Traditional clothes types

As of recent, the traditional_clothes tag has been deprecated, and I would like to ask if we can have it back. It is often not obvious what particular type of national costume is referenced in a picture, unless the author explicitly mentions that. We can expect authors to use inspiration from all kinds of regional costumes. In Poland alone every region has its own folk style, and I'd expect similar level of representation from other nations. Recognizing folk styles referenced is a subject for folk studies, not for casual danbooru users.

As of now, forcing users to only use specific nation-referencing tags motivates them to tag with whatever feels good to them - probably their own country, if they find the costume similar enough. Case to point, post #7194424, which I just uploaded. Outside of lore telling me Remilia is referencing Vlad Tepes, who was (let's keep it simple) Romanian, I have no way to guess if this is Romanian costume or author looked up general European folk costumes on pinterest for reference.

Another point, a user who wants to look up all kinds of traditional costumes, without specifically looking up Mayan or Ukrainian or Chinese ones, is restricted to old posts.

There is aristocratic clothes for generic European clothes.

The problem with traditional clothes was that it was used as a dumping ground for "I don't know what this is". There's no utility in that.

You bring up a valid point however, that sometimes you genuinely can't tell on upload, and it's not just a case of "tag the specific thing" if you can't identify it. We do have clothing_request, idk if we need a subtag just for traditional clothes.

nonamethanks said:

You bring up a valid point however, that sometimes you genuinely can't tell on upload, and it's not just a case of "tag the specific thing" if you can't identify it. We do have clothing_request, idk if we need a subtag just for traditional clothes.

Culture request? I'm not sure how well it'll work in practice but in theory this can also group other cultural references like traditions, activities, festivals, foods, objects people failed to identify.

nonamethanks said:

The problem with traditional clothes was that it was used as a dumping ground for "I don't know what this is". There's no utility in that.

You bring up a valid point however, that sometimes you genuinely can't tell on upload, and it's not just a case of "tag the specific thing" if you can't identify it. We do have clothing_request, idk if we need a subtag just for traditional clothes.

It should be my main point that there really is no way to guess or label specific national costume if the author did not draw inspiration from only one. There is a theme of clothes made to resemble a mixture of traditional European or Turkic clothes. Most of us would be more biased to say that it's Kazakh or Turkish depending on their own identity. In case of post #7194424 I was biased to say it's generic Slavic or even Polish, if it wasn't for lore implication.

Vasi1 said:

It should be my main point that there really is no way to guess or label specific national costume if the author did not draw inspiration from only one. There is a theme of clothes made to resemble a mixture of traditional European or Turkic clothes. Most of us would be more biased to say that it's Kazakh or Turkish depending on their own identity. In case of post #7194424 I was biased to say it's generic Slavic or even Polish, if it wasn't for lore implication.

Well, 'ambiguously-coded national costume' isn't exactly something that is conducive to proper tagging. The previously-mentioned aristocratic clothes actually provides an excellent example of this, because it emerged out of the ill-fated European clothes tag, per topic #24073. "European clothes" was initially created for early modern formal (aristocratic) European clothes or clothes derived from it (hence the new tag), before it ended up getting tag-poisoned with traditional European clothes from across the continent, stereotypical fantasy clothes (because most fantasy clothes is medieval/early modern European-coded), and basically anything vaguely European-looking, from military uniforms to pirates. Only about 12 posts were that kind of seemingly ambiguously-coded clothing, now banished to clothing request because surely they are based on something.

There is no way you'd be able to word a tag that would serve the purpose you'd want it to without it going to shit in one way or another.