Went to my best friend’s wedding reception and as I was trying not to be deafened by the Chinese lion dancers (wife is Chinese and they put my seat in arms reach of the musicians), I was thinking about what a well-dressed Imperial female would wear to a wedding as a guest (1).
The open rules are-
Dresses or dress slacks for females. No uniforms for non-active duty military. No white, cream, beige, or metallic colors.
The unspoken rules are-
Don’t show up the bride. Be presentable to our bride’s poor grandmother, who barely understands the concept of human ethnicity and that religions other than Roman Catholicism are not demonic heathenism, let alone extra terrestrials. May be roped into the bridal party at some point (poor me has the bachelor’s party and after the last one with our mutual friends, the groom is getting an AirTag sewn into his underwear or something).
So…while I’m getting on my tux, what will I be zipping/tying/securing my blushing Imperial girlfriend into?
(1-I suspect that my Imperial girlfriend, if we didn’t get married in Imperial fashion, would persuade me to go full medieval fantasy and/or Church wedding for the irony.)
“I’m a foot taller than the next tallest member of the wedding party, and the product of eight thousand years of eugenic engineering for beauty, magnetic confidence, and uncompromising flawlessness, and while the bride’s a nice girl whom I would not say a word against, she, well isn’t.”
“And in general, around here, the only way I can not absolutely dominate any room I happen to be in is… well, retro robot proxy or invisibility cloak?”
“Don’t literally glow and don’t wear something that will cause the photographers to look for excuses to not photograph you. The height and everything else is something her bridezilla instincts are going to have to live with when she sent us the invitation. She knew what she was getting when she invited us.”
Leaving aside what I presume to be some fairly strange ideas about what they actually wear in Imperial society -
There is basically nothing our protagonist is likely to own, specialized work clothing notwithstanding, no matter how “casual”, that on the human scale of clothing formality registers hits lower than “semi-formal”. The scales just don’t match up well.
(Given that “semi-formal” is what Earthers usually wear to weddings - well, wearing one’s day-to-day suit to a Significant Occasion is already a terrible concession to our degenerate monkey fashion hellscape.
What they’d usually wear to Significant Occasions at home is crashing through the high-society barrier. Even “the garb of a young gentlesoph attending a nice dinner and a night at the theater with friends” is probably erring too high on the formal side once the mapping is taken into account and that it is no longer the Gilded Age.)
“The invitation was, we should assume, tendered out of genuine desire for our presence or a sense of social obligation. In either case, courtesy and reciprocity together imply that we should not spoil her Significant Occasion inadvertently, whether or not she foresaw the eventuality. It is therefore incumbent upon us to send our good wishes and appropriate gifts-of-occasion, and politely decline our presence, pleading necessity.”
(One might make an analogy to the social difficulties one might have at home if one were to invite one’s distant cousin the Emperor to one’s Significant Occasion, except there is a mechanism to handle that: if he chooses to attend under some lesser title (say, having himself introduced as mere Ser Amanyr, lathlé of the Order of Star and Crown), etiquette mandates no-one contradict him on that point, and so matters are smoothed over. But if the awkwardness is more, ah, physical and non-concealable, other solutions are called for.
One might also note that this is covered under the principle I summed up once as “thou shalt not cockblock someone else’s torrid affair with awesomeness”. It’s bad form.)