I’ve got to be balanced in this “better than the ‘good old days’” posting. My mother and my wife disagree. My mother says clothing is better than in the good old days. My wife says it is worse. Both are right. They are looking at different aspects of the thing. For reasons of accuracy and personal tranquility, I have a line to walk.
Let’s start with my mother’s position since the idea for this column came from her. Mom argues clothes are better because they are warmer. She paints a chilly picture of being out and about in the winter in her childhood. Coats were thin and did not have hoods. Long underwear was itchy and made for boys. Girls without older brothers for hand-me-downs had cold legs. Winter boots were rubber without insulation. Mitts were woolen, which were cold when the wind blew. People dressed for warmth by wearing both their pairs of pants and three layers of mittens. What’s more, the warmest clothes were woolen. In addition to the itch factor, there was the wet factor. Wool collected snow. When indoors, melting snow created damp clothing. Going outside again quickly resulted in icy clothing.
Mom argues clothing in the good old days was not so great.
My wife says clothes have become worse. Clothing, she argues, used to be better made. Clothing lasted longer. It was made out of material that could be mended. Clothing has become cheap and disposable. This cheapness (in both price and quality) creates negative environmental impacts associated with disposability.
So here I am. Caught between two strongly held opinions. What’s more, both are right. A glass can be both half empty and half full.
I’m going to add one more consideration. My wife correctly notes that clothing has become cheaper. One reason is because making both cloth and clothes has moved from richer countries to poorer ones. Many have argued that the cheapness today’s clothes create poverty and misery, which would not fit my definition of better.
There is a lot going on with this topic, so I’ll present it in two parts. I’ll start by looking – in rough chronological order – technological changes that have made clothing better. Next week I’ll touch on the social, environmental, and economic impacts.
I think the plusses of change outweigh the minuses. This is what “better” means. Not perfect. Not no negatives. Just better overall.
The Creation of Clothing and It’s Challenges
According to the Bible, the first humans were naked. This makes sense. Clothing had to be invented. In Genesis (3:6) Adam and Eve became aware of their nakedness. They created clothing by sewing fig leaves together. This story is unlikely. According to this story, the first impetus for clothing was modesty. Sewing is a fairly advanced technology. It requires both a needle and a thread. Fig leaves are not durable, so they would not hold together very long.
Once God discovered the first people had covered themselves, he was angry. Punishments – banishment, pain in childbirth, the necessity of toil – were imposed. However, God had mercy. Before sending Adam and Eve into the cold, unfriendly world he made them clothes from animal skins.
Now we are onto the real reason clothes were first invented. Protection from the elements. When it is cold, raining, snowing, windy – or even when the sun is beating down unmercifully – clothes protect furless creatures. The first person to drape an animal skin around themselves likely said, “this is better than in the good old days.”
Whatever the sequence of causality, allowing for modesty and protection from the elements are two important reasons for making and wearing clothes. Humans also seem to be hardwired with a desire to make themselves look better and to establish social status. Clothes fulfil social desires as well as physical needs.
We don’t know when people went from naked to clothed because clothing is made of material that tends to decompose. We rely on indirect clues. Archeologists have found hide-scraping tools that are several hundred thousand years old. Awls and needles date back about 30,000 years ago. Simple spinning devices and looms about 10,000 years old have been discovered. Each of these artifacts represents a major technological step in making clothing better.
To understand how clothes have gotten better, we’ll look at three aspects of a garment: the material it is made of, the way pieces are attached together, and the way it can be decorated.
Clothing material
Early humans clothed themselves by killing other animals to appropriate their skins. Man does not live by meat alone. We need warmth. Killing other animals fulfilled for both needs.
Animal skins have their good points as clothing. Most importantly, they are warm. When I first went to university, I found a NWMP police buffalo coat at a yard sale. It was great. I walked about 5 km to school every day and stayed warm no matter how cold or windy. On the downside, the coat weighed about 25 kilograms. Great for walking to school; not so great for walking around school. What’s more, furry things attract predators. Some Schweinhund stole the coat.
Scraping tools – usually made of bone – represented the first major technological advance for making clothes better. Cleaning made the hide less stinky and more supple. Tanning technique were then developed, probably beginning with leaving hides under a pile of rotting leaves. This was likely followed by soaking hides in a mixture of water and fire ash (liming) to make them more comfortable and durable. The Bible does not report whether the animal skin clothing God made for Adam and Eve as tanned, but we can hope that it was.
