Glossary

A fabric called 'attabi took its name from the al-'Attabi district of Baghdad, and it later gave English the word "tabby" for plain weave.

The turban, or 'imama, was of pre-Islamic origin and was already widespread in the ancient Near East.

In Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), Mobutu Sese Seko's authenticité campaign banned Western suits and ties from 1972 in favor of the abacost (from à bas le costume, "down with the suit"), a tieless suit that closely resembled the Mao suit.

Women in the Gulf wore the abaya, a flowing black over-garment, which became a canvas for increasingly elaborate embellishment — lace, embroidery, rhinestones, and even experiments with color — and for designer labels.

The finest textiles, called cumbi, were made by specialist weavers, including male cumbicamayoc ("keepers of the fine cloth") and acllas (chosen women) who lived in cloistered communities and wove fine cloth for the state.

This laid the foundations for adire cloth: the name was applied to resist-patterned indigo cloth around the turn of the twentieth century, and the hand-painted starch-paste method (adire eleko) dates from about 1910, when smooth imported shirting gave dyers a new surface.

Artists associated with the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements favored loose, flowing aesthetic dress inspired by medieval styles.

Ankara (also known as African wax print) — brightly colored cotton fabric with bold, graphic patterns — became the most recognizable textile of the continent, despite its complex origins in Dutch imitations of Indonesian batik.

The rise of Afrofuturism in popular culture — most visibly in Ruth E. Carter's costumes for Black Panther (2018), which drew on the dress of peoples such as the Dogon, Tuareg, and Ndebele — brought African-inspired design to a vast global audience.

Bedouin men of Arabia and the Syrian desert wore a coarse cotton shirt under a woollen mantle, the abba, with a keffiyeh headcloth held in place by a camel-hair cord, the agal.

In Mesoamerica, agave fibers (known as ixtle) and cotton, which Mesoamericans domesticated independently (remains from the Tehuacán Valley date to roughly 5,500–4,300 years ago), were both woven into textiles in prehistoric times.

The agbada — a flowing, wide-sleeved robe, called riga in Hausa — is today pan-Nigerian men's national dress, while wax-print cloth, also called kitenge, enjoyed a revival from the mid-2000s and new kanga designs keep coming: Zanzibar's largest kanga dealership sends up to 30 a month to its factory in Mumbai.

The brilliantly colored kente cloth of the Akan and Ewe peoples of present-day Ghana and Togo, woven on narrow strip looms and assembled into larger garments, grew out of this broader strip-weaving tradition, but it belongs to a later period: Asante tradition places its beginnings in the 17th century, and in 1721 the Asantehene, who had adopted kente as a royal cloth, created a chiefly stool for its weavers at Bonwire.

Women wore a large wrap dress, the aksu, held at the waist by a sash called a chumpi, with a shoulder mantle, the lliclla, on top.

In the Andes, weavers trained in Inca traditions went on producing fine cumbi tapestry cloth after the conquest, weaving imported Chinese silk and Spanish silver threads with Inca techniques and motifs, alongside the traditional camelid fibers, from alpaca to the prized vicuna.

In the Andes, indigenous communities also domesticated camelids — llamas and alpacas, the alpaca some 6,000–7,000 years ago — and their soft wool became a prized textile fiber alongside cotton.

Specialist artisans called amanteca, organized in guilds, created dazzling cloaks, headdresses, shields, and fans using feathers from birds such as the quetzal, macaw, cotinga, and roseate spoonbill.

Featherwork (amantecayotl, "the art of feather working") was a prestige art whose makers worked for the elite of the leading Aztec cities.

American sportswear — pioneered by designers like Claire McCardell and Bonnie Cashin, and carried forward by Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren — rejected the rigid formality of European couture in favor of separates, mix-and-match pieces, and fabrics that allowed freedom of movement.

The anarkali suit experienced a major revival, and designers' experiments with drape, such as Tahiliani's corseted saris, kept the sari fashionable for modern wearers.

The Greeks called the Persian trousers anaxyrides, remarked on their bright colors, and even mocked them.

Courtiers might wear an angarkha (a chest-wrapping coat) in its place, and tie a patka (a wide sash) at the waist.

An angavastram, or upper cloth, could also be worn; in bronzes of Shiva as Nataraja the upper garment is tied around the stomach and streams out in folds as he dances.

