Clothes are Clothes: Describing Them

Clothes are clothes.

Do not cite pictures of clothes for your readers so that they know what the characters are wearing because it defeats the point of writing a story. You might as well just make a comic, instead of writing a fanfiction. It also shows a lack of effort. It's great to be inspired by real outfits but using a third of your story to just describe clothes is a waste of time. Readers like having the freedom of imagining things to their tastes.

If I said: "Musa wore a red dress." What would you imagine?

A good amount of you would assume she was wearing a cheongsam and the other half would assume she was wearing a plain dress.

Musa wore a knee-length red dress.

She's either wearing a short cheongsam or a cocktail dress. Every reader interprets a description differently. Her dress could be A-line, a sheath dress, something with ruffles, a halter top, sleeveless, etc.

Musa wore a knee-length red dress with puffed sleeves and a flared skirt.

That is sufficient. Do not go into any more detail than that. There is a point when descriptions are too much for the readers and you might as well draw it yourself. No one really cares if there are golden Chinese dragons and magenta chrysanthemums in the brocade or black mother of pearl buttons and pink diamonds beaded on the skirt that shone like stars in the midnight sky.

It's good to not be too detailed because the main point of the story is not the dress but what's happening. It's okay to let readers come up to their own conclusions about how the dress looks like. No one is going to remember it to the smallest details anyways five paragaphs later.

Plus, it's a natural habit for readers to assume that its beautiful.

On the flip side, if the entire point is about how a character is oogling the dress, then it's alright to get a little more descriptive about the clothes. However, pay attention to who is observing the outfit. The way a man, such as Riven, admires a dress is completely different from how a woman, such as Stella, admires it.

Kikurukina Bal Des'cagel
Advice!