Chemosian Art and Culture
The Old Night, Great Crusade, and Horus Heresy Eras
It would be impossible to discuss Chemosian fashion or art without discussing Fulgrim himself, the culture hero who shaped so much of the planet's society. While an exhaustive history of Chemos isn't the intention here, it is important to hit a few key points.
Chemos, once a thriving industrial world, was cut off from the rest of human civilization during the Old Night. The loss of their major trading partners, combined with a chain of cascade failures and industrial disasters sent their society hurtling backwards into a dark age that persisted until the intervention of Fulgrim, one of the Primarchs created by the Emperor of Mankind.
When Fulgrim arrived as an infant, Chemos was ruled by a government called the Oligarchy. The Oligarchy consisted of individuals powerful enough to controls the remnants of the planet's industry that were still functional and their inner circles of enforcers and overseers. Life on Chemos was strictly regulated, defined by desperate need and crushing poverty, and to keep the populace in line the Oligarchs enforced strict rationing and punishing work-quotas. Privacy was unheard of, while work-crews were on shift, a second (or sometimes third) crew lived and slept in their habs. Reproduction was illegal without pre-approval from the factory-overseers. Leisure time was a fantasy, survival was balanced on a knife's edge, and when a crew wasn't on the factory floor, they were sleeping.
Fulgrim changed all this. The Primarch grew with supernatural speed and his superior strength combined with innate knowledge that the Emperor had granted him before his emergence meant he could meet his Oligarch's quotas with relative ease. He spent every spare moment repairing the ancient machines, exploring, and intventing - sometimes alone, and sometimes in the company of other members of his work-crew.
In an almost miraculously short time, Fulgrim was able to reverse the spiral of extinction the Chemosians had been dragged into. Instead of falling into disrepair, suddenly his factory was breaking even. A few months later, they were producing more than they could consume and stockpiling what remained. A year later, they were producing more than they could stockpile. The rest is, essentially, history.
The Imperium of Man calls the revolution that overthrew the Oligarchs and Fulgrim's rise to power bloodless, and to be completely fair, by their standards, it absolutely was.
There was never outright war between the Chemosian factions over who would control the planet and its resources, but that's not to say that Fulgrim and his followers didn't have to fight for what they believed in. The Oligarchs, terrified of how quickly change had come to Chemos, tried to have Fulgrim assassinated on a number of occasions. At least twice, these attempts ended with Fulgrim talking the assassins into joining his workers collective. Famously, Vargas Tero, a human soldier who would eventually come to oversee recruitment for the Emperor's Children, was one of them. In the Reaches, places that the factories had broken down beyond repair - the rough equivalent of Chemosian 'wilderness', mutants and cannibals roamed freely, and occasionally the Primarch and his enforcers were called upon to defend outlying or vulnerable settlements.
Likewise, once the yoke of starvation was lifted from their shoulders and the people of Chemos turned their eyes to their leaders, it became of apparent that some of the Oligarchs were guilty of atrocious crimes. These men were executed after ostensibly being tried, though the verdict of such trials was never in question. Others managed to barricade themselves inside their personal compounds, where they lived out their lives screaming at clouds or hollering impotently that the sky was falling. Many of the more moderate Oligarchs joined Fulgrim's collective, desperate to get on the train before they were thrown under it. Others, especially those in distant or remote areas of the planet, remained separate sovereignties but accepted and adopted his political and social reforms for fear of losing their workers and citizens.
In truth, there was no need for war against the Oligarchs, in an alarmingly short time, they had been made redundant, and history left them behind.
Now, let's talk about the really cool stuff, art and fashion.
Certain icons and imagery tend to show up in Chemosian art, in the same way there are trends that show up in Terra or Ultramar's, this list is by no means complete, but it touches on some of the most important concepts.
The Alacta Cascade and the Drak
During Fulgrim's early days of leadership, his collective suffered a major industrial disaster that came to be known as the Alacta Cascade. The Cascade was a chained failure of hundreds of essential machines, with the resulting fallout killing hundreds of workers and destabilizing the production lines. The exact cause of the Cascade was never discovered, and although sabotage by one of the rival Oligarchs was always suspected, it was never proven.
Regardless of the reason behind it, the Cascade gave rise to a crisis of worker morale and faith in Fulgrim's leadership abilities. He had promised the people of Chemos safety and security, and failed spectacularly to deliver on it. In response to this, several options were discussed, but in the end, Fulgrim and his council made the controversial (at the time) choice to introduce the drak.
A drak was a small circle of colored glass stamped with a glyph. In the Chemosian language, 'drak' is a lightly derogatory term for the waste products or unusable industrial shavings, which was exactly what the draks were made from. In order to encourage the populace to work, Fulgrim's government issued draks to work-crews for various reasons, exceeding quotas, talented leadership, and good behavior were all examples, but a man was entitled to draks merely for completing his entire shift. Draks could, in turn, be handed in to overseers to be excused from work with no cut to rations and no questions asked. There were three types types of drak issued, defined by color; yellow-red draks, which represented a handful of hours; red-purple draks, which counted for a half-day; and finally, violet draks, which excused a worker from an entire shift.
