[Sindri]

Originally Posted by RyanW

I believe I've posted this observation before, but my biggest complaint about most TV sci-fi clothing, particularly Star Trek, is simple: Once you live in an environment you have full control over, the primary purpose of clothing is to have something to attach pockets to.

Yeah pockets are important though from the point of view of practicality I would wear a belt or something with attached sealable pockets. Finding your keys wouldn't be a problem if you weren't constantly moving them from one article of clothing to another. With a belt you can just put everything you need on a day to day basis in the pockets and just keep it there.

Originally Posted by nondescript handle

Unless you'll have very exotic places like the smoke ring from Niven's Integral Trees, all environments with free fall will also be totally temperature controlled. On todays ISS basically everyone wears polo shirts.

I guess I can see full arm shirts for a space navy mess dress or stewards of interplanetary luxury liners, but I have a hard time envisioning multi layer clothing (e.g. a toga over form fitting clothing, a shirt under an uniform tunic) in such a context.

My guess would be that informal civilian dress in a shirt sleeve free fall environment would be something like (not too loose) shorts and T-shirt (worn inside shorts) and bare feet.

For people for whom EVA is common (e.g. the SF cliché of the "belter" miner), an "undersuit" might be typical "inside" clothing (and designed to be worn as such).

I don't think that a spacer culture will routinely wear emergency gear for decompression. If decompressions are that common that you'll have to wear such things, it will not be a "culture" but a frontier were experts spend limited time in.

I mean most of our earthling homes are flammable, but most people don't wear fire extinguishers...

Meh. I spend most of my time in temperature controlled environments and I wear a coat. People like to layer things for the same reason I want people in my setting to layer: everyone wearing the same thing is boring.

I can't see bare feet at all. Even if the rest of the clothing doesn't use magnetism to pull it down, magnetic footwear is too useful in a freefall situation and too many of the surfaces will be too rough or covered in metal shavings or something for it to be practical

People might carry emergency gear for reasons involving tradition or paranoia. I can see a space military assigning it to everyone. Otherwise yeah I agree that only undersuits make more sense for routine or time critical unexpected EVA or as part of the method used to get rid of bad health effects due to freefall. You can get to the emergency equipment that falls from the ceiling fast enough.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Only one of the reasons why I believe there will never be any large populations living in freefall. It'll be spin gravity if nothing else.

So the question of clothing for freefall isn't going to come up IMHO.

Many station designs that incorporate spin gravity also have areas of freefall (both for simplicity of engineering and the fact that freefall is useful for some purposes) that the clothing of residents will consider for in their design.

Originally Posted by malloyd

Also, you have to be able to get the clothing on and off. Here in gravity you can "pull up" a whole body suit pretty easily because gravity holds your body down. In freefall that doesn't happen. I suspect this rules out both non-rigid whole body suits and anything really form fitting. If you need to exert a significant push or pull to force it on or off, that's a problem. Dress shoes you need a shoe horn to get on are right out.

Form fitting doesn't necessarily need to be form fitting when it's going on it can tighten after being put on. Example from fiction include the seam tubes from some SF illustrations and the plugsuits of NGE. Also some people will wear what they think is cool no matter how much of a pain it is to get into. The possibility of partial spin gravity helps here too.