Cast Clothing Color Theory

No one cares but me, but I care so you get notes.

In dressing the cast, the first guide needs to be the comics. Gwen Stacy-616 (which -254616 is based on) has a specific theory, born of the late sixties and early seventies and Steve Ditko's clothing sense. Contrary to expectations, she didn't always wear a hairband, but she was very likely to be in a skirt whether casual or dressed up. This contrasts heavily to Gwen Stacy/Spider-Gwen-65's aesthetic, which is very alt rock punk.

Similarly, Gwen's clothing colors reflected not just their time period but the printing techniques comics used during those time periods. Gwen is a blond with blue eyes and cool undertones. If we use the (outdated, admittedly) seasonal color theory, she's a summer and should mostly rock soft tones like pinks and greys. Even black would be too harsh -- dark grey would be best.

But she was born of four-color print processing, so her palette's always been bright. So I dress her as though she were a winter instead of a summer. The skin tone still matches, but she gets starker color choices. Blacks. Jewel tones. Gwen was always fashionable -- as much a fashion plate as Mary Jane, really -- so that works. Because she's iconically still seen as being back in the old days, that also means she goes for more primary colors. Her outfits will be big on emerald (technically a secondary but it's an edge case), bold blue, and stuff like that, because back in those days secondary and tertiary colors looked muddled on comic pages, so generally colorists would reserve those colors for bad guys. (And that's why the Joker's trademark suit is purple, boys and girls!)

For the record? Spider-Gwen-65's actually a solid summer. That's why she accents with pink so well.

Mary Jane's palette changes with different art teams and colorists, but she's always big on black, so she's either going to be a winter or an autumn. It takes just the right skin tone for a redhead to pull off Earth tones, so winter it is -- again. Two winters together makes for boring visual appeal, so I differentiate by giving Mary Jane more Secondary elements. Burgundy, rich purple, stuff like that -- those are the MJ Collection. Also jeans. Denim, by the way? (Well, blue denim?) Fits in the 'neutral' category even more than the color theory would suggest. Any skin tone can get away with worn blue jeans, especially if you fill them well.

And yes, I'm talking about 'visual appeal' when I'm a prose writer. It counts. Trust me. You know how hard science types will be reading science fiction and suddenly hit a clear scientific error and their brains go splung? The same thing happens to fashion designers. Certain writers love writing their warm skin tone redheads (which usually means bottle redheads in the real world -- just saying!) rocking their bright purple outfits and being in the very It of It while they do it, and a certain percentage of their readers sit there going "that would look hideous on her!" and then have to take a break to watch television.

Cindy Moon wears a lot of black, white, and grey. She really doesn't care.

Peter I dress in the 'eternal bachelor' (yes, even when he 'was' married) mode. Clothes, essentially clean? He's happy.