The History Of Clothing

Clothing is said to have been initially adopted by another branch of the human family tree, the Neanderthals. Clothing and textiles have been made for a long time, with some sources claiming that contemporary Homo sapiens have been dressing in some shape or another for over 180,000 years. How can we know this when only a few antique fabrics have made it through to the present day?

The finding of old human clothes lice, ancient stone and clay sculptures depicting clothing, and tools such as needles and loom weights, among other artefacts, have all provided insight into what we originally wore. Once in a while, we’re fortunate enough to come upon a well-preserved cloth or a sliver of fibre. The oldest is estimated to be over 34,000 years old.

Clothing became a need at some point, yet clothing and the materials it is composed of have not stayed exclusively utilitarian over the centuries. Clothing and the materials used to make it have come to symbolise individual style and expression, as well as social standing, gender/sex, religious affiliation, and other functions in society. Let’s take a look at the history of clothing and textiles for a moment.

Origin

Cotton is a common plant that is used in textiles. Cotton is used in a variety of textiles. Textiles are fabrics or cloths, some of which are woven, that are used to make clothes and other textile-based products such as blankets and carpets.

Clothing would have been very rudimentary in the beginning; it would have been made from animal skins and hair. Humans began to weave patches of skin together instead of enveloping themselves in a single big skin at some stage.

Plants such as flax, which can be transformed into a textile called linen, and cotton plants, which can be used to make cotton cloth, would have been used to make the first clothing that wasn’t produced from animal skins. Wool textiles were introduced into the mix as a result of animal domestication. Clothing was embellished with feathers, shells, leaves, and dyes to create patterns, designs, and figures.

The earliest evidence of flax fibres dates back 34,000 years and comes from the Republic of Georgia, whereas the first evidence of fabric dates back to roughly 6300 BCE in what is now Turkey.

Textiles and the Rise of Civilisations

Civilisation progressed, resulting in increasingly sophisticated fabrics with patterns and colours. Clothing became a sign of your identity and status in society, not simply to protect you from the weather but also to inform everyone who you are, whether you were a princess or a poor, a priest or a warrior, or an ordinary labourer.

Silk, for example, was fashioned from silkworm cocoons in China around 2700 BCE. Silk was a lovely and silky fabric, and individuals who wore it were usually wealthy and nobility. It wouldn’t have been anything that the general public would have had access to. Silk was so valuable that it became a very valuable luxury product traded over the Silk Road, which connected East and West cultures.

Silk is an early textile that is still popular today. Silk is an ancient cloth. The Andean Chancay culture made woollen textiles from camelids such as the llama and alpaca, which exhibited not just expertise in weaving but also their ability to use dyes and create shapes.

An ancient Andean culture named the Chancay Andean wool textile weaved a wool tunic with condor designs. Improved looms and spinners accelerated the process of textile production in the 1700s CE, at the dawn of the Industrial Age, allowing larger quantities of cloth to be produced for clothing design. Machines eventually began to assume the role of humans in this process.

Conclusion 

We conclude that from 100,000 to 500,000 years ago, people wore fabric clothing. Knitting was the first fabric manufacturing process, going back to 6500 BC, and it is still used in today’s materials. Natural fibres derived from both plant and animal sources are the earliest material used for clothing.