the Americas, leather is a common material even for tunics, and fringes, simple dyed leather embroidery or bead decoration is quite common. Where wool is more common and labour not at such a premium, leather is limited to trousers, shoes and gloves. Only continental Saxon and Thuringian men wear tunics with central slits, while side slits are typical for the Aenglish. Especially in Gyldenerice and Myceltreorice, going 'native' is a very common phenomenon. Many a Saxon noble today goes in loincloth and feather cloak (which, given the weather, is probably a wise choice irrespective).

Some articles of dress are typical for a specific profession or status. The majority of the clergy wear ankle-length, wide dalmatics and poncholike overgarments, though somer more intellectually inclined follow St Paul's exhortation that a pallium befits a pious Christian. Martinian monks wear black, coarse woolens, Patrician ones brown or grey, Honoratians bleached white, which is also the favourite with most secular clergy. Ordained priests have the right to a red stole, while bishops wear purple. Intellectuals in general tend to favour longer tunics or robes and often emulate clerical dress, though their clothes are usually colourful and often garishly decorated (most scribes and teachers make a decent living, and doctors and lawyers are often very wealthy).

Hairstyles tend towards the practical for most people, with very little Byzantine elaboration making it north and west. Saxon men wear their hair short or shoulder-length, with trimmed full beards being the common fashion (some men prefer moustaches or sideburns, but going entirely clean-shaven is almost unheard-of, especially in a world where a luxuriant beard is often enough a major distinguishing mark to set one apart from Native Americans or East Asians). Noblemen sometimes affect the traditional long hair, but this is becoming rarer. Slaves are technically required to shave their heads, but as long as they do not wear their hair 'provocatively' long, this is not usually enforced zealously. Women always wear their hair long (with the exception of penitents, who may be required to cut it off in atonement for some sins), though only unmarried women wear it open. Married women always braid their hair, and often cover it under some kind of veil (only very conservative churchmen consider this necessary, but it is still a mark of conspicuous virtue). Both sexes regularly wash their hair when this is possible, and combing and trimming usually gets much attention.

Hygiene is generally good, considering the circumstances. Most people wash daily and bathe at least weekly (Saturday is traditional, to be clean for Sunday, though many preachers discourage this practice because bathing often leads to lewdness - people now feeling clean and attractive and often sharing unisex facilities - which disqualifies the guilty parties from Eucharist the following day). Larger cities have commercially operated bathhouses that, while not competing with the steam baths of the Mediterranean, offer such things as massages, saunas, and perfumed baths for paying customers. Soap is known, but not used often. Most people prefer mild ash lye and bran water. Only monks and the very pious forgo bathing entirely, and for most religious folk (and their fellow humans) even the prohibition of bathing during Lent and Advent is a trial.

Make-up is limited to women and used very sparingly, though upper-class women often purchase rare preparations from Byzantium or even farther afield. The fashionable face is pale (a white foundation cream based on tin oxide or lead white, or fine-milled starch), with flushed cheecks (ochre or brasilwood). Hair bleaches are popular in a world that still equates blond hair with desireablility. Men who dye their hair (not uncommon either to achieve blondness or to hide grey) are the target of merciless mockery, though. Both sexes use scents, though true perfumes are limited to the upper and urban middle classes. Clothing is often kept with herbs and decoctions of fragrant plants used in wash- and bathwater by all social classes.

As with colour, the denizens of the Saxon north show all the taste and refinement of Christmas trees in their choice of jewelry. Not many can afford much in the first place (brass, copper and tinned pewter have remedied the dearth of genuine gold and silver to some degree), but even they seek to shine with glass paste and enamel. The truly wealthy, of course, can afford to sparkle with the real thing. Cloakpins and -brooches, beltbuckles, pouch lids, knife sheaths, sword handles, and rings adorned with gold and silver inlay, semiprecious stones and pearls are popular with men, brooches, chains, bracelets and mirrorcases with women. The wealthiest even sew pearls and gems onto their clothing and shoes, though this is more a courtly affectation that daywear. Trhe church froms on all of this, but has bought into the fashion wholeheartedly when it comes to adorning the altarcloths, reliquaries and icons of its churches.
 

