Clothing in Spaaaaaaace!

[Voren]

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.

"Totally temperature controlled" is tricky, depending on what values you can achieve for these. A large spacecraft or station might give you a range of climates. Whatever you personally like in your own, private, quarters. Whatever the rookie has to put up with from the three senior guys in his bunk room. Whatever the captain likes on the bridge. Maybe it's chilly in engineering most of the time, but scorching when the main drive is powered up. Hot and muggy in hydroponics; cold and damp in the aquaculture bay. Maybe you just have the bad luck to get the workstation right under an HVAC fan. There's room for variety, especially on an old, cheap, or otherwise less than completely shiny ship.

Two other problems. First, as much as I'd like fashion to be simply designed around common sense, there are a lot of cultural factors involved.

"The one exception to this rule is aboard ship, where it is now (barely) acceptable to use a painted wig in lieu of a powdered one, following the disaster aboard the SS Carpathia en route to the Royal Law Society Convention of 2164." Duchess Jane's Protocol, 2170

Second, when lots of civilians start going into space, I suspect people are going to start demanding more variety in their clothing. Our current space programs and works of fiction mostly involve rather fit people who spend long periods training together. If you have liners full of paying passengers, you're going to get a mix of body types, ideas about fashion, modesty, personal space, and so on.