Working on a scene (non ORU), in which a ruler-in-exile meets a man from off-planet she hopes will help restore her to her rightful place. I'm describing what they're wearing, with in my ears David Gerrold's plaint (made last year at Rustycon), about women writers who insist on stopping the scene to describe what people are wearing. This he found irrelevant and tedious. Though I piped up that it makes a difference who your viewpoint is: a tailor, for instance, would notice what people are wearing. But I have been rereading some of Baen books free library on my Palm: military SF, and some of those writers go into great detail about military ordinance, its history, its provenance, and its effect on tactics, because it's all relevant to the story, part of the worldbuilding (I like it, but then I like information in a story). I don't see why clothing should not be viewed in the same way, as a technology, and as worldbuilding. I wonder if women writers treat it differently than men. Or whether the divide is between people who have studied history and other cultures and learned to analyse the social languages of clothes. It may be you have to step outside your own culture to be able to understand the language of your own clothes - I know we have one - or several - they seem muted and muddled. And if you haven't had that perspective, you don't know just how much clothes say.
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