Fashion and Clothing

Two hundred years of Toreador in Paris can do strange things to the world of fashion; to wit, kill it. Domination of any kind on an aesthetic front is now treated with vast suspicion. The sign of young urban with-it-ness is to do something so strange to your appearance that no one else will have thought of it.

The back of corporate conformity has been broken into thousands of different ideas of what looks sufficiently conservative, the entertainment industry (such as it is) has mostly followed the urban youth's lead, and rural fashion mostly consists of trying to have /enough/ clothing, nevermind what it looks like. Political leaders and others with ambitions of authority tend to split between the other three trends - innovation, conservatism, or pragmatism - depending on whose support they consider themselves to need the most.

Artificial fibers are hard to find, and imports are much less common than they used to be. On the North American continent, the most common materials are wool, cotton, linen, and, by far the easiest to produce, hemp. Colors tend to be more subdued, with a much greater reliance on vegetable dyes than laboratory-produced anilines. Really bright, intense colors and artificial fibers are now the hallmark of a slightly frivolous prosperity.