Danbooru

Anyone thinks strapless and sleeveless are heavily misused?

Posted under Tags

It seems that despite the simple and straightforward definitions of the strapless and sleeveless tags, and their associated tags, there has been continuous mistagging of the two tags in which they are being interchangeably used, sometimes even being used together when referring to the same clothing (ie. post #4678195, post #4719139, post #4726836, etc.; all of these are strapless clothes that were tagged as "sleeveless").

Strapless clothes are supposed to be used when the clothes are not held up by any support (straps, sleeves, etc.), whereas sleeveless clothes are used for all other non-strapless clothing that have no attached sleeves.

In my opinion, strapless and sleeveless are supposed to be mutually exclusive tags when referring to the same piece of clothing, even before the wikis of both tags were revised for clarity. The misuse of the tags (over 2000 posts, as of this writing) seem to make it far worse than off-shoulder jacket/coat (which almost nobody knows how to correctly use).

I'd like to hear other's opinions of my assessment.

I often use sleeveless and strapless for the same garment, especially for dress or tube tops, but never interchangeably. Basically, if there is no straps, I put strapless and if there is no sleeves, I put sleeveless (regardless of any strap). And usually, if there is no straps, there is no sleeves (some counter-examples may exists) so both tags overlap. It looks more like a kind of subset than exclusive tags.

What was the reasonning behind the wiki edit ?

Rignak said:

I often use sleeveless and strapless for the same garment, especially for dress or tube tops, but never interchangeably. Basically, if there is no straps, I put strapless and if there is no sleeves, I put sleeveless (regardless of any strap). And usually, if there is no straps, there is no sleeves (some counter-examples may exists) so both tags overlap. It looks more like a kind of subset than exclusive tags.

What was the reasonning behind the wiki edit ?

Yeah, because people seem to be using sleeveless for strapless clothes (which is incorrect); even though strapless clothes don't technically have sleeves, why else are strapless clothes considered distinct from sleeveless clothes (which is true in real-life fashion terminology).

To a marginally lesser extent, some people mistag off-shoulder clothes as strapless, when strapless clothes are stated to not have any straps or sleeves for support; clothes like off-shoulder shirt have sleeves as support to prevent it from slipping.

Updated

Following a exchange with Inujerr, I would like to bring this topic back. I'm concerned about the fact that, by following this redefinition, tags such as strapless_dress would not appear anymore when searching for sleeveless_dress. Maybe this would be correct in fashion industry terminology, but I think it might by counterintuitive for most users.

Strapless and sleeveless shouldn't be used together. This is not how they're normally used in the outside world. A strapless dress and a sleeveless dress for example are two different things. A strapless dress is completely bare-shouldered, while a sleeveless dress is missing only the sleeves. Sleeveless implies a normally-sleeved outfit that has everything but the sleeves.

I'd say this is yet another case of taggers ignoring all context and interpreting tags in the most literal-minded way possible. This leads to absurdities like tagging one-piece swimsuits as sleeveless - nevermind that swimsuits don't have sleeves to begin with, it meets some literal definition of sleeveless, so it must be tagged.

evazion said:

Strapless and sleeveless shouldn't be used together. This is not how they're normally used in the outside world. A strapless dress and a sleeveless dress for example are two different things. A strapless dress is completely bare-shouldered, while a sleeveless dress is missing only the sleeves. Sleeveless implies a normally-sleeved outfit that has everything but the sleeves.

I'd say this is yet another case of taggers ignoring all context and interpreting tags in the most literal-minded way possible. This leads to absurdities like tagging one-piece swimsuits as sleeveless - nevermind that swimsuits don't have sleeves to begin with, it meets some literal definition of sleeveless, so it must be tagged.

I agree with this 100%

evazion said:

Strapless and sleeveless shouldn't be used together. This is not how they're normally used in the outside world. A strapless dress and a sleeveless dress for example are two different things. A strapless dress is completely bare-shouldered, while a sleeveless dress is missing only the sleeves. Sleeveless implies a normally-sleeved outfit that has everything but the sleeves.

I'd say this is yet another case of taggers ignoring all context and interpreting tags in the most literal-minded way possible. This leads to absurdities like tagging one-piece swimsuits as sleeveless - nevermind that swimsuits don't have sleeves to begin with, it meets some literal definition of sleeveless, so it must be tagged.

I see, this pretty much confirms my argument that strapless and sleeveless are supposed to be mutually exclusive tags that should not be used together when referring to the same article of clothing. As expected.

