After I knew what the face of Leto, the hero of my fairy tale, looked like it was time to design his clothes.
I always had known that the Wan Tau fabricated and sewed their own cloths, they did not use things from the human world to cover their bodies (they did use human artefacts for other parts of their village though, but I will cover that in another blog post).
I also wanted to give them a little bit of a kobold´s look mixed with some elements from nature and the humans´ Late Middle Ages. Of course the relation between these three main elements would vary depending on the age, character and job the Wan Tau would have.
The younger ones, like Leto, would usually wear bigger hoods for example and generally more textiles. But most of the Wan Taus would not cover their whole body with clothes, as they had a warm fur to protect them from the cold. Their arms would be naked in most cases. You must not forget that – if you look at their psychology – Wan Tau had more in common with a colony of “social squirrels” or gophers than with humans.

There would also be a distinction in details like shoes – which would be mainly determined by the generation a Wan Tau was born into and therefore be a question of their attitude towards nature: The older Wan Tau looked at shoes as a form of degradation of their connection to the earth as shoes suppress direct contact with the ground. The younger Wan Tau on the other side would see shoes as something that was convenient: They reduced the risk of getting hurt if they ran over human waste like broken glass.

In the sketches below Leto does not wear shoes, but that changed in the later illustrations.

Oh, yes – and Leto has a cape! I loved capes as a kid!