Fashion of Worldbuilding (Part 2: A Vampire Noir Setting)

In 2025 Geoff attended a class given by Mary Robinette Kowal about how fashion in speculative fiction is influenced by the time when the piece was created. She talked about what the fashion choices for a person – in real life or a character in a book – can tell us about their place in society or how their position, power, and influence (or lack thereof) can be determined through the clothes they wear. Our previous blog post covered how we have used fashion in our fantasy detective series, the Constable Inspector Lunaria Adventures. On this blog we are going to talk about the fashion of worldbuilding in a vampire noir setting, using our Saul Imbierowicz trilogy.

You might think that there is not a lot of worldbuilding that we would need to do for a story set in the prohibition era of America. It’s not like we had to come up with flapper dresses, fedoras, or any of the other clothing styles that our characters wear. But how we present the clothing helps to place the characters within the strata of society and allows us to identify them without a lot of explanation. That’s the way that fashion can work for us.

In Unremarkable, Saul is supposed to be the embodiment of the book's title - an unremarkable man. He wears basic workman clothes – a simple shirt and pants, suspenders, and a newsboy cap. This clearly marks him as a member of a working trade - someone who might work at a factory, or stockyards, or the postal office in the case of Saul. We can show Saul's socio-economic status to the reader without having to spend a long time giving unnecessary backstory and long-winded info dumps.

Contrast Saul with his girlfriend Moira. She seems to always wear the latest fashion in dresses and hats. The reader can tell right away that she is from a different social class than Saul, which tells you something about their relationship (or at least makes you question their relationship). When we first meet Moira she's wearing a cream-colored blouse with a green tie, riding pants and calf-length riding boots. Her ensemble is capped with a green felt cloche hat with the brim turned up rakishly. Definitely a woman with her own style, which tells the reader something about her from the moment we meet her.

Our gangsters – Bugs Moran, Al Capone, and their goons – wear suits and fedoras, sort of the “uniform” of the gangster that we have been exposed to in film and television. While it is a stereotype, it is a useful one for us, as we can identify characters as gangsters just by their style of dress. In contrast, our two Feds, Agent Truesdale and Agent Wright, wear ill-fitting suits and trench coats. Again, this is a stereotype for cops pulled from film and television, but their fashion choices also quickly identify who they are to the reader.

As you can see even the simple choices for what a character wears is important as it gives the reader a lot of non-verbal clues about the character.