How do you use wardrobe and clothing to show character personality?

[arthurmercer3]

Hi everyone!

A character’s choice of clothing is one of the fastest ways to show (not tell) their personality, social status, or mood without needing paragraphs of exposition.

For instance:
1. A worn leather bomber or track top immediately suggests a casual, practical, or athletic background.
2. Sharp, structured coats project authority, formality, or detachment.
3. Vibrant vintage or pop-culture streetwear (like classic retro 80s pieces or gaming-inspired shirts) instantly signals a nostalgic, bold, or eccentric personality.

I often browse specialized outerwear collections and fashion sites just to study different coat silhouettes, seam lines, and material textures to use as references for character descriptions.

What’s your main character’s signature outfit item, and what does it say about them?

[PeteLensing]

I brows fashion sites, mailorders, social media etc. and find inspiration
for outfits. Especially for outfits for female characters.

Most of my male characters wear business shirts and ties. Sometimes in
awful, tasteless colors when that´s part of their character.

I have my go to "unattractive" male outfit and that usually includes shorts,
socks and sandals.

I also have a go to female conservative / uptight outfit and that is a turtle
neck pullover, long dress or pants.

The female main character changes her outfits from story to story. I´m not
big fan of having characters wear the same clothes all the time and it´s also
fun to draw outfits.

[kyupol]

Picked this wardrobe to give Akala this approachable friendly exterior. To also make her not look like an evil queen big bad villainess (even if she is one, deep down). She's an approachable friendly villainess. I remember when I showed her char design before she even appeared in any comic and asked for feedback if she looks like a hero or villain. I got "can go either way" or "anti hero".

Used darker colors for Jeffrey to depict that he just wants to be invisible to normies and stay in the background because of bullying and rejection he gets as an incel. Long sleeve shirt to show how he wants to conceal his weak scrawny frame. Long sleeves and sweaters seem to be worn by people who aren't proud of the appearance of their body or want to conceal for modesty reasons.

Sometimes, the wardrobe is designed to project the opposite. Claudita is calm and collected even though her color scheme indicates being attention seeking, aggressive, flashy. If her char design were to reflect her actual personality, she would have more subdued colors.

[ThunderChicken]

Daecon is all about the 1980’s. Bright colours, tight acid wash jeans, deck shoes or sneakers… and he is most certainly bold and eccentric

.

[NotKei]

I’d like to contribute!

For my main cast, the design choice for them is usually a mix of their personality, interests, and personal history.

Raveena Vesper usually has a cool, boyish look with some punk influence. Her very first original design leaned more toward a cyberpunk-ish vibe, but it was eventually simplified to fit the webnovel, where she's an aspiring engineer. She's highly intelligent, has a quiet and reserved personality, and has trouble trusting people easily, so darker colors suit her well.

My wife, who designed Raveena, is currently developing a new look for her that leans more heavily into alternative fashion. It fits the personality Raveena develops later in the story much better.

Aya Ribbuns is much more straightforward. She prefers cute, bright, pastel-colored clothing because it matches her sweet personality. She’s gentle, supportive, a bit of an airhead, and very much the “cinnamon roll” of the group. Her personality is also highly inspired by Sanrio's My Melody.

Some parts of her personality and design are also inspired by rabbits, since she is rabbit-folk.

Mizu Angel was the most difficult character for me to develop. She’s technically a student like the others, but she’s also an actual doctor, a master of magic, and an extremely intelligent character.

Her clothing is intentionally eccentric and a little hard to process at first glance. So to pair with that idea, I gave her the eerie, strange impression she gives people. Despite that, she’s a genuinely caring friend, even if she tries very hard not to look like one.

Her design was created by a friend and loosely inspired by the Cheshire Cat. The outfit originally came from their personal design tastes, so I later built Mizu’s personality around that strange appearance.

Lastly, Rory Brixton has a more casual and neutral wardrobe. Her colors are easy on the eyes, while also matching her red fox traits.

She’s the social butterfly of the group: cheerful, outgoing, playful, and occasionally a little dumb for comedic purposes. Her clothes are simple because her personality already does a lot of the storytelling for her.

[PeteLensing]

I have a question for all of you. Do all of your characters wear the same outfit all the time?

[kyupol]

Most of the time its 1 outfit but I have given some characters various outfits

[Aeneas1]

I'm not going to lie to you, I have always found clothes extremely difficult to draw. I'm only just working out how to do it convincingly. The fact is that I largely give clothing to background characters and that is not done so much to show character personality as it is to show off my knowledge of historical fashions. My main characters, Erik, Ragnar, and Oriel, do NOT wear clothing themselves because they do NOT need to. While characters in the World Oak do still wear clothing, it remains purely optional.
For example, when I draw characters such as Lord Nix and Lady Aqua, I often deign to give them clothing. The reason for this is that their physiques were inspired by statues of Classical deities and heroes, which were often used to show off the ideal humanised body in all the glory the Greeks perceived it to have.

[jwabeasley]

With my main characters, nearly everything in their wardrobe has a story and a look. I do try to be recognizable and fashionable. For Etherwood, I'm using a lot of 1880s-1930s inspiration for the clothing styles to show how people have adapted to having a lot less material wealth than they do in our time, and to help it seem more storybook-fairytale, which is the general vibe I'm going for.

Veronica sews her own clothes (her mom helps a lot), and whenever I give her an outfit I think about how she obtained each piece. Vests, basic skirts, modified men's shirts are all common beginner clothing pieces. Full length skirts or dresses would require Veronica to buy whole cloth rather than cutting into her many older brothers' clothes, so most of her pieces are smaller. As the only girl of the family and the youngest, Veronica has really leaned into a feminine look as much as she can.

Veronica is the center of the story, the meeting of spirit (blue), physical (red), and eventually divine purpose (yellow). Hence she has all three primary colors on her outfit. Her gloves and headband are plot-important but I won't talk about that yet.

Aramis isn't human, and his clothes were also sourced from Veronica's brothers. However, he's not interested in modifying them. At the end of the day, he's a romance hero, so he wears the uniform of all modern romance heroes - a Henley undershirt. It's red because he's a very martial, action-focused character. He wears a leather jacket that uses the same paint as his fox undercoat, and it subtly recreates his fox countershading pattern. He wears renn-faire pants and boots because ultimately, he's a character out of time and out of place - an ancient centuries-old fabled being.

There's plenty more to say on the other Etherwood characters but that's enough right now, I think.

[BOMB]

I either show the personality the character wants to present, or the deeper themes that the character upholds.

For example if a character is a friendly pirate, I can either make them look extremely friendly because thats how they want to present themselves, or I can make them look extremely creepy and dangerous because thats how they are actually perceived by other characters and the reader.

Some of my favorite designs actually do both things, though. For example there's my character Pitch. His blue and orange color scheme is made up of the blue from one side of his friend group, and the orange of the other side of his friend group. The color combination is dynamic and maybe a little loud which mirrors how characters in the story see him as dangerous to be around. However, his style of clothing is casual almost understated because he doesn't want to stand out. Regardless, because of the colors and his rabbit body, he draws attention whether he wants to or not.

So the colors are meant to translate his connection to his friends and his standing in the story, while the style of clothes translates how he wants to be seen. Thats what we had in mind when we were designing him.