Why Do We Wear Clothes?
Have you ever been threading one leg through a pair of pants in the morning and wondered\u2026why do we wear pants anyway? Or wondered why pockets in clothing designed for girls are sometimes smaller than the pockets in clothing designed for boys? In this episode we\u2019ll tackle your questions about clothes with fashion historian and writer Amber Butchart.
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\n\u201cWhy do we have to wear clothes?\u201d - Bhakti, 9, Australia
Many people think we started to wear clothes for practical reasons of warmth and protection.
\n\n\u201cWe don\u2019t have fur like other animals, so when modern humans started moving into colder parts of the world, we needed to protect ourselves somehow if it\u2019s cold and snowy. This is one answer, that we wear clothes for protection,\u201d said Amber Butchart. Butchart is a dress historian, author and broadcaster. She studies how the clothes we wear are connected to where we live and what kind of culture we grow up in, and what time period we\u2019re growing up and living in.
\n\nButchart says, while the protection theory explains why we have to wear something\u2014to cover our skin from the elements, there are a lot of other answers that help explain the style of clothes we wear, or don\u2019t wear. These have to do with culture and society, and ideas about modesty as well. In this case modesty means what\u2019s considered proper, broadly accepted as not being too wild or \u201cout there.\u201d A lot of how we dress comes down to what is considered appropriate in our current culture.
\n\n\u201cThe idea is that these cultural codes built up across millennia and centuries and centuries, ideas that parts of our body should be covered up,\u201d Butchart explained. \u201cWe have these social ideas to do with what parts of the body should and shouldn\u2019t be on display, but we also have that combined with this need, especially in colder parts of the world, for protection from the elements.\u201d
\n\nBut when it comes to fashion, what you wear communicates something about you to the outside world, and clothing has gone through many changes throughout history. Listen to the episode to learn more!
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