The thing I’m wondering is, would anthros figure out to make clothings themselves? And if they do, how would they look?

Depends on the world they are set in, but in most cases I think the answer would be yes.

In a multi-species world, for example, even though furry species would have less incentive to turn to clothing solutions, both in the temperature and resistance departments, there would still be other species for which clothes would provide the same advantages it provides humans. Cold-blooded species are good candidates for clothes-as-temperature-control, and hairless species for clothes-as-defense-mechanism.

On single-species worlds, there’s still, well, the world. Weather changes more rapidly than species adapt, so clothes could be invented as a way to deal with a suddenly colder climate.

If that doesn’t fit, there’s culture. Maybe, for centuries, taking care of their fur coat, and keeping it looking healthy and beautiful, has been an almost impossible endeavor. Clothes exist only to help the worst of the injured and diseased (for example, helping burn victims dealing with temperature management, or letting people infected with a hair-losing disease keep presentable), but the richer folks co-opt those clothes, decorate them, and start wearing them to hide the inevitable blemishes on they fur coats, and it becomes a status a symbol that eventually trickles down into lower classes. Many years later, once skin fur care starts improving, taking care of your fur becomes much more feasible, and the richest shift into wearing less clothing, it propagates, and now the only clothing that survives is that which either indicates status (displays of rare materials or colors), or has practical uses (pockets). Or maybe a culture of “nakedness” being seen as reprehensible has already developed, so while the richer folk are able to get away with it to some extent, the low/middle classes doesn’t feel like they can, and they keep using full clothing, and it becomes a class discriminator.

Of course, clothing serves more purpose than just covering bare skins. They serve aesthetic purposes and shows our identity.

I think that, for those cases, accessories would be a more obvious choice. Pendants, collars, hats, arm- and tail-bands, etc. Clothes as we know them, a full set of cloth from head to toe, covering everything, seems like would be a harder sell to come naturally without external factors driving them in. (Or I just lack imagination in this particular scenario.)

(And shoes! As much as we, furries, like our beans exposed, shoes are something that I think every tool-capable civilization would eventually create. We even created horseshoes for horses, so not even hooved species would be spared the inevitability of shoes.)

Furthermore, different animals have different fur with different thickness, length, shapes, forms, etc. […]

Anthros might have different size standards for different species to account their differences. […]

That’s a very interesting case!

A world were different species have different sizes/needs regarding clothing is a world where clothing resists industrialization and mass production. Mass produced clothes could be derogatorily generic. Unless you were one of the lucky species/individual that fit the “standard” form that was profitable to produce, you would only buy those if you didn’t have money for tailor-made clothes.

Each town would have their own tailors, who knew how to produce adequate clothing for the species in those towns. Before you moved into a town you’d have to check either tailors or seamstresses, to see if they were able to produce clothes that fit your species, else you’d have to choose another town. These clothing specializations could be a factor driving group/society/culture formation, and there could even be cultural conflicts between species that were usually catered for, and those who weren’t. It would be a factor uniting certain species together, and keeping others segregated.

I’m very bad at naming stuff, so instead of trying to find good names… I find “good” reasons for the names being bad.

For a concrete example: I have a place named NML (Noon Moon Loom), which is an mouthful to actually say, and only slightly less so to say with initials. So I plan to, eventually, have a character note how horrible the name is, and another explaining that it came to be because people didn’t want to refer to the place with its actual name (since it is a brothel), so they referred to it with other names: moon, loom, and others. During a rebranding the brothel decided to go with those instead, but as the management couldn’t settle on one, they compromised by choosing some similar names each liked, and using them all. Now the building has neon signs that sequentially say either “Noon,” “Moon,” and “Loom,” and eventually, as new people got to know the place, they started calling it NML.

Did you ever have to, or chose to, deal with pets? In particular things like having an anthro Golden Retriever character and a feral Golden Retriever dog in the same scene.

If I was using this handwaved approach I would probably avoid scenes like that, which have the potential for maximum weirdness, but I’d be curious about other approaches.

Fully agree with you here. It’s only anecdotal, but my own experiences with monkeys/humans was that for the longest time I hated monkeys because some of them were a little bit too similar for comfort. And the thing is, in hindsight, humans and monkeys aren’t even that similar. We’re certainly not more similar than a feral and an anthro foxes or wolves.

I think that including and handwaving it (or not mentioning it at all) is a perfectly viable solution, but if it’s mentioned too much without proper handling, it will end up becoming weird, and possibly even an obstacle to proper reading (for example, if you keep referring to feral foxes and anthro foxes as just “fox”, you either need to always be explicit (“the feral fox” and “the ??? fox”), or risk confusing readers).

