January 2019

Hello there ! How we can describe cyberpunk clothing in story ? Those details and accessories seemed definitely hard to write for me

I have to say that I’m always desperately searching for some good cyberpunk sources and there’s so few posts. You can find what I have in my http://the960writers.tumblr.com/tagged/cyberpunk tag but it’s precious little I’m afraid and mostly images.

How you want to describe the clothes depends very much on what style you want to follow. If you look at images of cyberpunk, they usually fall into the sexy with tech department or they go towards android/human hybrids. In some cases, it looks more like armor or like wearing the control unit of the machine in Aliens. 

Personally, I would always go from practicality and purpose. For the most part, clothing is meant to cover us, protect us from the elements, and carry our stuff. With cyberpunk, you add technology to it. Depending on your worldbuilding, clothes can be full on wearable systems or a network for connecting modules. 

When you design these things for your worldbulding, you should think about energy sources, connections to the outside world and upgrades and interchangeability. 

Where does the energy for the systems come from? Battery packs? Kinetic energy converters? Body energy converters? Inductive energy receivers? Wireless charge?

Are there standards by country or cooperation? Can systems be interchanged? 

Do you have systems woven into cloth or are there modules attached to the clothing and plugged into connectors?

Once you have these things specified for your worldbuilding, I would describe them from different point of views. For instance: The wearer can talk/think about the creaking of artificial leather because it’s thicker and can carry more modules, while another prefers the lightness of cybersilk because it connects directly to their skin-nodes. From the outside they could describe how someone seems to have thrown tight clothing with bulky modules together with a loose cape that acts as a receiver for wireless power transfer.

In general I would only describe clothing if it makes sense in context. Meaning: a hacker might describe how the cyber-modules look because they interested in connecting to them but a normal user might just describe how comfortable it looks.

I hope this helped.