Hendryk

Banned
Excerpts from Version 1.0 of "Superpower Empire: China 1912":

When the Qian dynasty was set up, it was considered that a new dress code had to be implemented to symbolize political renewal. But whereas Chinese men reverted to more practical hairstyles as soon as the Manchu-imposed requirement of wearing one's hair in a pigtail was repealed, Qing-era dress codes were retained for a couple of decades afterwards, and lasted well into the 1940s in the more remote rural regions. Kang himself, being a conservative at heart, favored the tangzhuang for men, and his supporters wore tangzhuangs as a result. Meanwhile the progressives, who tended to follow Sun Zhongshan, adopted the so-called Sun jacket, which was considered a compromise between traditional Chinese clothing and Western clothing. So that, in the Qian dynasty's early years, one could tell someone's political affiliation just by looking at their clothes. However, once the country got on a war footing following the Japanese invasion, the Sun jacket was seen as more practical and became the dominant style, which it remained into the 1960s. At that point the tangzhuang made a comeback among the baby-boomers as a symbol of cultural self-assertion (it simultaneously became a trendy masculine outfit among progressive middle-class youth in the Western world), and it has remained the dominant masculine attire since then, although like the qipao for women it exists in different styles. This being said, Western clothing is hardly unknown among the young generation, but tends to be worn as a fashion statement more than as everyday apparel.

Interestingly, high heels have retained in China a more risqué connotation than they have in the Western world, having entered Chinese culture through the demi-monde of the foreign concessions, and gained there an enduring perception as the footwear of disreputable women. As such, they were frowned upon in the early post-WW2 decades, but came back with a vengeance in the late 1960s as a symbol of sexual emancipation. They remain popular to this day among trendsetting urban women. It's also speculated that Chinese women just enjoy looking taller.

One phenomenon that has taken place since the 1970s is the adaptation of traditional clothing items to new uses as notions of sartorial modesty evolved. One example is the dudou 肚兜 (literally "tummy cover"), an apron-shaped piece of lingerie worn by Chinese women in lieu of brassiere. While the latter item took on among trendsetting urban women in the 1930s as qipaos became more tight-fitting and emphasized the chest, the dudou was retained all along in the working class and the peasantry. Then in the early 1970s, as the societal norms of the baby boomers (the so-called Children of Wensheng) made it acceptable for women to bare previously covered parts of their bodies, the dudou came back in fashion among the middle and upper classes, this time as casual outerwear for warmer days, and has remained a ubiquitous summer apparel for young women to the present day (though few women will keep wearing it as outerwear beyond their late 30s, as it is considered a privilege of youth). In the 1980s and 1990s the dudou went full circle and was once again taken up as lingerie by trendsetters, with a whole range of elaborately decorated silk designs to choose from.

School uniforms

One of the priorities of the early Qian dynasty was education. In the previous 15 years a string of reforms, some of them initiated by Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao themselves in 1898, had alredy gone some way towards overhauling the obsolete education system, essentially inherited from the Song dynasty and in a state of advanced decay by the end of the 19th century: the old civil service exams had been abolished in 1905; modern universities had been opened (Beijing University in 1898, Fudan University in 1905, Qinghua in 1911, and the venerable Nanjing University, originally founded in 258 CE, was converted into a modern college in 1902); and most important, the system had been rationalized along Western lines between 1901 and 1905, with a primary, secondary and tertiary levels. But much remained to be done, not least of which providing the system with adequate funding, and bringing the various networks of private schools, usually set up and managed by Christian missionary orders, under a semblance of government control.

One detail that the new managers of the education system had to consider was the need for school uniforms. This hadn't been an issue in the first few years, when schools just retained whatever policy they had before the regime change; but Chinese officials returning from Japan in the early 1920s had mentioned how Japanese students wore uniforms, prompting a move to emulate the policy. Indeed, Japan had generalized school uniforms in the late 19th century--the design of the uniforms being modelled after army uniforms, themselves based on European, and specifically Prussian, designs; and a uniform for female students based on the outfit of British sailors had been introduced in 1921 at the initiative of Fukuoka Jo Gakuin University.

