That kind of changed thanks, in part I am forced to admit, to the Hunger Games. I watched that film, after trudging through the book (which I wasn't a big fan of, though the second and third books were major improvements in my eyes), and I couldn't help but think that these oppressed people sure looked happy and healthy. Wow, if they're so pretty and well off, why don't they just rise up and fight back. Clearly things aren't as bad as they seemed. (Keep in mind that the entire novel is narrated by Katniss, so it's actually possible that the situation in District 12 isn't that bad and Katniss is an unreliable narrator. If you take the movie as a viable adaptation, it could actually point to this in the book since the film is clearly a third person point of view).
This got me thinking about my own story, and I realized that if I was going to sell that Eastgate was a ghetto, I better damn well amp up the poverty. This led to me going back to the drawing board on how I initially envisioned people. Gone were pretty leather coats and goth high fashion.
This left me, and still leaves me, a week and a half away from having to type those oh so crucial first words (for those counting, I have a draft of the story that's already several thousand words in, but I'm going to begin at square one again and push forward in the interest of not being able to cheat) and I still don't know what anyone is wearing.
Initially Eira was intended to be wearing things like this:
Yeah, factoring in poverty in an economy that's slowly been ground into nothingness in the past 50 years, it becomes impossible for her to dress anything remotely like that.
So this leaves me with some pretty big questions of, what exactly can I put her in that can give her a similar feel that she would be able to acquire second hand or make herself/have made for her by a friend. Nothing can be bright or pretty, and everything's got to have a decent amount of wear on it because chances are that since very few people in Eastgate still have jobs when the story begins, no one will have been able to make or sell her anything for a couple of years pre-story.
Now the standard apocalypse look could work. You know what that looks like:
Yeah, that totally doesn't fit the character I have in mind. Other characters, yeah, I could put them in similar things. Eira, not so much.
So far I haven't found anything really inspiring to put Eira in, so at present she's not wearing anything (not like that ya perv). I really hope that I'm going to have an answer as to what she's wearing by the time I have to type that first sentence. Otherwise, the genre of my novel is going to change real fast.

http://ushouldbewriting.blogspot.com/2012/10/costuming-or-how-do-i-keep-my.html
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