The issue of draks worked better than Fulgrim had ever anticipated, and where his government had previously faced a crisis of morale, they now had the opposite problem, men were fighting each other for the open places in the Alacta work-crews, refugees and immigrants flooded into the Captial, eager to work under the new system. New factories were renovated and opened as fast as Fulgrim and the engineers he trained could manage it, and new work-crews were formed and assigned to them.
Eight months after the introduction of the drak, Fulgrim's advisors discovered that the populace was trading draks among themselves. While a small portion of the draks issued by the government were returning to overseer hands, the practice of citizens trading draks for favors, food, or services had become commonplace. Though some of them urged the Primarch to withdraw the draks now that the crisis had passed, ultimately Fulgrim's government went in a different direction, which was to back the practice enthusiastically, taking steps to maintain the stability of this unofficial 'market'. One year after the first issue, Fulgrim's government announced a number of new work assignments, such as paying citizens in draks to take care of the elderly, sick, and infirm, or moving workers off the factory lines in order to have children educated full-time.
Two years after the first draks entered circulation, a tattoo artist named Jenet announced that she had accumulated enough customers and draks that she would never have to return to the factories. It was the first such success story, but many others followed, as the new system encouraged the citizens of Chemos to develop and market their skills. Although the planet now uses more complex forms of currency, the three glyphs originally used on the draks are immensely important in Chemosian art. They're popular as subjects for tattoos, old or out-of-circulation draks are carried as good-luck charms or incorporated into jewelry, and their image is often used in Emperor's Children heraldry.
At some point during Chemos' storied history, an industrial disaster wiped out most of the plant life. What few forests that existed on the highly-developed world were petrified by the runoff, and the wood of these trees was transmuted into a strange sort of metal. As light as softwood but as hard and durable as steel, ironwood was harvested extensively and used by Chemosians for a variety of purposes, and after contact with the Imperium, it was used in weapons, most commonly as the grip for guns. Originally thought to be a limited resource, Fulgrim discovered that ironwood trees were alive, and along with his engineers, came up with new ways to harvest and cultivate them. The method for doing so was jealously guarded, and following the destruction of the planet after the Heresy, ironwood trees are believed to be extinct - though it's possible that both seeds and the technique for growing and caring for them survived somewhere among Fulgrim's Astartes.
Both water and cups are important imagery on Chemos, influencing clothing and repeatedly appearing in art. When it touched down, Fulgrim's pod broke open an ancient reservoir that gave his caretakers access to fresh water - the good omen that convinced them to keep him alive in the first place. The work-crew to which he was eventually assigned worked as water-purifiers and recyclers, and his environmental reforms eventually healed and restored the weather cycle, clearing the storms of acid rain. Fulgrim's star-sign is the Ewer (by the Chemosian reckoning anyways, he's an Aquarius on Terra), the most prominent of their seventy-two Water-elemental signs.
Whirlpools, rivers, clouds, waves, lakes, rain, and other water-based imagery are often used as patterns or backgrounds, while clothing is layered and left open to expose lower layers and simulate depth, or ruffled and cut to looked like flowing water. Cool colors, such as blue, black, green, or purple take precedence over any other shades. Art installations often use water as part of their appeal, and fountains are common in almost every public area.
When the Emperor came to collect Fulgrim from Chemos, men and women in their twenties still bore the marks of ownership by the Oligarchs, and the newest generation of children were the first to be born outside of slavery.
Needless to say, the population of Chemos was furious to hear the the Emperor would be taking both their children and their leader, and neither would ever be returned. No one was pleased to hear that their sons were being sent to die in an alien crusade they wanted no part in, and worse, that they had no say in the matter. For a time, the public outcry bordered on anti-Imperial violence or outright rebellion, and it took all of Fulgrim's charisma and considerable diplomatic skill to soothe it. Despite this, the wounds ran deep and never fully healed. Though Chemos was an Imperial state, there existed a strong tradition of backhandedly or subtly insulting the Imperium or the Emperor in its art. Notably, many of their famous works of sculpture, music, and theater include no male characters or masculine imagery, in remembrance of the children stolen to become Astartes.
Chemosian clothing evolved out protective gear for factory workers, and even in the modern day, its design reflects that while incorporating fashion from other prominent Imperial trendsetters, such as Terra or Ultramar.