Though, the problem with cleaning up the mistags of strapless sleeveless is that it is disastrously huge (4974 posts at the time of this writing, much more than off-shoulder jacket before it was cleaned up); I attempted to tag garden it myself, only to burn out quickly because there were so many mistags. Of course, there is the option of informing the mistaggers that they're using the tags wrong (like I did when people misuse off-shoulder jacket) to minimize the increasing amounts of mistagging, though the results often vary depending on whether or not they would actually listen to tagging advice, plus some people may attempt to counter my argument by claiming that "strapless clothes don't have sleeves, so they are sleeveless".

Updated

First off, I don't dispute any decisions here. However, as I was directly chastised regarding this topic, I think it's critical people here get a good understanding of the situation from a different perspective. And having never been directly confronted about tag mistakes before in over a decade of being on this platform, I am going to assume that this is a very serious subject that people are trying to address and treat it as such.

Unbreakable said:

I don't see the point in tagging sleeveless and strapless on the same garment, if they have no straps then they won't have any sleeves, otherwise it would be an off-shoulder_* instead. Otherwise we might as well do implications between the tags.

Short Version:
I highly recommend finding a way to make the distinctions among sleeveless_*, strapless_*, and off-shoulder_* more obvious on the wiki, in the same manner that the difference between skirts and dresses are very clearly illustrated on their respective wikis. This will be a reoccurring problem otherwise.

The Details:
To be frank, it is not common knowledge or intuitive that sleeveless implies a strap and that strapless implies that no sleeves exist. I will say, however, both of these facts become more understandable when the off-shoulder_* tag is known. But in my case, until reading this forum post I was only aware of off_shoulder and did not know the existence of off-shoulder_* tags, much less how they differ in usage from off_shoulder. I can say I'm happy I now know this tag exists and I intend to use it correctly, because it helps solve a conundrum discussed later below.

The major problem is that most people who don't know the details previously discussed in this forum post are unlikely to look up the wikis on sleeveless or strapless and realize the mistake, because both terms, as used in common speech, are not innately mutually exclusive in language. Likewise, the distinction that tags like off-shoulder_dress are meant for clothing specifically designed to be off_shoulder comes up only in the wiki for off_shoulder and the respective off-shoulder_* wikis. This is not a problem, maybe, if someone is curious and looks up, let's say off-shoulder_dress after searching through the tag group:dress. However, considering that I have read through tag group:dress many times and many of the tags under it for trying to find the precise tag for images, I still missed the existence of off-shoulder_dress, and I would be astounded if the average tagger on this site knows it exists, and even more if they could distinguish it from sleeveless and strapless based on the discussion above.

To clarify: this is not simply a misuse of sleeveless and strapless that you all are talking about. It's a misuse and/or misunderstanding of three separate tags. To demonstrate this problem in action, let's consider these scenarios:
1) A dress with straps and no sleeves --> sleeveless_dress
This makes perfect sense.
2) A dress with no straps or sleeves --> strapless_dress but not sleeveless_dress
Already you will have lost a good portion of people, because you can correctly in informal conversation refer to such a dress as sleeveless. However, if sleeveless must imply straps in the world of fashion (or on this platform), so be it. No complaints from me.
3) A dress with sleeves but no straps --> off-shoulder_dress but not strapless_dress
This makes sense under two conditions:
One: someone takes strapless to mean "no straps, no sleeves, etc.", which is questionable to assume as a natural stance because in conventional language sleeves are not synonymous with straps. However, considering sleeves attached to the dress need some support (else they'd be detached sleeves), it is reasonable to refer to that support as a "strap" and thus you'll get no complaint on the decision here.
Two: The tagger knows that off-shoulder_dress exists and how to use it. Else, you have a situation where you cannot use sleeveless_dress or strapless_dress and the tagger is left wondering what to do next (assuming everything from above is already accepted and known). In this case, sure, the tagger may leave the tag out or go searching through tag group:dress for the precise tag for the job (if they aren't overwhelmed by the massive list of options). However, if the tagger does not already know the details discussed in this forum post regarding sleeveless and strapless, this scenario reinforces the mistakes discussed herein. I predict, because I have done it myself, that there will be many strapless_dress tags incorrectly used in place of off-shoulder_dress tags. Once you have a tagger that thinks you can have a strapless_dress with sleeves, then it follows that a dress with neither straps nor sleeves will warrant both strapless and sleeveless.

Solution: I argue that this problem would diminish if the off-shoulder_* tags were more visible and directly compared and contrasted next to each other as we see in the wikis for skirt and dress.

1