Fashion of Worldbuilding (Part 1)

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. Inspired by Mary Robinette's class here's how we have used fashion in our novels. First up is the fashion of Tenyl, the elven city that is the setting for the Constable Inspector Lunaria Adventures.

There are a lot of different fashion styles that we use throughout the three books in the series to date, but we wanted to touch on two, specifically, as they relate directly to the worldbuilding aspects of the series.

Constabulary: The constables and seekers in the Royal Tenyl Constabulary all wear a uniform. Since they are a police force, we wanted to be able to present them as members of a cohesive unit. This is true for all members of the force, from the patrol constables to the inspectors. In modern police forces (especially in the United States), detectives usually wear different clothes from the patrol officers, but one of the decisions we made early on was to make all constables wear the same style of uniform. Part of that is to set them apart from the general populace, but there is a subtle nod to the militarism of the Kingdom of Tenyl as well by having them all in uniform. In addition, their uniforms are military in style, with leg wrappings (puttee), leather armor, leather bracers, and swords. The puttees are drawn from the military uniforms worn by many allied troops in World War I, and we specifically wanted this image for the constables. Their uniform implies that they are not just a police force but are actually a paramilitary force. That the dress code is applied equally to all ranks also reinforces this idea, and this says something about the type of society in which our stories are set.

Sucra (Green Cloaks): The Sucra are the King’s secret police. They are the master spies for the kingdom, they investigate political crimes (which are broadly defined by the Sucra), and they address any threats against the king himself. As with the constables, the standard uniform for the Sucra is also suggestive of a military uniform. The distinctive green cloak that they wear identifies them as members of the Sucra and serves as a warning to the citizens. The cloak allows them to intimidate the populace in the same way that an FBI, ICE, DEA, or other federal agent can be intimidating by just wearing a windbreaker with bold letters emblazoned on the back. The other distinctive feature of the Sucra uniform are the black jodhpurs. If you are not familiar with jodhpurs, they are pants that flare out to the side at the thighs. If you have watched a movie or documentary about World War II, most of the Nazi officers wear jodhpurs, and we specifically chose this style of pants for this very reason. The Sucra is the equivalent of the Nazi Gestapo, and the jodhpurs reinforce this impression. Again, it is a way for their clothing to reinforce the authoritarian nature of the kingdom.