The next big improvement in clothing came with agriculture and herding. With civilization, in a word.
I learned in school that people began to herd animals and plant crops in order to fend off hunger. The Bible says this kind of toil was imposed as a punishment, which gets at something profound. Herding and farming was hard work. What’s more, many archeologists and anthropologists now argue that members of hunting and gathering societies ate pretty well – indeed, better than after toiling to grow their food.
Fashion rather than hunger is another explanation for the emergence of herding and agriculture. About 10,000 years ago, concurrent with the emergence of agriculture, people in Egypt and Mesopotamia began to grow flax. This is still used to make linen. A few thousand years later, some came shepherds. Selective breeding made sheep more suitable for producing fiber than supper. Both flax and wool fibers were suitable for spinning thread which, in turn, could be woven, knitted, or felted into cloth. You’ll recall that the first spinning and weaving devices date also back about 10,000 years.
As agriculture emerged spontaneously in different parts of the world. In very location, so too did the production of fibers suitable for turning into cloth. In the Indian sub-continent, cotton became a thing. In China, silk. In Japan, hemp. In South and Central America, Alpacas and Llamas. You get the idea. Wherever agriculture or herding emerged, it was accompanied (caused by?) the production of fiber suitable for clothing.
Kinds of cloth were regionally specific because of the type of available fiber and climactic conditions. In cold damp climates, nothing beat wool. For hot places, cotton was much better and silk was best. Inter-continental trade in cloth was restricted to luxury items for the very rich.
A huge improvement in clothing material came with the development of wind-powered ships capable of trans-oceanic travel. Trade expanded fabric options. For example, In the 1600 and 1700s, cotton from India became popular in Europe.
Patterns of agriculture also changed as the fiber producing plants and animals were moved around. Cotton production spread from India to Egypt and the Mississippi Valley. Sheep were shipped from England to Australia and New Zealand.
The spread of silk production is especially interesting. Silk production originated in China. Both the silk worms and the knowledge turn their cocoons into cloth was a tightly-guarded state secret. Legend has it that Japanese exchange students committed industrial espionage about 300 CE. Five centuries later Byzantine traders hid silk worms and mulberry cuttings in bamboo to establish silk production in Italy.
Until about a century ago, fashion was limited to the fibers produced by plants and animals. Improvements in material came diversification of supply of these ancient fibers.
Synthetic fabrics began to emerge in 1889 when a French industrialist named Hilaire de Chardonnet accidently discovered that fiber could be made from nitrocellulose. He called it Chardonnet silk. It did not become commercially viable since the resulting cloth was extremely flammable. People wanted clothes that kept them warm, but not that warm.
The first commercially successful new material produced by the chemical, rather than the agricultural, sector came in 1905 with Rayon. This was not a truly “synthetic” cloth since it was made wood. A few years later, spin-off techniques made it possible to turn plants and animals that had been dead for millions of years into cloth.
British chemists patented polyester in 1924 but did not get it to market until 1941. In the United States, chemists at DuPont patented nylon in 1931 and got it to market in 1935. It was original used in women’s stockings, but military discovered it made great parachutes. Other synthetic fabrics followed, including Acrylic in 1950 and Spandex in 1959.
Whether by themselves or blended with fibers from traditional animal or plant sources, synthetic fibers have made clothing much better. On their own, wool itched and cotton shrunk. A bit of blending with synthetic fibers results in clothes that do not shrink, wrinkle or itch. Clothing can stretch to fit body shape or allow for strenuous physical activity. Cloth can be designed for warmth or to wick sweat away from the skin. Some fabrics last longer than any did in the past.
In short, better material helps make clothing that is better than in the good old days.
Joining cloth together
“Simple clothing” consists of one piece of hide, fur, or cloth draped or tied around body. Simple clothing was a vast improvement over no clothing, but had its limitations. It was tough to keep in place and was not particularly windproof. We still see examples of simple clothing today: the dhoti, the sari, the kilt, and the sarong.
But most people wanted something better. They wanted clothing that fit. Something that stayed on the body and kept out the wind. Something that could be styled into a fashion statement. Something called “complex clothing”. This desire began to be expressed a long time ago. The first needles and awls date back about 30,000 years. This implies complex clothing goes back that far. Artwork from 5,000 years ago shows people wearing complex clothing.
