Fashion: Dwarfs working in the tunnels and mines and in the workshops commonly wear white shirts of cave-spider silk below their candled helmets, whose hard-earned immaculate brightness is interrupted only by green suspenders made of a thicker version of the same fabric. Those suspenders, in turn, hold up most dwarf’s most prized family heirloom: lederhosen made of expensive, imported deer leather which makes the pants soft and light but very tearproof. The expense and durability of these lederhosen means they are bequeathed from one generation to the next. As work pants, they are equipped with two side pockets, one hip pocket, one knife pocket, and a drop front to allow certain bodily functions to be more easily performed. Stockings stretch from these shorts, over the knee, and into thick-soled leather boots with a steel toe. Thick aprons of wool or, for the rich or those who need it, the same leather mark those who are doing more dangerous work, such as smithing.
When engaging in more domestic work, dwarfs tend toward keeping the shirt, but covering it only with a long hooded stole of gnomish-made goat wool that just hangs wide front and back without connecting on the sides. The two front flaps do connect in front, however, low, about at the dwarf’s belly button, to form a sort of apron. Three great big pockets wait at about the dwarf’s hips to help their work. Unless their boots are needed, domestic dwarfs tend to walk in their bare feet.
Dwarfs don’t dress up much for fancy occasions, and when they do, they mostly just add embroidery and tooling and brighter colors to the same garments and oftenm make those garments out of finer textiles. Dwarfin jewelry tends to the chunky and the big, and is most often carved and polished from granite or marble or any number of precious stones. Because dwarfs tend not to value gems and other crystals aesthetically, they export many of the ones they find to Sardis and Galatia. This means most people in the wider Empire tend to see rich dwarf gem merchants, leading to a stereotype of dwarfs as rich.
Art & Aesthetics: Dwarfs gravitate to earthy tones of greys and browns in a variety of shades, accented with flashes of much more brilliant colors usually made from ground precious stones. They quite enjoy little flashes of hues that remind them of the surface world (blues, yellows, greens) from which they have retreated amidst colors much more representative of their current environment. Bright reds and light purples are rare in dwarfin aesthetics, and white is treated mostly as a utilitarian color to increase visibility in often-dark tunnels. Dwarfin lines and shapes tend toward straight lines and sharp corners. The occasional curve is long and languid, dripping like stalactites or sloping around like the tunneled halls.
Dwarfin art focuses on well-made tools more than anything else, prizing efficiency as a marker of beauty though modest adornment is also often added. Large sculpture is often discarded in favor of grand architecture, but most dwarfs work small rocks into a variety of forms as a way to keep their hands busy and entertain themselves in idle moments, much like forest-folk tend to whittle. Two-dimensional art is largely restricted to gorgeous mosaics and friezes that cover the grand halls of the dwarfs. By far, the most famous dwarfin artform in the rest of the empire is their metal furniture-making, sturdy, perfectly proportioned, and starkly gorgeous.
Music is vital to dwarfin culture. Songs tend toward the long and the sonorous, often backed by throat-singing, all intended take the greatest possible advantage of their subterranean acoustics. Opera is the greatest dwarfin contribution to Imperial performing arts, originating as work-songs to the steady clanging beat of tools on stone. Instruments similar to billabongs are used sometimes to play a melody behind both vocals and percussion. To imagine dwarfin music, combine the musicalities of Gregorian chants and 1930s chain-gang worksongs, backed with droning. King d’Holbach brought dwarfin opera to Galatia, where it began to gain more complicated melodies and harmonies, and from there to Sardis and Penguern who added their own bombastic and delicate touches, respectively, which have fed back into the most complicated Galatian style of opera.
Cuisine: Dwarfs usually braise their meat; fried dishes also exist, but these recipes usually originate from Sardis and Galatia. One Worthese specialty is Hrewashtarber (sour roast), involving marinating bat meat in a myungja (mushroom wine vinegar) mixture over several days. A long tradition of sausage-making exists in Worth; more than 1,500 different types of sausage (Worthese: karal) are made. Most karal is made with natural casings of goat intestines, acquired rather dearly from the gnomes. Among the most popular and most common are tarbkaral, usually made of ground cave shrimp and spices, the Sardikaral (Sardin), which may be bat or salamander and is smoked and fully cooked in a water bath, and myelshkaral (slime sausage) or zrauschkaral (black sausage) made from a particular type of cave slime. There are many regional specialties, such as the Kirchen sieukaral (Kirch white sausage) made from crab or the ryukaral (depending on region, either a steamed crawfish sausage or a version of the tarbkaral, sliced and spiced with a fermented fish sauce) popular in the city of Worth itself.
Living underground as they do, dwarfs don’t get much plant matter in their diet. Far and away, however, the two most common are carrot and white asparagus. The latter is simply considered delicious and oft purchased from the gnomes who grow it on the slopes of the mountains where the dwarfs live. The former, however, is mostly consumed like coffee, with the carrots being roasted and dried, then ground and steeped in water to create a hot drink called grafhul.
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