Textile traditions in fantasy, a how-to guide: part 2 of 3

This is a continuation of the series I started one two weeks ago: textile traditions in fantasy worlds and how you build them. Part 1 was about general ideas for how cultures interact with textiles, and this part (part 2) is about specific traditions for your culture. I assume anyone reading this, fair warning, has already read part 1 and has sort of a general idea of their culture’s textile traditions and history. Or at the very least, a couple of ideas about materials and workers and tools. 

This week, we’re focusing on specific textile traditions in a culture. This means things that have been handed down for at least a few generations (traditions are passed down from person to person) relating to fabric and its role in people’s lived (textiles are mostly not-everyday-clothing-things but more like rugs and blankets and special clothing) that are reasonably compact to define and easy to drop into an rpg world (specific means not going into 300 years of detailed history all at once unless you actually want to). 

As someone who loves historical textiles, I’m just going to note that this week is about building what the players will see. Usually, sticking textiles into a world isn’t about thousands of years of history. It’s about making a few — maybe at most 6ish— specific facts about textiles in your world that support local cultural norms. 

So. 

4. Connecting to cultural norms 

Do you already have a sense of the behaviors and customs of the people in your world? Great, that’s a good place to start. If not, come up with four or so things that people in the culture you’re working with believe, do, think, say, etc. to be cultural norms; you just want an idea of what’s important to a person of that culture. Using that, think of some way to connect it to textiles. Idioms, festival clothing, specific weaves or textiles for religious things, whatever you like.

Yes, that’s horribly vague. I have no better way to explain it in a general sense, so let’s go straight to examples. 

For the Tyrusians, I like the idea that each extended family has their own special patterns to weave and wear. So let’s say that the weavers of the family protect their patterns, and there’s one distinct drafting pattern for each family that serves as a coat of arms and identifier. Great start, now let’s make it more complex. What could that idea be used for? Maybe the families have an idiom, “Giving away your pattern”, which could be a euphemism for marriage (do people leave their extended family when they marry? Do people learn their spouse’s weaving pattern?) but also a warning about telling secrets (because those patterns are private and personal, and you don’t just tell everyone you meet). And let’s say each family has a holiday celebrating the weavers. Call it Weavers’ Day, and make it a day celebrating the fiber arts and textiles, maybe arts in general. Since the Tyrusians are traders as well as weavers and known for these textiles, it’s probably like the real world Distaff Day (January 7, the day spinners got back to work after the Christmas holidays) and is an unofficial holiday that celebrates the work the weavers do.

Let’s look at clothing as well, since those are general traditions. I want specific textile things. Maybe fancy clothes are all made from a blend of all the different types of animal fiber spun as fine as possible, and woven into the family’s special patterns. And one breed of these animals is almost certainly regarded as extra special and only used for the fanciest of textiles. What if there’s a particular type of garment that only the family weavers can wear? I think those are a good start, and those can be dropped into the world when the players run into the Tyrusians.

5. Account for drift

Cultures are not a monolith. That’s rule number 1 of world building. So we’re going to account for that drift. Drift can come in a couple of forms. There’s drift over time, since things change when they’re handed down between people, and maybe the available materials or something will shift too. There’s drift between geographic areas because even two neighboring villages will have different ideas and stuff to do. And there’s cultural fusions and stuff that changes when two cultures interact, as cultural exchanges have always happened (see: the Roman Empire and Han dynasty China, with regards to silk and porcelain and other trade goods, but also the plague and social ideas). 

Your world needs that. If you’re building a textile tradition for a specific small area (a particular village, or maybe at most a region), consider how that tradition has changed over time and what influences their neighbors might have had on the tradition. If you’re building for a whole culture, how does that tradition change across various different regions? Two villages only a few days’ ride apart might have fairly similar textiles, but across a thousand miles, traditions could have vastly diverged. 

For our example of Tyric textiles changing, I’m going to start with the garment worn only by weavers. It probably started as a simple tunic that’s slightly more elaborate than most people’s. Most likely, it’s got some shaping at the waist and an extra few pleats in the bottom, and it’s not so much a way of distinguishing the weavers as a recognition that they do the hard work and so they get to wear a little bit more of what they make than the rest of the family. Now, over time, that probably stays pretty much the same, but maybe the ruling family changes and the new family-in-charge wants to consolidate their power. One way they can do that is regulating trade through regulating the number of weavers; that probably means formally recognizing who is or isn’t a weaver. If I were that family, I would make a proclamation that the current version of the “weaver’s tunic” is mandatory clothing for all weavers, so that everyone can know and laud the weavers. Or maybe the weavers themselves start to self regulate across families and they choose to set themselves apart by adopting this tunic, and then that’s enshrined in the law later. 

I’m also going to use the Weavers’ Day to demonstrate cultural exchange and geographic drift. Different families definitely celebrate this differently. I bet that one family makes it a day where the weavers don’t have to work, one family celebrates it with a huge party in celebration of the weavers, another decorates with the family’s special weaving pattern everywhere, and another family considers it the day when children are dedicated to their future trades, especially weaving. As a seminomadic people, the Tyrusians don’t have so much in the way of geographical drift, but the culture still changes between different groups. 

Next, cultural exchange. In the case of Tyrus, I think more cultures have picked up some Tyric influences than the reverse, simply because the Tyrusians are fairly mobile and interact with a great number of cultures and peoples. However, nomadic cultures still participate in exchanges between cultures, and the Tyrusians definitely get influenced by other peoples. 

I like the idea that, like Distaff Day, Weavers’ Day got attached to another holiday and ended up with a consistent date that way. Maybe a Requian holiday, the Day of Sun, that I came up with which celebrates the summer solstice. I think that would fit since it’s summer, and summer is hot, so the weavers wouldn’t want to work in the heat. That’s an example of Tyric culture borrowing a bit of another culture, and in return, I think the Cantorans picked up Weavers’ Day from their trade with Tyric merchants. 

What happened there possibly started with one or two Tyric traders taking a break from trading on Weavers’ Day while in Cantora. Cantoran traders obviously notice this, and they start taking the same day off since there’s not much point in trading if there’s nobody to trade with. The holiday spreads in Cantora, where people start taking the day after the Day of Sun off (since Requia celebrates the Day of Sun, and as Cantora has a large population of refugees from both Requia and the Emerald Empire, it gets to be a Cantoran thing as well). The name sticks, even though the holiday becomes less of a celebration of weavers and more a day off, and it mutates over time to become one word; Weaversday, then Weavsday, then Wevsday, then Wendsday, then Wednesday. (Yes, I went for that joke. It’s still a yearly holiday. But it has a different name in different places.)

I think that’s enough for this week. You can repeat this ad infinitum, and eventually you have a lot of traditions. Next week I’ll give some random traditions I’ve made up for various worlds, and some advice about using these textile traditions for plot points in your games.