This captures a sense of Malian’s style — but only when dressed for action. 😉

I spotted the title question — “What Is Your MC’s Style If They’re Dressing Up?” — on Twitter last week and thought, “I’m sure I’ve posted on this relatively recently…”

Only a very small amount of grey-matter cudgelling was required to prompt recollection of Kim Falconer’s Styling Characters: More Than Meets The Eye post on the Supernatural Underground last year. A post that’s well worth reading, by the way, if you havena done so already.

At the time, I enjoyed it so much that I wrote four(!) spinoff posts:

Styling Characters in The Heir of Night

Styling Characters in The Gathering of the Lost

Styling Characters in The Gathering Of The Lost Revisited

Styling Characters in Daughter of Blood

Three books – but mainly one style.

When it comes to the T-verse (or X-verse now, I suppose — but I’m a late adopter, so imagine it’ll be T-verse for me for some time to come :D) question, I led with Malian’s dress-up style fairly early in The Heir of Night. To quote last year’s Styling Characters post:

“[Malian]…must dress for a feast, at which point her “grimy” and presumably comfortable, clothes must give way to “an elaborate black velvet dress” (black “because” Night, just in case you were wondering ) with a “gauze collar that stood up like butterfly wings on either side of Malian’s face” – and a train that Malian describes as “restrictive.” She goes along with it, though, because the formality is part of what it means to be Heir of Night.”

As far as I can recall, though, that’s about the first and last time Malian dresses up. The rest of the time she favors clothes that allow unrestricted movement as her life is generally action packed and involves considerable traveling, when she isn’t outright on the run or navigating dangerous situations. Situations in which grime not infrequently features…

Although in The Gathering of the Lost she “smooths the worst of the wrinkles out of her clothes and combs at her hair with her fingers” in one instance, and dons“her last clean shirt and hose” at another. So she is not completely lost to a sense of personal grooming—but it’s a far cry from velvet, pearls, and gauze collars.