Clothes

Each city's dress is described on its own page — Shining Reach#Dress, Forgegate#Dress, Stormharbor#Dress, Eldershore#Dress, Clearhold#Dress, The Iron Coves#Dress — and Wages and Prices#Clothing prices it. What those do not say is how long any of it takes.

An ordinary day is quick. A working woman dresses herself in minutes. A master's wife takes longer because there is more of it and the street will see her. A wealthy woman takes as long as the day requires, is dressed by her maid or her slave, and considers the morning's dressing a light matter compared to the evening's. Hair is the part that takes the time everywhere and is done daily whether or not anything else is; Eldershore's is the most elaborate in the world and takes hours, and is worth every one of them to the woman wearing it.

What being badly turned out costs depends on the city and is never nothing. Shining Reach reads clothing constantly and will place a person within a glance. Clearhold reads precision rather than expense, and a hem that falls wrong marks somebody who did not check. Forgegate looks at the border and the work. Stormharbor wants you dressed for the weather and thinks the rest is somebody else's business. Eldershore expects composition and personality and finds a person who has not bothered rather sad.

A wife dresses her household's slaves, and how they look is read as her management. A slave in poor or dirty clothing says either that the household cannot afford better or that nobody is paying attention, and both reflect on the woman running the house.

Sewing machines

They exist, and they are good. A sewing machine is cams, a reciprocating needle, a shuttle timed to the needle's stroke, and a treadle, which is precisely what this world is best at and needs no power beyond a foot.

A tailor's shop has two or three. The machine does the long seams and the master does the collar, the buttonholes and the fit, because the standard everywhere is that a thing has a maker who stood behind it. A middling household may own one, bought once and maintained forever. A working household does not, and mends by hand or sends it out.

What the machine does not produce is cheap clothing. That took the machine, the factory and the railway together, and this world has the first and neither of the others — see The Ceiling. So the machine makes a tailor faster rather than making a factory possible, and clothing stays bespoke, repaired, handed down and expensive.

One consequence: a Shining Reach house can turn a new season's coat around in days rather than weeks, which is part of why that city's fashion moves as fast as it does.

See also

• Meta:Cultural References · Cultivated Plants#Fibers and oils · Baechri · Serwy