To Nickar

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TennyoCeres84
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To Nickar

Post by TennyoCeres84 »

When you started working with Meris and the others, did your creative process change at all, compared to working with the Goat?
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IamLEAM1983
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Post by IamLEAM1983 »

"Hm, let's see; how to compress a variable amount of time that could possibly be counted in the thousands of years in mortal perception, all of it spent constrained to an excruciatingly precise stylistic notebook..."

He shrugs.

"I don't think I can, honestly. Take Karl Lagerfeld's personal design sensibilities, right? Black suit, black pants, white shirt, sunglasses, rings here and there - all of it unchanged for decades and draped over painfully obvious uses of cosmetic surgery. Fakeness over a skin suit, by the end-point - bloviating Vanity trapped in a self-constructed sense of identity? Well, that's the Goat. He glimpsed into the Renaissance from very early on - thanks for nothing, Angel Time - and decided, only just barely into Antiquity, that his real style involved black surcoats and ruffled shirts, wool stockings over braies, and an exactingly precise set of dark leather buskins - the whole of it sometimes jazzed up with a little scepter or a foil, centuries before mortals would be able to alloy steel in the precise combinations needed to create flexible points. I was designing clothes for your average power-mad Medieval lordling long before Lords-o'-the-Manor would so much as be a workable concept, and he treated the tiniest of revisions like sweeping reforms. I remember seeing the entire Order of the Fly packed atop the Spire, hunched in close, eyes wide - to marvel at a new set of buttons I'd sewn on the same old doublet.

If I could've killed myself, I probably would have. An entire timeline's worth of fabric at his fingertips, and all that His Idiotic Highness wants is Errol Flynn's Goth mode.

Now, Meris - she's both freeing and constricting in her own sense. She frees me in the extent of her sartorial needs; and trust me, the soon-to-be technical Queen Regent of Dalarath who really won't want to claim that title as we all suspect, has a ton of requirements. She doesn't even need to state them openly, either. 

Nybbas and the boys want to be aristocratic and everything for a laugh or two? That's a new courtroom regalia on the docket. Casual wear for a not-so-casual photoshoot with Scientific American for her first post-recognition thesis with Brown University? Another outfit, then. She's picked something off-the-rack but needs to give it a few arcane buffs? That's me and the sewing team, again. She insists on eloping privately with Nereus but the rest of us are counting the minutes until camera shutters start clicking? Then it's all about taking her to the local outlets and helping her put something together that says I'm not who you think I am, please look elsewhere and have a great day while you're at it.

Of course, designing for her also means designing for the big guy, and Nereus poses his own challenges. With the Goat and Meris, I'm used to generally slender types and he's, well, anything but. You want to cinch a few things, loosen others, avoid horizontal stripes and find ways to add subtle vertical cues to slim his silhouette down without going for pinstripes - and you have to work with his seesawing body habitus. His girth seems to reflect how he feels, and he's certainly shown that he's more of a despair eater than a stress eater. Win a fight? Lose ten pounds. Lose a fight? Gain five or six. Win a big fight while fighting side-by-side with your beloved? Then decency practically flies out the window, to the point where he'll make your most overeager French innkeeper imaginable look like an Ascetic Buddhist. To add insult to injury, he'd doggedly determined and keeps losing what my sewing team just accounted for! I don't know that he'll ever approach something like Cuthbert's physique, but he's certainly putting the cardio in...

Color-wise, he's shellfish-white and she has several different key tones between her hair, the grain of her skin, the differences in shade between her hand and the webbing between her fingers. In some ways, Nereus is a lot easier to plan out a style guide for, seeing as off-white goes with practically everything. Meris, though? There's days where her swashbuckling stories react to sunlight and ooze out of every pore, which basically demands bright blues and greens, splashes of silver or turquoise. Lose the sunlight during an overcast day in Hope, and it's her hair and the saturation of her skin tone that really catch the eye. Then it's all about slate greys, blacks and charcoals and dark blues and browns, all in fabrics as warm as her own pelt. Movement always matters, of course, and I try and account for the fact that selkies could give classes on scene changes for theatrical productions, as quick as they are to shuck off clothes. Add a few clasps and non-piercing snap-on points to sort of subtly turn her pelt into a sash or a makeshift messenger bag, and you've got some of the design cues I usually follow."

He gives it some thought, shakes his head and nods. 

"It's hard work, it is. Downright annoying, sometimes - but I don't think I could put into words how gratifying it still feels. My team and I were indentured slaves under the Goat, and now my seamstresses want to unionize, of all things! Not so much against me, mind you - at least, not as far as they've told me - but just so they have the right and ability to elect one of theirs to speak for the rest, if anything happened to me."

His beak contorts into a smirk.

"It's all well and good with me, I just hope they've got the patience for it. I'm not kicking the bucket until Meris does or until one of my outfits revolutionizes personal protection - whichever comes first."
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