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In most anime, most of the time, the characters wear the same clothes. Why is
that?

I'm sure they are easier to draw but are there any other reasons?


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2013-12-17T21:10:58.167
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anime-production anime-history
Why do characters always wear the same clothes?


You could justify it by utility, like warriors not being comfortable with
wearing other things in combat/not being able to store their weapons/supplies
as efficiently and such. Or by making it a sort of uniform. Literal, or like
making a self-conscious character who knows they're forgettable, so they wear
the same thing everyday to avoid being not recognized. Or to draw attention.
Or something. Or in the case of ghosts, it may be the outfit that they died
in. Or shapeshifters - having a limited understanding of society, so they see
nothing wrong with wearing the same stuff.


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I believe that is to keep familiarity with the character throughout the
series. Plus when they do add a change no matter how small it's usually very
noticeable giving them a significant definition without actually changing the
overall appearance.

As @eric mentioned it's not unique to anime. One of the things to consider is
most of the anime and cartoon's originate from sketches and that makes it
relatively difficult to iterate with significant changes.

Also, it saves time and money with editing and reconstruction while developing
it into moving picture.


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One factor is character familiarization. Another is that the artist can use
the same "template" for his/her creations. Another is that it will be more
economical to produce toys and other merchandise.


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There's many reasons -

  1. Many manga artists draw all their characters with a standard male or standard female face. The only way then to distinguish their characters is by hair style and clothing, if they wear a recognizable outfit.

  2. Branding - as other people said, characters become more recognizable, like a brand when they always wear the same clothes.

  3. Coming up with new outfits is hard. Manga artists have really strict deadlines, so it's important for them to save time when they can, and designing new outfits that aren't terrible take time.

  4. For those manga that have the same clothes all the time, their intended audience isn't really interested in fashion, and fashion isn't really a focus of the manga, and so it's not really worth it to invest time/effort in coming up with new outfits anyways.

I actually think more economical merchandising is not a motivating factor. For
every outfit you come up with you can sell another toy to the same group of
people who bought the last toy (Look at Card Captor Sakura, with lots of
merchandise of her many outfits).

Shoujo manga publishers are much more likely to pressure artists into drawing
new clothes regularly because they're more likely to have a storyline relating
to fashion (like all those "become an idol" manga), and their intended
audience is more likely to be interested in fashion (why else would they be
reading a manga where that's a focus?) For example, I know for a fact though
the manga author for Skip Beat! was not particularly interested in fashion,
she was pressured to come up with new trendy outfits for her characters since
she was, after all, writing a manga about movie stars.


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