The relationship between simple clothing and complex clothing could be, well, complex. Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, was said to favor a simple garment known as a toga. This was a semi-circular piece of cloth draped around his body. It was hard to put on properly and was uncomfortable. It restricted movement. These shortcomings ensured the toga remained a fashion statement for the rich and for ceremonial occasions. For day-to-day use, most Romans favored the tunic, which was a complex garment consisting of two pieces of rectangular cloth sewn at the top (except for opening for the neck) and sides (except for arm holes).
People usually preferred complex clothing. That is why needles are one of the most common finds at archeological digs. For thousands of years, pieces of fabric were together by hand sewing. Improvements came the needles – metal was much better than stone or bone – but the act of sewing remained slow and laborious.
A huge improvement in sewing came with the invention of the mechanical sewing machine.
By the early 1800s the sewing machine’s time had come. Inventors in Britain, France, and the United States produced early sewing machines more or less simultaneously and independently.
In 1830 a tailor named Berthélemy Thimonnier was the first to market with a commercially viable sewing machine. Thimonnier quickly won a huge contract to supply uniforms to the French army but suffered a major setback when a mob of angry tailors burned down his factory. Thimonnier was inside.
In addition to mobs, an impediment to using machines to improve sewing was lawyers. Early sewing machine producers became emmeshed in a quagmire of patent infringement lawsuits. In the United States in 1851, Isaac Singer came up with a sewing machine powered by foot treadle. He found both consumer demand and lawsuits from other inventors. Singer was a legal innovator as well as a mechanical one. In 1856, he created the world’s first patent pool to allow everyone with a relevant patent to share profits. With this, sewing quickly became a machine process. In 1853, Singer sold 810 sewing machines. Two decades later, he sold 232,444. Mahatma Gandhi called the Singer Sewing Machine “one of the most useful things ever invented”. Machine sewed clothes were better than hand sewed ones.
The invention of the sewing machine was the most important innovation for making complex clothing since the invention of the needle some 30,000 years earlier. Pieces of cloth could be attached quickly, cheaply and durably. Improvements since 1856 have been incremental.
There was another challenging problem with complex clothing. It could be hard to get into fitting garments and difficult to get out of them. The solution was fasteners that could be done and undone.
The first temporary fastening technology was likely lacing attaching two pieces of the garment together in a way that could be tied or untied.
About 4,000 years ago, people invented clasps and pins. These quickly became decorative as well as functional when the larger end became a button. Buttons did not become a functional fastener until the 1200s when some unknown genius invented the button hole. I’m not going to bother explaining how this works since I think you already know. Anyways – with the invention of the hole, buttons became the dominant temporary fastening technology for the next 7 or 8 hundred years. Improvement came incrementally, as bone, shell, pearl, and wood buttons were joined by ones made from fabric, ceramic, metal, glass, and plastic.
Buttons are great, but there are limitations. They can fall off the garment. They snag on things. Lots of buttons can be time consuming to do up. They can be in locations can be awkward to reach. If you have a belly the size of mine, a button-up fly really sucks. A certain amount of finger dexterity is needed, so buttons don’t work for the very young and the very old. But still, in the 1200s the combination of buttons and holes made clothing a lot better than it had been in the good old days.
In 1885, Heribert Bauer invented a new kind of button. The snap button. A “male” and a “female” button could be pressed together. The snap button did not snag and was easier to do up. More importantly, it was much quicker to undo. It became popular in garments worn by people who might be in a hurry to get out of them – ranging from paratroopers to prostitutes.
The next big improvement in temporary fasteners came with the zipper. In 1893, Whitcomb L. Judson exhibited a “shoe fastening” device at the Chicago World Fair. He formed the Universal Fastener Company. It did not take off. Judson’s early zipper only had four teeth per inch, which meant it was hard to zip up and easy to come unzipped. What is more, Judson saw his device as a fastener for shoes rather than clothing.
In 1917, Gideon Sundbäck increased the number of teeth to 10 per inch and added a lock-in system attached to the last tooth. Sunback was also focused on shoes rather than clothing.
