Personal headcanon for the Taaco twins in order to justify my over-blingification of their designs:
When you’re poor, one-meal-per-day-poor, at-least-we-have-a-roof-over-our-heads poor, everything that shines is gold to you. You want this uselessly complicated “exotic fruit, emerald flower, ivory soft” soap; you want the perfume in a shiny golden box that leaves glitter on your fingers; you want that too-rich food that swears it contains two dozen different types of carrot and has too much cream; and you absolutely don’t care if it’s tacky or unhealthy or actually cheap. You want what you imagine luxury is, and luxury is to have Everything.
The bigger the better. No time for subtlety. No time for refined shit. You want to swallow everything you can because you never have anything anyway – let me have this, let me have this.
Lup steals her first dress in a thrift shop: it’s covered in thirty different patterns, overly-saturated, obviously made in bad quality fabric, with too much ruffles and poorly painted wooden pearls and plastic sequins and loose golden threads. It’s the ugliest piece of shit, but it’s a lot, it looks like a lot. She wears it until she can’t anymore, and even then, she still keeps it because hey, who knows, maybe someday she’ll make a new dress out of it? You have to keep these things, they might get useful again someday. She says that of all the clothes she owns and never throws anything away. “You never know”, she says. You never know.
Taako loves these super cheap, way too bright to be true jewels you can buy dozens of at the local market: he pierces his ears himself, in dozens of places, just so he can wear more of these pseudo-gold plated hipster earrings with suns and stars and intricate patterns that leave green stuff on his skin and cause the holes to bleed and leak pus two times out of three. He still wears them, and still loves them. Who cares if it’s not an actual diamond? A shard of glass shines just as bright, with colourful tiny patches of light that dance on the palm of his hand whenever he holds it in front of a candle. Plus, it’s not like he could ever get an actual fucking diamond, so.
So.
The trick is not not-to-be-poor, but to look like you’re not.
(The first time Barry buys Lup an actual good dress, something made of silk, maybe, or comfortable velvet, something colourful and shiny but something nice, she straight-up refuses to wear it. It’s too much, too real. How much money did he put in this? Why didn’t he save it in case something happens? She just can’t have that. They argue until Lup can’t even find words to put on the gut-wrenching feeling she has and bites her lips until she tastes blood, incredibly frustrated and angry and afraid, so afraid, of this fucking real nice dress.)
(Kravitz looks nice, pretty boneboy, handsome faced reaper man, and like, Taako knew this, Kravitz’s a man with style – so he eyes his jewellery at the Chug N Squeeze, and sure, he’s not wearing much: two small earrings, a couple of bracelets, a broche with his goddess’ insignia on it. It’s a small round crow with a bright orange eye. It catches the light in a way Taako’s jewels don’t, and suddenly, something nasty turns his blood to ice when he realises it’s because it’s an actual fucking gem – and the rest is too solid and heavy to be gold-plated.
Kravitz is wearing solid gold jewellery, and for the first time in forever, Taako, bright, loud, pseudo-fashionable Taako feels cheap.)
They never argue when people call them too-much, greedy, shallow. They don’t care. All they have are rhinestone bracelets, fake crystal stones, glittery nail polish, colours and cheap glamour: they’re the king and queen of fake it ‘til you make it, so they just. Don’t. Fucking. Care.