It's sort of inspired by 19th century industrial machinery, steam powered stuff.
I'm guessing all those clocks you saw looked like they were made of brass and maybe the gears were exposed, and the corset the woman you were talking to probably looks like it's made of metal too but with an "old" look to it.
It's quite interesting, almost anything can be steam punked up, here's a cool pic of a laptop made to look steampunk http://www.wired.com/images/slidesho...unkLaptop2.jpg.
There's a lot of sci fi stuff based around it, sort of alternate futures where steam power remained and the world is all still sort of industrial era.