I was gonna just post screencaps of the twitter thread I made the other night but because of how it's formatted, I think it would be best to just make a text post feat. some additional 3AM anxiety-induced rambling from me. This is sort of an addendum to this post on shader mixing. I'd read that post first before reading this one as the concepts in this post rely heavily on the concepts from that post.
Anyway, let's talk about the most overlooked - and imo one of the most important - aspect of Destiny fashion: cohesion.
Many outfits I see often made by players (myself included) focus solely on a particular aesthetic on their armor, even if that aesthetic doesn't actually work with the armor or shaders they're using. The result ends up being an outfit that, while it does it's job making your Guardian presentable when you're trying to grind or just do things, ends up being rather unappealing when you're focusing purely on aesthetics. These outfits lack cohesion.
So, what's cohesion? Cohesion is how well each armor piece flows between one another. This usually involves making details like lines line up with one another or finding armor pieces with similar patterns, details or motifs.
See how the lines in the thigh parts of the leg lines up with the lines on the stomach? Or how there's many simple gold metal parts in the mark, chest, arms and helmet? That's cohesion at work!
Or look at this outfit. Notice the repetition in the shapes - lots of simplistic curves and color blocks for the blue and purple parts, with the grey parts in the pants and stomach serving more as accents.
In its simplest form, its approaching Destiny fashion with the belief of making a whole greater than the sum of its parts - and making the outfit you create stand on its own.
Now, how can cohesion be achieved? It's achieved through the deliberate choices in armor pieces and shaders - and by extension, through shader mixing. This is very much an appearance-based goal, so the best thing you can do is experiment with what you have and take notice of the materials armor pieces have.
Let's look at this outfit. It has a focus on lots of leather and cloth materials as well as simple geometrical lines to give a casual Guardian look of sorts. We can incorporate the presence of the leather on the top part of the chestpiece by using the fully leather Intrepid Discovery Grips in a matching leather tone. To further the cohesion of the uncolorables, I took the color of the seafoam pouches and used it in the chest and legs, and the orange in the Hunter logo in the cloak and mask.
As much as we all loathe uncolorable parts, these parts provide a great opportunity for creating cohesion. However, this relies on leaning on the aesthetic of the uncolorable parts - though this limits what you can do with the outfit, using a cohesion-based approach as opposed to explicitly an aesthetic-based will prevent your outfits from having that mish-mashed appearance when using armor with uncolorable pieces.
Here's an outfit I made that really exemplifies this point. There's a lot of uncolorables with this Winter's Guile ornament. While we can't have that icy appearance on the one arm directly, we can emulate it using shiny light blue metals like the ones in Xenosilver and Laguna Cruiser on super spiky armor like the Corrupting Echo Robes. The green bands are also uncolorable, so to maintain cohesion, I chose to go with one of the leveling string bonds to further incorporate it into the outfit.
This is admittedly kinda vague and just me breaking down armor sets to show the methodology in making them, but I hope this helps in better understanding cohesion :)
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