It was common for a work-crew's on-shift gear to cover the entire body, as well as incorporate a mask that could be closed in the event of acid rain or a gas leak. In some areas and factories, metal or dust in the air meant that workers kept their faces covered at all times and only removed their protective gear in the privacy of secured barracks. In open areas, the damage to Chemos' atomposhere and layers of ozone meant any prolonged sun exposure could be deadly. Leaving no exposed skin was not a matter or privacy or modesty, but survival.
Head coverings are still common on Chemos, considered appropriate (or occasionally necessary) public wear for a person of any gender. In the wealthiest, most modern cities, especially ones with a large Imperial population or in districts where Terran culture has taken hold, this tends to be a brief nod towards tradition, and citizens wear hooded cloaks around their shoulders or light wrappings and half-veils that leave their hair visible. Masks are highly decorated and reserved for parties, holiday events, or special occasions. In more rural areas, the old ways cleave tighter, and it's normal to see citizens fully masked in public. Closed footwear is considered normal, and most people wear shoes inside their homes, open-toe shoes are seen as almost insufferably Terran and an affectation of the upper classes.
On Chemos, the ability to sing and dance are considered important qualities for a well-rounded adult. While all musical ability is valued, for a long portion of their history, instruments were so rare as to be non-existent, and Chemosian work-crews had nowhere to keep them where they wouldn't be stolen or destroyed. However, anyone can sing and dance. Most crews had personalized songs that they used to ease the burden of work and boost morale, and a typical crew would have one or two more talented singers who would entertain their fellows during the shift's off-hours. Music is a vitally important subject of study, taught alongside math, writing, and science, and a career as a musician is considered a worthwhile investment.
Restaurants, parties, and even a variety of businesses often have live music as part of their atmosphere, and it's not unusual for young people to be in bands. Owing to their celebration of music as part of their culture, hundreds, if not thousands of famous musicians have hailed from Chemos.
Before Fulgrim's rise to power, Chemosians had virtually no way to express themselves artistically, and many chose to do so by tattooing.
Tattoos are common among adults, though it's considered improper to tattoo the face, the palms of one's hands, or the bottom of one's feet, as all these things could interfere with an individual's work output and reflect negatively on his work-crew. All workers were once marked with ownership tattoos on the inside of the right wrist, signifying the crew, factory, and Oligarch they belonged to. Even Fulgrim has one, and to show solidarity with his fellow workers, he never had it removed.
They were originally done by hand-tapping with sharpened slivers of ironwood or bone, though with the revitalization of the planet, more modern methods now exist.
Vorshal are a type of beetle native to Chemos, and one of the only animal lifeforms that didn't go extinct during one of the planet's many cataclysms. A vorshal is fairly docile, incapable of flight (despite having wings), and slightly larger than a man's fist. Most vorshal are purple-blue or purple-red in color, but variations exist. During most of Chemos' history, they have been heavily farmed and domesticated. Their bodies contain a surprising amount of meat, which tastes bland and inoffensive, despite the fact that vorshals eat garbage and waste products, and their shells can be ground down into a thick powder that was used as dye for clothing and mixed with additives to make ink and paint.
They owe their survival to vorshals, and thusly, most Chemosians regard the insects with the same reverence other humans might give to dogs and cats (save that they also consider them food), believing them to be far more cute and intelligent than they are. Representations or stylized versions of vorshal are popular choice for brooches, hair ornaments, rings, and other jewelry designs.
An agat is a Chemosian insect, similar to a wasp, though different in a number of ways. Their meat is inedible, however, their venom glands produce a mild hallucinogen and trigger euphoric sensations. Consuming agat was, for a long time, one of the only forms of leisure on the planet. It's still popular and widespread in the modern day, and some citizens farm agat for this exact purpose.
While there is no legal or social stigma against consuming agat, it's considered crass to discuss it openly and addicts are looked down upon. Tattoos of agat are extremely popular among teenagers and woefully embarrassing among adults who got them as teenagers, the Imperial equivalent of a marijuana leaf or the unprofessional work of a scratcher. Eidolon, of the Emperor's Children, has one.
Chemosians are, perhaps unfairly, stereotyped as being hedonistic, though what they are is a product of their history. Within living memory, their entire way of life was defined by crushing poverty, starvation, a total lack of security and privacy, and the very real knowledge that they could die at any moment in a random industrial accident. Now, from a position of safety, comfort, and security, they're able to enjoy the finer things in life. It's not Chemosians are wanton, it's that Terrans and the citizens of Ultramar are terribly stuck up.
To a Chemosian, there's no point in denying yourself, since you could be dead tomorrow. Food exists to be eaten, wine to be drunk, lovers to be enjoyed. Every guest is the one you use the good china for, and 'saving yourself' for the right person is pointless. The person you're with right now could be the right person, and even if they're not, it's good practice for when you find them. On Chemos, there are no social stigmas against having multiple sexual or romantic partners, so long as all parties involved are accepting of it. Prostitution is legal, and likewise, there is no social stigma against either being a prostitute or using the services of one.