The various options were debated: would China adopt European-style uniforms, as some private schools already did? Would it adopt a similar design to those of Japanese schools? Eventually, the decision was taken to adopt a general nationwide uniform template based on typically Chinese designs, which the various schools could customize to some extent for the purpose of identification. The male uniform would be based on the suit designed some years before by Guomindang founder Sun Zhongshan, who by then had safely died (the fact that Sun had himself been inspired by the design of Japanese uniforms was glossed over); it came in a color range from grey to black, with many schools opting for navy blue. The female uniform would be a cotton qipao, short-sleeved in the summer and long-sleeved in the winter; a wider range of color was allowed but in practice many schools went with conservative pastel tones, frequently light blue. Paradoxically, the adoption of the qipao was pioneered not by a Chinese school at all, but by a Western-run Hong Kong institution, Saint Paul's Co-Educational College (this too was conveniently glossed over). Length varied but most went down to mid-calf. Similar styles were adopted by the state-run orphanage network.

The designs would evolve little over the following decades; though while the male uniform has remained virtually unchanged until the present day, the female one has more closely followed changes in fashion: originally fairly loose (closer in fact to the original qipao than the ingreasingly more tight-fitting ones adopted by urban women throughout the 1920s and beyond), it became gradually tighter in the post-war years, and either shorter (stopping at the knee rather than the mid-calf) or with a slit going further up the leg (up to mid-thigh in some cases, though those tended to be the exception rather than the rule). By the late 1960s some schools, seeking to set themselves apart from the competition, had adopted rather stylish designs.

Like their Japanese counterparts (as well as Korean, Vietnamese, etc.), Chinese students have long days, with several hours of cram school following the end of regular classes. As a result, most teenagers wear their school uniforms all day long except on week-ends. The advent of a specific youth culture has led to the uniform being perceived as a symbol of teenagehood in and of itself, and, possibly as a result, its fetishisization by adults (especially men), much as in Japan though thankfully not quite to the same extent.
 
We all remember JFK's ubiquitous top hat:
3333703.jpg


Another iconic image of JFK:
jfk_I_day_with_silk_topper_small.jpg

;)
---

They say hats started dropping out of fashion when women were required to remove them in the theater. WI small "theater hats" became fashionable instead? Or WI JFK was balding and wore is top hat as often as he could?

hmm . . . if Oswald was shooting the the center of JFK's head, could a top off make him aim a little high?
 

Hendryk

Banned
This book cover is an artist's impression of the Ming-3 ATL, in which China never scrapped its oceanic exploration program, met the Europeans on superior terms in the 16th century, and ended up conquering most of the world. Chinese styles in fashion and architecture are ubiquitous in Europe, but obviously such details as the "Sinicized" Big Ben and the man's bowler hat aren't supposed to be taken all that seriously.

89.jpg
 
Nice ideas...
Thanks!

By the way, when you bring your dishes and bowls, they're supposed to be your finest dinnerware.

What if, in the future, top hats have little video screens, and maybe they can be used for storage? :D
 

Faeelin

Banned
Hmm, in Answers for Milinda I had a neat idea of what Hellenistic stupaslooked like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhist_art

(I hate this article, BTW, but the pics are useful).

I would anticipate more monuments closer to Hellenistic temples. An image of the Buddha at the center, say, with images of his Departure on the sides...

And the Buddha columns of Gaul have an oddly Ashokan feel, with images of the wheel and deities kneeling before it.
 

HueyLong

Banned
My Adelphic Christianity had a few effects on Arabian and East African architecture.

First off, churches remain in the circular fashion of early Arab churches.

In the common architecture "mezuzot" (Bible verses) are inscribed on the main doorway to houses, with wealthier houses plastering them over the entire face of doors throughout the house.
 
They say hats started dropping out of fashion when women were required to remove them in the theater. WI small "theater hats" became fashionable instead? Or WI JFK was balding and wore is top hat as often as he could?
That's a neat idea. I always wear a hat when I leave the house. I wish they would make a comeback.
 
This book cover is an artist's impression of the Ming-3 ATL, in which China never scrapped its oceanic exploration program, met the Europeans on superior terms in the 16th century, and ended up conquering most of the world. Chinese styles in fashion and architecture are ubiquitous in Europe, but obviously such details as the "Sinicized" Big Ben and the man's bowler hat aren't supposed to be taken all that seriously.

89.jpg

That picture... Is FANTASTIC!

Good old Steve Jackson games :)
 
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