I'm having trouble deciding on the appearance for this one character in my story. I know the basics like his haircut, hair color, build, etc., but I'm not sure on his clothing. He's 14 at the start of the story. He helps his grandpa take care of his little sister and cousin while the parents are busy at work, though if the parents aren't going to be home too late then he takes care of them by himself. He helps with the cooking, laundry, homework, and he acts as the emotional support for the younger characters. He goes to a special school out of town and every summer, ever since he turned ten, he goes to summer camp. I want people to look at him and, the moment they see him, they know who he is and what he's like. I was thinking of having him wear his school uniform which would serve as foreshadowing to something else in the story, but I'm worried that that won't give off the right vibe. The uniform would be a green sweater with a white undershirt, a red dot with a silver ring would be stitched onto the pocket. Black dress pants for the boys, girls can wear black skirts, and black steel toed boots. The other option I was thinking of was having him dress up more like his grandpa, to show how close they are. His grandpa wears touristy clothes, think Hawaiian shirts, so I could have him wear a Hawaiian shirt tucked into some jeans, and some black boots. But that might be a little too casual. Though I suppose that could be his literal casual wear. I don't know. I really know nothing about fashion. Most I know is what a shirt, shorts, pants, socks, and shoes are and the uniforms that policemen, military officers, doctors/scientists, firefighters, and construction workers wear. Oh and that cowboy hats/cloaks add a plus 10 to everyone's charisma skill, but that might just be a me thing.
Without knowing any more about the project or the character, his wearing a school uniform, especially if it's outside of school, would seeem to imply he's a conformist, a rule-follower, and maybe a little overly formal. Or possibly that he doesn't have many clothes to change into. Or maybe that he lives entirely for school and wishes he was in school all the time. Unless you find a way to make it a symbol of something in particular. Him dressing like his grandpa could associate them, depending on how it's shown I think. I don't know why you would want to associate them visually. The Hawaiian shirt thing might just make grandpa seem like an old guy with no fashion sense or no taste at all, who doesn't care how he looks (especially if he wears white socks and sandals and maybe khaki shorts). If you're going for more of a non-conformist self-possessed kind of look, maybe something less loud and garish that seems to have some kind of fashion sense (not that I do, or would recognize fashion if it bit me). But I think it depends on what you want the clothes to represent and how they would do that. Possibly you're contrasting the grandpa against other older people to showcase his approach to life or the way he does things, and you want to show that the MC is more like him? I don't know though, there'd need to be some kind of reasoning behind it for it to say anything coherent about the characters. I also think, if you want to get something specific across like that, you'd need to share a little more about the project with us for us to give any kind of help. What is it you want to say—what do the grandpa and the MC share in common that you want to symbolize with the clothes? I think it would also be important, if you want the clothes to say something in particular, to state in the treatment or screenplay (or whatever it may be) how the other adults (and school kids) are dressed. Otherwise it might just end up chaotic and the clothing not really symbolize anything. Symbols work through contrast. MC and his grandpa stand out from the rest of the characters because they wear (whatever) while the other characters, who have these traits, dress in a particular way that marks them as all being similar to each other. What I'm saying is you'd also need to define the standard against which grandpa and MC are being shown to be different, and somehow make it clear what character traits are symbolized by the clothes. That can be done pretty easily, but you have to be able to clearly state these variables.
I should probably mention that I'm very deeply into symbolism in stories and movies and have studied it for a long time. I can link to a few resources and places where I talked about it in some depth: Character Web If you want to make characters symbolize certain things, you want to create a character web CinemAnalysis My film analysis blog where I mainly cover visual (and other forms of) symbolism. I go into great detail about how it's used in Iron Man, Jessica Jones, and Black Swan. In the Iron Man blog entries in particular I was looking into how they used plot elements and character web to create the symbolism. OK, actually I did that for all of them, because those are what symbolism must be built from. It's really all you've got to work with. But with the Iron Man alanysis I was trying to lay it out clearly as to how the symbolism was presented, so I can do it effectively myself.