A text from Tokamachi in the Japan Tourism Agency's database states that weaving in Japan began in the early Jomon period (7,200 to 5,400 years ago) with a simple cloth of woven ramie fibers, and that the kind produced in Tokamachi was called Echigo angin.

Senators wore tunics with a broad purple stripe, the latus clavus, while men of the equestrian order wore a narrow stripe, the angustus clavus.

After synthetic aniline dyes were invented in the mid-19th century, the intensity of color in Bolivian and other Indigenous dress increased dramatically, and since chemical dyes reached the Andes in the late 19th century, the practice of natural dyeing has declined sharply.

The earliest inhabitants of the Americas most likely entered from northeast Asia across the Beringia land bridge, exposed when Ice Age glaciers lowered sea levels, and living in that cold north required tailored clothing made from animal hides and furs.

Organic materials like these seldom survive, so how much clothing people in the warm tropical regions south of the Sahara wore, and whether animal skins and plant materials served mainly for protection, warmth, or ceremony, is largely unknown.

Ankara (also known as African wax print) — brightly colored cotton fabric with bold, graphic patterns — became the most recognizable textile of the continent, despite its complex origins in Dutch imitations of Indonesian batik.

Sculptures from Bharhut and Mathura depict men and women in finely draped unstitched garments: the antariya (lower garment), uttariya (upper drape), and a sash at the waist.

Belgian designers of the Antwerp Six, including Dries Van Noten and Ann Demeulemeester, broke through at a London trade fair in 1986 and put Belgium, a country that had barely registered on the fashion map, firmly on it.

Women wore ao jackets or blouses over long, pleated qun skirts.

The upper portion folded outward and downward, creating the distinctive overfold called an apoptygma.

Yoruba men wove aso oke cloth in narrow strips, some nineteenth-century examples enlivened with imported magenta silk.

The most common grade, awasca, was used for daily wear and for the army, and it was rarely decorated.

Archaeological finds of bone awls and, by about 26,000 years ago, eyed bone needles demonstrate that early Europeans were not simply draping skins over their bodies but actively tailoring them into fitted garments.

Among the Aztec (Mexica), clothing was regulated by sumptuary laws that restricted cotton clothing to the nobility, while capes could also be made of humbler maguey (agave) fiber.

The Hausa weavers and embroiderers of what is now northern Nigeria became known for the riga, a voluminous embroidered gown worn by men as a status garment, whose large form is called babban riga ("big gown"); an example in Cleveland, dated to the late 1800s or by 1910, is lined at the hem with silk imported across the Sahara.

Maya weavers used the backstrap loom, a portable device anchored at one end to a post or tree and at the other to a strap around the weaver's waist.

During the Three Kingdoms period (57 BCE–668 CE), the kingdoms of Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla shared broadly similar dress customs, though regional variations are evident in surviving art and artifacts.

A separate museum resource describes the baby's collarless baenaetjeogori and the clothing worn for the first birthday, or dol.

In the New Kingdom a new garment joined the wardrobe: the bag tunic (Egyptian mss), a wide rectangle of cloth folded at the shoulders, with a neck hole cut through the fold and the sides seamed below the arms.

In Brazil, Afro-Brazilian women in Bahia wore shoulder shawls and headwraps reminiscent of the West African gèlè, and the pano da costa cloth they wore was a potent sign of West African heritage and prestige; the baiana dress of their descendants carries that long legacy of expression through dress.

Women wore the short jeogori jacket paired with the voluminous chima skirt, while men wore the jeogori with baji trousers.

Banarasi silk weavers in Varanasi continued weaving silks patterned in gold and silver zari thread — a surviving 19th-century sari blouse of rose silk carries Varanasi-woven zari motifs — adapting designs to changing tastes while drawing on techniques built up over centuries.

They identified caps or snoods, belts, skirts, bandeaux (bands across the chest), bracelets, and necklaces, all made from plant fibers.

Rajput courts in western India developed their own brilliant aesthetic, favoring vivid bandhani (tie-dye) cloth, flared angarkha robes, and, for women, wide skirts called ghaghra.

Women covered their hair with a veil and a wimple, a cloth wrapped around the neck and chin, or with a barbette chin band and linen fillet band around the head.

In the Buganda kingdom, bark cloth was made in workshops in almost every village, though its production slowed after Arab caravan traders brought cotton cloth in the nineteenth century, while Yoruba towns such as Abeokuta remained centers of indigo dyeing.