Plus, and this is probably just be me, but I think it would be weird to include that detail, and even call attention to it, but never explore it.

For most stories, I think handwaving or lampshading the weirdness of it is the way to go.

For the remainder… I’d say it’s a matter of what kind of culture you want to create. Taxidermy is one of the problematic areas, but there are many more, such as, but not limited to: pets, cattle, wild animals, and food.

Food is probably the easier to step into. Is every anthro herbivore? That may work if you have an herbivore-only world, but may become jarring if you have carnivores too. If you accept that you need meat, and you aren’t willing to handwave it away, where does it come from? The way I see it, as soon as you have meat, you need wild animals to provide it.

Wild animals then. In some settings you can dodge the problem. On magical settings, you can have anthros being sentient, and magic creatures not sentient, and that’s where the meat comes from. On sci-fi settings you can dodge it with all wild animals beings extinct, and meat being synthetically created from some of them. On more “normal” settings you can maybe have only one sentient species, and every other being wild/non-anthro, or maybe only mammals being sentient, and all others being wild (Imperium Lupi goes with this. Wolves, and hyenas are the main species; bunnies, pigs, + others are “secondary” species; bugs and fish are all wild + magic (iirc)). If you have an all mixed setting… you’re kinda screwed. You’re gonna need a whole lot of either worldbuilding or handwaving.

As a less hypothetical example, in my ongoing Star Fox fanfic I mention synthetic meat, and rely on the “readers only make level-1 questions” assumption to avoid going deeper into that particular rabbit hole. If it does turn out to be necessary, however, I can always handwave it with “alien wild animals”. Things such as pets, though? I won’t be touching that subject with a 10-foot pole, there will be exactly zero mentions of any domestic animals, it is not worth the trouble.

This is probably the best way, imo. There’s no need to be overtly hand-holdy, most readers are astute enough. Some reference to humanity and some reference to non-humanity should be enough to prime readers into thinking something is not normal.

A single paragraph like

Zorian combed his hair, forcing his ears down with it, muting the world around him until they sprang back up.

Conveys both a human action and inhuman attribute.

You can also replace human-targeted words with animal-targeted ones in human contexts, like so:

Zach’s paws were shaking in anticipation, and he had to exert conscious effort to make them stop.

With the priming done, less subtle information can then be dolled out throughout the story, and then when a species descriptor appears, chances are it just confirms reader’s suspicions, and they won’t be read nearly as abrupt as if they were the first thing they read.

In addition, for non-PoV contexts, I feel it’s possible to go for a more direct approach without it seeming so jarring, like so:

Three dogs sat equidistant from each-around around the circular table, their hands holding five cards each, all displaying the comfort of those for who this is a regular activity, while still holding the tenseness associated with gambling things you can’t lose.

Depends a lot on how far you want to go with playing up the source animals differences.

In the transformation scenario, a dog character would suddenly find themselves seeing less colors, which could be played for a change in outlook where they stop relying on sight so much, and pick up the slack with smell. It could also have interaction-with-society effects: signs written/drawn with certain color combos would become unreadable, some computer games would become harder, if not impossible, to play, plus others (talking with a person with daltonism could probably give you more information here). Does your character now have the ability to see in the dark? This could change their habits and circadian clock drastically, and inform a lot of their behavior (suddenly it’s a lot easier to be a night thief, or be a security guard, or a valuable asset in mining operations).

If smells change, so do food tastes, so the character would have to re-evaluate every food preference. Every single person (both others and self) would gain a new smell dimension. Suddenly a great friend’s presence may become unbearable. Is the character’s room close to an outside trash can? Suddenly even just a day’s trash might be uncomfortable. The same applies for any in-house trash, such as in the kitchen. I’m unsure of this, but there might be smell components to certain emotional aspects? Can “smelling” fear become more than a metaphor? And going farther than just smells, dogs can be trained to detect panic attacks and other issues, could a dog character train themselves to replicate that?

Is the character digitigrade or plantigrade? Suddenly they might have no shoes to wear, and pants need completely different fits, even without considering the tail. Will they be able to even walk immediately, or will they struggle to keep equilibrium with tail and/or legs? The clothes’ fit might be relevant with fur alone, if the character ends up having a long or thick coat, rather than a short one.

And hearing, of course. Do they hear worse? Better? Human hearing is not particularly good so probably better? Are electronics now unbearable due to their buzzing? Do people talk too loud? Is working in an office absolutely agonizing? Do they plug their ears to handle the new stress? The unique thing about these changes is that they are really hard to relate to, even more so than eyesight problems, because it comes from being better at something than any human possibly could, and it creating problems. This means that not even in disabled communities would your character be able to find someone who understands. It’s the kind of thing that almost begs to introduce a plot thread of alienation from peers (even more so than just being an anthro in a human world).