1923 was a breakthrough year for the new fastening system. B.F. Goodrich began mass production and named the fastening system the “Zipper”. In addition to shoes, the zipper was used on tobacco pouches. In 1925, the breakthrough to clothing came with the zipper’s use on leather coats. The zipper’s use was still confined to leather products since these were ill-suited for buttons.
In the early 1930s, the zipper spread to cloth. Children’s clothing came first. Marketers explained that the new fastener allowed small children to dress themselves. Mothers rejoiced and sales boomed. In 1937, the zipper spread to adult fashions. It started with the fly on men’s pants which had to be opened and closed several times per day. The superiority of the zipper over buttons was incontestable.
Then came Velcro. A Swiss mining engineer named George de Mestral was picking burrs off his socks and out of his dog’s hair when he had an eureka moment. He patented Velcro in 1955. It did not catch on until used by the American space program for doing up astronaut’s suits. Good enough for spacesuits, good enough for children’s shoes.
Since then, improvement in fasteners has focused on making existing technology better. As a result, male teachers are now less likely to hear snickering students saying things like, “I thought you were crazy but I see your nuts” or “you are flying low”.
Fasteners are better than in the good old days.
Decorating clothes
Almost as soon as clothes were invented, so too was fashion and style. People wanted to look nice while staying warm. This post has gone on way too long, so I’ll just touch on one aspect of style: color.
Making clothing colorful is as old as making cloth. For millennia, dyes were made by extracting color from living plants or animals. For example, early purple dye came from the Murex snail found off the coast of Lebanon. It produced a dye that got brighter when exposed to light and water. As a result, “Tyrian Purple” became associated with wealth, power, and immortality. It was also extremely expensive to make. 12,000 snails were needed to make enough dye for one garment. Wearing purple became the prerogative of kings and emperors.
Let’s look at the production of two cheaper colors: blue and red. By the 1700s, these colors became cheap enough to be used in military uniforms. This deadly fashion statement made it easier to know who to kill.
France got blue because it had colonized Dominica (now Haiti). The mountains on this island were ideally suited for growing Indigofera tinctora – a legume with bright blue leaves. The leaves produced a blue dye. Slave labor kept production costs low so that tens of thousands of soldier’s pants could be dyed the right shade of blue to die in.
English soldiers got red coats by accident and piracy.
When the Spanish conquered and looted South and Central America, they found the locals wearing red fabrics. The source of the dye was the cochineal – a small insect that lived on cactuses. People could sweep off the cochineal off the plants. Dried and crushed insects gave Spain a European monopoly on red dye. Spaniards kept the source of the dye a closely guarded secret.
In 1597, the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh were out pirating. They captured three Spanish ships carrying 27 tons of red cochineal dye. This was a lot of dye. There was still lots in warehouses in 1645. Parliament created the New Model Army for its war with King Charles. Thus, the “Redcoat” was born. After Britain reached India, they were introduced to the Rubia tinctorum – a shrub whose roots produced a red dye that was cheaper but more muted than cochineal dye. Much of fashion is about status markers, so by the mid-1700s English officers got bright cochineal dyed coats while the enlisted men got coats with muted plant-based dyes. This distinction was handy for American sharpshooters during the revolutionary war. Brighter dyes made for a greater likelihood of dying.
Dyes were made from the extracts of plants or animals until just over a century and a half ago. There were problems. The plants and animals often thrived only in ecological niches. Huge amounts of crop had to be crushed to get small amounts of dye. Color palates were limited. Washing clothes washed out most dyes making for fading and color transfer. Sunlight also caused fading.
Dyes began to get a lot better in 1856 because of serendipity. A chemistry professor named August Wilhelm von Hoffman assigned an 18-year-old student named William Henry Perkin a project to synthase quinine – used to treat malaria. Perkins accidently produces a liquid with a purplish color called mauveine.
Remember how difficult and expensive it was to produce purple dye from snails? Remember how purple was the color of royalty? With Perkins accidental discovery, everyone could wear purple. With that, the chemical dye industry was born. I’m tired of writing and you are probably tired of reading, but let’s just note that a century and a half after Perkins screwed up his science project, we have clothing comes in every color of the light spectrum. They are made with dyes that don’t run in the wash or fade.
It’s better than dyeing in the good old days.
Next week we’ll look at how clothing became better by becoming cheaper and more egalitarian.
The unlikely fig leave as a source of clothing - great beginning!