jhameia: shoomlah: fashionthefinalfrontier: ...

shoomlah:

fashionthefinalfrontier:

Well, tbh, you don’t need to put in Victorian elements to make it Steampunk- that’s the brilliance of the multicultural steampunk challenge: you think how that particular culture would have evolved with just steam for power and they didn’t necessarily have Victorian influences. They’re their own steampunk.

Yesyesyes, that’s definitely true. Yikes, I hope it doesn’t come across as that. I don’t want to imply that adding traditional elements of Victoriana immediately makes something steampunk, but rather that mixing the fashion styles present in India at the time is what makes it so. I admittedly tend to focus a lot more on punking of fashion, rather than adding overt sci-fi elements; a character choosing to appropriate and integrate motifs from the invading class, on their own terms, rather than the other way around.

So much of sci-fi is about addressing human issues, rather than the actual technology, and Steampunk has a tendency to ignore that entirely if not prompted. Yes, I definitely enjoy playing around with the design aspect of these sorts of pieces, but I’m also extremely keen on the historical and social context that informs it. Not saying I’m on par with Gavin Fernandes or Yinka Shonibare when it comes to fashion design with a message, but I am trying to keep it in mind and encourage the critiques from people who are better informed than I am.

While there is definitely room for the marginalized class to adopt and mimick the dominant class as an act of resistance, very often, this adoption happens as a result of assimilation into the dominant class’ terms. I’d have to ask you why you think the adoption of Victorian elements would make an outfit automatically “steampunk”, even given the elements and the history you’re working with, because as valeriane pointed out, you don’t actually need to turn to Victoriana for that at all. There were MANY other things happening in India at the time, and ardhra has pointed out that a lot of Victorian fashions had already influenced Indian fashion at the time itself (no matter how “traditional” it looked). (See my response to your Ask for more.)

Yeah, okay, definitely see what you mean. And no, I didn’t intend (oh intent, Claire, you doofus) to say that the mere act of adding elements of Euro-Victoriana makes it steampunk- I was just drawing a character wearing fashion that I (mistakenly!) assumed wouldn’t have existed at the time, though ardhra called me out on that. I mean, yes, this exact outfit probably didn’t exist, but I was completely oblivious to the point that Victorian fashion already had its proverbial hands in the soup that is Indian fashion in the 19th century.

So yes, steampunk characters could be wearing fashion that has some mix of cultural influences, but it’s straight up disingenous of me to say that said westernization in and of itself defines a character as steampunk- when it’s not actually doing anything new in regards to actual history/fashion. The woman I drew could easily exist in a broader steampunk world, a world where we’d see women wearing both bustle dresses and sari, but the piece presented out of context makes it seem like “ADD DASH OF EUROPE AND MIX THOROUGHLY” are the only instructions to make something Steampunk. Which is, good lord, so very wrong.

Iiiiii think I’m finally wrapping my head around this.

(Source: shoomlah.deviantart.com)