CLOTHING

A feature of nearly all human societies is the wearing of clothing or clothes, a category encompassing a wide variety of materials that cover the body. The primary purpose of clothing is functional, as a protection from the elements. Clothes enhance safety during activity by providing a barrier between the skin and the environment. Clothing also acts as a hygenic barrier, keeping toxins away from the body and limiting the transmission of bacteria and viruses. Outside of their purely functional purpose, clothes often play an important social and cultural role. Most socieities develop norms about modesty, religious practices, behavioral appropriateness, social status, and even political affiliations in which clothes play an important role. Finally, clothing functions as a form of adornment and an expression of personal taste or style.

Throughout history clothes have been made of materials ranging from natural grasses and furs to elaborate and exotic synthetic compounds. Some recent scientific research involving lice estimates that humans have been wearing clothing for as long as 650,000 years. In addition to clothing, people also decorate their bodies with makeup or cosmetics, scented perfume, and other ornamentation; they cut, dye, and arrange the hair on their heads, faces, and bodies (see hairstyle), and sometimes also mark their skin (by tattoos, scarifications, and piercings). All of these may contribute to the overall effect and message of clothing, but they do not constitute clothing.

Articles carried rather than worn (such as purses, canes, and umbrellas) are normally considered fashion accessories rather than clothing, but hats and small dress sweaters can be called either clothing or accessories.[ Jewelry and eyeglasses are usually considered as accessories as well, even though in common speech these particular items are described as being worn rather than carried.

One of the primary purposes of clothing is to keep the wearer warm. In hot climates this function is minimal, while in very cold climates it is more important. Shelter usually reduces the functional need for clothing. For example, coats, hats, gloves, shoes, socks, and other superficial layers would normally be removed when entering or once inside a warm home, particularly if one is residing or sleeping there.

Clothing at times is worn as protection from specific environmental hazards, such as insects, noxious chemicals, weapons, and contact with abrasive substances. Clothing can protect against many things that might injure the uncovered human body. Clothes act as protection from the elements, including rain, snow and wind and other weather conditions, even from the sun. Clothes also reduce the level of risk during an activity, such as work or sport. Conversely, clothing may protect the environment from the clothing wearer, as for example wearing of medical scrubs.

Humans have shown extreme inventiveness in devising clothing solutions to environmental hazards. Some examples include: space suits, air conditioned clothing, armor, diving suits, swimsuits, bee-keeper gear, motorcycle leathers, high-visibility clothing, and other pieces of protective clothing. Meanwhile, the distinction between clothing and protective equipment is not always clear-cut, since clothes designed to be fashionable will often have some protective value and clothes which are designed to be functional will often consider fashion in their design.

According to archaeologists and anthropologists, the earliest clothing likely consisted of fur, leather, leaves or grass which were draped, wrapped or tied around the body. Knowledge of such clothing remains inferential, since clothing materials deteriorate quickly compared to stone, bone, shell and metal artifacts. Archeologists have identified very early sewing needles of bone and ivory from about 30,000 BC, found near Kostenki, Russia in 1988.

Scientists are still debating when people started wearing clothes. Ralf Kittler, Manfred Kayser and Mark Stoneking, anthropologists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, have conducted a genetic analysis of human body lice that suggests clothing originated quite recently, around 107,000 years ago. Body lice is an indicator of clothes-wearing, since most humans have sparse body hair, and lice thus require human clothing to survive. Their research suggests the invention of clothing may have coincided with the northward migration of modern Homo sapiens away the warm climate of Africa, thought to have begun between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. However, a second group of researchers using similar genetic methods estimate that clothing originated around 540,000 years ago (Reed et al. 2004. PLoS Biology 2(11): e340). For now, the date of the origin of clothing remains unresolved.

Some human cultures, such as the various people of the Arctic Circle, until recently made their clothing entirely of prepared and decorated furs and skins. Other cultures have supplemented or replaced leather and skins with cloth: woven, knitted, or twined from various animal and vegetable fibers.

Although modern consumers may take the production of clothing for granted, making fabric by hand is a tedious and labor intensive process. That the textile industry was the first to be mechanized during the Industrial Revolution attests to this fact; before the invention of the powered loom, textile production took many hours and callused many hands.

Different cultures have evolved various ways of creating clothes out of cloth. One approach simply involves draping the cloth. Many people wore, and still wear, garments consisting of rectangles of cloth wrapped to fit — for example, the dhoti for men and the saree for women in the Indian subcontinent, the Scottish kilt or the Javanese sarong. The clothes may simply be tied up, as is the case of the first two garments; or pins or belts hold the garments in place, as in the case of the latter two. The precious 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 more prodigally, 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 we can reconstruct 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.

Religious clothing might be considered a special case of occupational clothing. Sometimes it is worn only during the performance of religious ceremonies. However, it may also be worn everyday as a marker for special religious status.

For example, Jains wear unstitched cloth pieces when performing religious ceremonies. The unstitched cloth signifies unified and complete devotion to the task at hand, with no digression.

The cleanliness of religious dresses in Eastern Religions like Hinduism,Sikhism, Buddhism and Jainism is of paramount importance, which indicates purity.

Clothing figures in prominently in the Bible where it appears in numerous contexts, the more prominent ones being: the story of Adam and Eve, Joseph's cloak, Judah and Tamar, Mordechai and Esther. Furthermore the priests officiating in the Temple had very specific garments, the lack of which would make one liable to death.

Jewish ritual also requires rending of one's upper garment as a sign of mourning. This practice is found in the Bible when Jacob hears of the apparent death of his son Joseph.