The History of Clothing is an educational reference on what people wore, and why, across six eras and six world regions, from the earliest evidence for clothing to the present. Each article covers one era in one region. A few deep-dive pages, such as Chola dynasty clothing, cover topics too large for a survey article.
Who writes this site
The History of Clothing is written by Dan Schnau, who has a dabbling interest in history. Articles are drafted and fact-checked with the help of AI tools, and every claim is checked against the cited sources.
How articles are sourced
Every article ends with a Sources list. Numbered markers in the text, like this one1, point to the entry in that list that supports the claim. The site cites these kinds of sources, in this order of preference:
- Museum collection records and curators' publications: the object, its date, and where it was found.
- Archaeological reports and academic books and articles.
- University and research-center publications, such as the Textile Research Centre in Leiden.
- Reputable reference works and journalism, for recent history.
Wikipedia is used to find sources, not as a source. No article or timeline entry cites Wikipedia.
How articles are fact-checked
Every article and the timeline went through a full fact-check in October 2026. Each dated or specific claim was checked against a published source, and hundreds of corrections were made. A second sourcing pass then replaced most of the general-reference citations with museum and scholarly ones. Claims that could not be confirmed were rewritten to say only what the evidence supports, or removed.
Clothing history is full of confident myths, and several articles have a section on common misconceptions. Where scholars disagree, for example on whether a famous statue wears a true peplos, the article says so rather than picking a side.
Each article shows the date it was last updated.
How to read a citation
A number after a sentence, like 3, links to the third entry in that article's Sources list. A sentence with no number is general background shared by the sources listed, or is supported by the source cited nearby in the same paragraph.
Images
Images come from museum and library open-access collections and Wikimedia Commons, and only public-domain images and images under licenses that allow reuse, such as CC0, CC BY, and CC BY-SA, are used. Each image's caption credits the photographer, artist, publication, or holding institution where known, links to the source, and names the license.
Most clothing before about 1500 does not survive. For those periods the site shows the evidence historians themselves use: sculpture, tomb figurines, murals, manuscript paintings, and textile fragments. Captions say what each object is and where it is from.