Do they have claws? They’re more of a weapon now, even if the character themselves does not think of them that way, other people would. Do they have a different weight and/or height? They might tire more easily now, or hit their head (if growing) or not be able to reach things they could (if shrinking). Are they a deer or other animal with horns? That’s a weapon and different weight feel (they would probably flail with their head when nodding the first times). Do the horns fall and regrow every year? That’s something they could sell for some cash maybe? Or maybe it weirds the character out.

Temperature control would be a whole other thing. Humans wear clothes in place of having fur coats, but now your character has a fur coat. What do? Are clothes more of a social thing now? To make them look less alien to others? Do they relish the opportunity to be naked while alone at home? A fur coat would also protect them from the sun and other weather effects, but forget any kind of long term exertion unless you magic some cooling system, panting and wet noses are not sufficient for prolonged running (unless you hand-wave it away or never introduce it as a complication).

And this is only from the point of view of a single character. If everyone is anthro (and has always been), then there are a lot of societal-level differences.

There’s a lot to fur coats, for example. Maintenance would be a lot harder for everyone, overall. Some species have short coats, other long coats, other double coats, and possibly much more (a species having no coat could be an ostracizing factor, for example: sphinx cats could be frowned upon). In double coat species baths could be just a surface wash, while deeper sessions might be relegated to grooming parlors of some sort, which would also handle problems with mating and other fur coat health concerns (it is a surprisingly deep topic. I plan to play around with it on something I’m writing). House plumbing would require some extra filters to catch fur, but this is not limited to water plumbing but also to air plumbing, as in, air conditioning and any other air cycling units would need to deal with shed fur and dandruff. Clothing styles would also be a lot different, cotton is great at grabbing shed fur, so I expect it would be favored a lot less in comparison with other fabrics, or it could be worn as a sign of luxury (as in, only people who have other people to handle their needs such as cloth washing would go through the effort of wearing them, as a display of economic power).

Claws, hooves, horns, and all other “externals” can be used as weapons, how does your society deal with that? Enforced culling? Only criminals have them as a display of power and not belonging in “normal” society, while “normal people” are all expected to neutralize theirs? Would things as de-clawing being treated as a normal thing that everyone is expected to do, or would it be considered mutilation, and inhumane?

What about “internal” weapons? Poisons and venoms? Would those people be looked down upon with inherent suspicion? Maybe they would be sterilized at birth? Could they have been “naturally” selected against, such that toxic traits disappear from the species entirely? Are there prey/predator dynamics?

I feel the that for a mixed species society something would have to be changed at some root level in the past (either species culling, massed sterilization, selective breeding, or others) that could either lead to deep rooted distrust or animosity between species (Beastars works in this zone, although I personally don’t think the equilibrium the manga starts with is something that could have occurred naturally), or have been totally accepted and be considered normal.

Or you could go with geographically enclosed species, no mixing whatsoever. Each species would have wildly different societal norms and expectations, with trade and collaboration being either a tense or unusual affair. Amphibian species could require very humid environments, and travel to other societies would need to be reliant on technology (for example, water misters that they could use on themselves to re-hydrate). Mammals could have a stronghold on non-equatorial latitudes, while equatorial ones would be dominated more by reptiles. This could work well in a black-and-white-morality setting, whereas for a morally-grey setting you could add species mixing in the in-between latitudes, and even some notable exceptions for added dynamics, such as camels in deserts.

Even with mixed species societies you can have a lot of this, even if you assume that the natural weapons are a thing in play. There’s no strict need for state regulations: you can handle the situation on a social level. Sure, some species have dangerous natural weapons, but their use in harming others can very well be something that is totally unheard of, or you can just ignore it all together, and only play them for flavor, or for less violent drama (for example: daltonic species ending up congregating together, because the way they paint their houses is unsightly to more colorful folks; noise-sensitive species doing the same because they build everything farther apart, or with more noise reduction techniques that other species find eerily mute; places that are totally mixed and there are no facilities to help with these differences, but were the people do the extra work of being aware and respect each other differences.)

And this is just touching the surface. Are you including avians? Do they fly? In a more reality-based setting that’s a hard sell, but in hand-waved or magic settings there’s a lot you would have to think with them.

For a less complex setting you could go mono-species, and just deal with the particulars of on single species. This is would be perfect for going deep instead of wide, but at this point I’m rambling more than thinking, so I guess this is a good place to stop. Either way, as you can see there is a lot to think about, it just depends on how deep and wide you want to go with it.