In World 278, clothing is colour-coded by the wearer’s age:
0: Black
1: White
2: Yellow
3: Blue
4: Orange
5: Red
6: Green
7: Purple
8: Brown
9: Gold
Secondhand clothing is the norm, children wearing one colour for a year and passing it on. People receive new-to-them clothes on their birthdays. Teens and adults wear one base colour for a whole decade, changing the secondary colour every year. Someone turning 40, for instance, gets a whole new wardrobe, switching from blue and gold to orange and black. Lying about one’s age is unheard-of, as it can be seen at a glance.
What if …
… everyone’s clothing was colour-coded according to their age?
Issue targeted:
Age discrimination, expressing individuality & adapting to function within imposed limits
Inspiration:
I came up with this idea as a child, maybe age 7-8. The colour assignments are mostly based on my (very strong & still present) synaesthetic sense of how numbers look.
This World was contributed by Katrin Salyers (located in the UK), using a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence which allows others to share and adapt the work in any medium and for any purpose, providing that they credit the author and share their material using the same Creative Commons licence.
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I am keen to hear about any historical or contemporary real-world examples – whether individual practices, subcultures or mainstream activities – that this fiction brings to mind.
Please share any such examples using this form. Thank you!