Irken Fashion and its cultural implications

That’s what I think so too, and I love that explanation, but Zim’s throne room clearly pulls from Urthen High Fantasy Dark Lord aesthetics. Both could be possible. He is wearing a probably fake goatee. He’s using a very different aesthetic to assert his power over Urth than the Tallest use...possibly niche partitioning, as not to challenge them?

The male Tallest all have a zigzag pattern on their breastplate, whereas Miyuki’s only has one latch. Are there gendered Tallest armors? Since Miyuki is the only canon female Tallest, we’ll never know.

Maybe Tallest uniforms aren’t gendered...maybe Miyuki’s is just in an earlier style?

Overthinker-to-overthinker communication.

Miyuki’s breastplate has one latch, and her skirt has three lines on it. Hers has the most detail of any skirt. Also, her “girdle” (the bit where her corset attaches to her skirt) is angular. 


Spork introduced the zig-zag breastplate pattern, and his skirt lost a lot of the detail that Miyuki’s had. He has a round girdle with at least three lines on it. 


Their breastplates are one piece-no zigzags or latches, their gauntlets have three stripes instead of two, and their corsets are much less extreme. Evidently their experimental look didn’t catch on (or maybe it was forever tarnished by the Zim Debacle(s)) because they go back to much more traditional Tallest fare. 



The Tallest kept the zigzag pattern and lost almost all of the detail on their skirts. Miyuki’s angular girdle has come back, but it’s rounder. 


By ETF, their gauntlets have changed shape, and they’ve got gloves and thumbs. They have round-ish girdles, zigzag breastplate latches, and, what’s this?-the skirt details introduced by Miyuki have made a comeback. Also, the skirt bottom have had details added, a novel touch. Red and Purple are (subtle) movers and shakers in Tallest fashion. 

It's really sad to me that Red and Purple might have been trying to do something new and different in their dress with a less restrictive style of armor...and Zim ruined it all and it became so associated with the failures of OID 1 and 2 that they couldn't wear it anymore. Rurple were wearing their post-pilot armor during Zim's post-OID 1 reencoding as a food drone...perhaps they were trying to reestablish their authority as legitimate Tallest after such a debacle?

The whole thing kind of reminds me of when Marie Antionette rejected wearing a Grand Corps, a type of very uncomfortable stays/corset that was dress code at the French court at the time, and was eventually peer-pressured back into wearing it even though it made her so uncomfortable.

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