Physically, clothing serves many purposes: it can serve as protection from weather, and can enhance safety during hazardous activities such as hiking and cooking. It protects the wearer from rough surfaces, rash-causing plants, insect bites, splinters, thorns and prickles by providing a barrier between the skin and the environment. Clothes can insulate against cold or hot conditions. Further, they can provide a hygienic barrier, keeping infectious and toxic materials away from the body. Clothing also provides protection from harmful UV radiation.
Clothes can be made out of fiber plants such as cotton, plastics such as polyester, or animal skin and hair such as wool. Humans began wearing clothes roughly 83,000 to 170,000 years ago.
Origin and history
Knowledge of the origin of clothing remains inferential, since clothing materials deteriorate quickly compared to stone, bone, shell and metal artifacts, but some information has been inferred by studying lice. The body louse specifically lives in human clothing and when it diverged from head lice it can be inferred that clothing existed at that time. One study estimated that this happened between 83,000 to 170,000 years ago another estimates between 65,000 and 149,000 years ago.
Archeologists have identified very early sewing needles made of bone and ivory which were found near Kostyonki, Russia in 1988 and are dated to about 30,000 BC.Dyed flax fibers that could have been used in clothing have been found in a prehistoric cave in the Republic of Georgia that date back to 36,000 BP.
Making fabric by hand is a tedious and labor-intensive process. The textile industry was the first to be mechanized – with the powered loom – during the Industrial Revolution.
Different cultures have evolved various ways of creating clothes out of cloth. One approach simply involves draping the cloth. Examples of garments consisting of rectangles of cloth wrapped to fit include the dhoti for men and the sari for women in the Indian subcontinent, the Scottish kilt and the Javanese sarong. The clothes may simply be tied up, as is the case of the first two garments; or pins or belts are used to hold the garments in place, as in the case of the latter two. The cloth remains uncut, and people of various sizes or the same person at different sizes can wear the garment.
Another approach involves cutting and sewing the cloth, but using every bit of the cloth rectangle in constructing the clothing. The tailor may cut triangular pieces from one corner of the cloth, and then add them elsewhere as gussets. Traditional European patterns for men's shirts and women's chemises take this approach.
Modern European fashion treats cloth much less conservatively, typically cutting in such a way as to leave various odd-shaped cloth remnants. Industrial sewing operations sell these as waste; home sewers may turn them into quilts.
In the thousands of years that humans have spent constructing clothing, they have created an astonishing array of styles, many of which have been reconstructed from surviving garments, photos, paintings, mosaics, etc., as well as from written descriptions. Costume history serves as a source of inspiration to current fashion designers, as well as a topic of professional interest to costumers constructing for plays, films, television, and historical reenactment.
