Clothing

Clothing—also called clothes, garments, dress, apparel, or attire—refers to anything worn on the body. It is made mostly from textiles, but also from animal skins, furs, and other natural or synthetic materials. Every known human society has clothing, and its look and use shift with climate, culture, what materials are at hand, technology, social rules, and personal taste. Clothing protects, regulates body temperature, shields against environmental dangers, and offers specialized protection for jobs, sports, and other activities. It also signals social standing, gender, cultural identity, religious belonging, modesty, and individual style, and is central to fashion.

People likely started wearing clothes tens of thousands of years ago, with early garments made from animal skins and plant fibers before woven textiles became common. Over time, advances in textile production, tailoring, and industrial manufacturing turned clothing into one of the world’s biggest industries. The garment and textile sectors employ millions, are key to global trade, and face issues around working conditions and sustainability. A garment’s life includes care, maintenance, reuse, recycling, and disposal.

**Origin and history**

**Early use**

Estimates for when humans first wore clothes range from 40,000 to as many as 3 million years ago. A 2003 study, using evidence from lice, suggested clothing use at least 100,000 years ago. Human body lice cannot survive outside clothing and die within hours without shelter. This implies that the body louse’s split from its parent species, *Pediculus humanus*, happened no earlier than when humans first adopted clothing. That split—between the body louse (*P. humanus corporis*) and both its parent and the head louse (*P. humanus capitis*)—has been dated to between 40,000 and 170,000 years ago. However, recent transcriptome analyses cast doubt on using lice to date clothing’s origin, finding that “body and head lice were almost genetically identical. Indeed, the phenotypic flexibility associated with the emergence of body lice is probably a result of regulatory changes, perhaps epigenetic in origin, triggered by environmental signals.”

Direct archaeological evidence gives dates matching those from lice. In September 2021, scientists reported evidence of clothes being made 120,000 years ago, based on findings in deposits in Morocco. Clothing’s development is deeply tied to human evolution; early garments likely consisted of animal skins and natural fibers used for protection and social signaling. Anthropologists and archaeologists think the earliest clothing was fur, leather, leaves, or grass that was draped, wrapped, or tied around the body. Knowledge of such clothing is inferential, since clothing materials decay much faster than stone, bone, shell, or metal. Archaeologists have found very early sewing needles of bone and ivory from about 30,000 BC near Kostenki, Russia in 1988, and in 2016 a needle at least 50,000 years old from Denisova Cave in Siberia, made by Denisovans. Dyed flax fibers dating to 34,000 BC, possibly used in clothing, have been found in a prehistoric cave in Georgia. The oldest known piece of woven clothing is the Tarkhan dress, a linen garment over 5,000 years old.

**Making clothing**

Several distinct human cultures, including those in the Arctic Circle, have historically made their garments only from treated and decorated animal furs and skins. Many other societies have added or replaced leather and skins with textiles woven, knitted, or twined from animal and plant fibers like wool, linen, cotton, silk, hemp, and ramie. Though modern consumers may take clothing production for granted, making fabric by hand is a tedious, labor-intensive process involving fiber preparation, spinning, and weaving. The textile industry was the first to be mechanized—with the powered loom—during the Industrial Revolution.

Different cultures have developed various ways to make clothes from cloth. One method is draping: many people wore, and still wear, garments made of rectangles of cloth wrapped to fit—for example, the dhoti for men and the sari for women in the Indian subcontinent, the Scottish kilt, and the Javanese sarong. These may be tied up (dhoti and sari) or held with pins or belts (kilt and sarong). The cloth stays uncut, so people of different sizes can wear the same garment. Another method involves measuring, cutting, and sewing cloth by hand or with a sewing machine. Clothing can be cut from a sewing pattern and adjusted by a tailor to the wearer’s measurements. An adjustable sewing mannequin or dress form helps create form-fitting clothing. If fabric is expensive, the tailor tries to use every bit of the rectangular cloth, perhaps cutting triangular pieces from one corner and adding them elsewhere as gussets. Traditional European patterns for shirts and chemises take this approach. These remnants can also be reused to make patchwork pockets, hats, vests, and skirts. Modern European fashion treats cloth much less conservatively, typically cutting in ways that leave various odd-shaped remnants. Industrial sewing operations sell these as waste; domestic sewers may turn them into quilts. Over thousands of years of making clothing, humans have created an astonishing array of styles.