University College London's Digital Egypt site notes that more dramatic decoration survives in the bead-net dresses of Old Kingdom dancing girls.

The Iltalala age-set, warriors from 1881 to 1905, were the first to wear beads in larger numbers, and the elaborate beadwork now associated with the Maasai, which signals clan and stage of life, flowered in the twentieth century.

His clothing was a complex, layered ensemble: a hide coat stitched from goat and sheep skins, leggings made of goat hide, a sheepskin loincloth, a bearskin cap, and leather shoes laced with cowhide and stuffed with grass for insulation.

The beizi, a long robe whose center-front opening was edged with a band, was worn by both men and women.

The earliest inhabitants of the Americas most likely entered from northeast Asia across the Beringia land bridge, exposed when Ice Age glaciers lowered sea levels, and living in that cold north required tailored clothing made from animal hides and furs.

In the Ryukyu Kingdom, now Okinawa, brightly colored stencil-dyed bingata cloth was worn by the royal court and nobility

| Saudi Arabia | Thobe; ghutra or shemagh with the egal; bisht for officials and for others on formal occasions | Abaya, enforced in public by the religious police until they lost that power in 2016 |

On the Great Plains, bison hides provided robes and moccasins, processed through laborious cycles of scraping, braining, and smoking to produce soft, durable robes and hides (soft-tanned deerskin is known as buckskin).

In the twelfth century, wealthy men and women adopted the bliaut, a long gown.

Block printing — in which carved wooden blocks were used to stamp patterns onto cloth — and mordant dyeing — in which fabrics were treated with chemical fixatives before being dipped in dye baths to produce vibrant, colorfast hues — allowed South Asian artisans to produce richly colored cotton textiles for export, not only as luxuries but for everyday use as far away as Egypt.

Loose trousers worn under a short skirt, promoted by the American reformer Amelia Bloomer and dubbed bloomers, caused a sensation in Britain in the 1850s.

The trousers were called "waist overalls"; Levi Strauss & Co. dates its adoption of the name blue jeans to 1960.

Genetic studies of body lice — which require clothing to survive — suggest regular clothing use by modern humans in Africa at least 83,000 and possibly as early as 170,000 years ago.

Mongol women of rank wore the boghtaq, a tall headdress of felt and willow covered with ornaments.

Traditional techniques also held their ground: adire (Yoruba indigo dyeing) is still made in Abeokuta, and bogolan (Malian mud cloth), which the Malian designer Chris Seydou took to Paris runways, remains a source of inspiration for designers worldwide.

In the Río de la Plata region, the gaucho wore the chiripá, a rectangular cloth passed between the legs like a diaper and held by a belt called a tirador, sometimes over white lace-fringed leggings; in the late 19th century it gave way to baggy imported bombachas trousers.

Stone hide-working tools, notably scrapers for preparing skins, go back far into the Pleistocene across Eurasia, and bone awls, the hide-piercing tools that preceded the eyed needle, are documented in the region from about 40,000 years ago at Yafteh Cave in Iran and 34,000 years ago at Hayonim Cave in Israel.

In the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, survival depended on expertly tailored garments: caribou hide parkas, fur-lined boots, and mittens stitched with sinew thread using bone needles.

Across the West African savanna, elite men wore voluminous status robes, called riga in Hausa, agbada in Yoruba and boubou in French, often of indigo-dyed strip-woven cotton.

The Celts of Gaul wore bracae, trousers so characteristic that the Romans called part of southern Gaul Gallia Bracata, "trousered Gaul."

Linen braies, loose underdrawers held up at the waist with a drawstring

Beyond coral, Benin's weavers produced cotton cloth that Portuguese merchants bought by the thousand, while the kingdom's famous brass plaques depict the oba or war chiefs with attendants in ceremonial attire — coral crowns and collars, leopard-face tunics, and leopard-tooth necklaces — a visual language of rank and power.

Nobles wore the broad collar, a wide neck piece, and the upper classes favored jewelry made of gold.

But the realities of frontier life demanded practical adaptations, and in the West the trappers of the fur trade wore buckskin clothing.

The V&A gives the surcoat's name as bufu, meaning "robe with a patch".

Bark cloth (made by beating the inner bark of certain trees into a supple fabric) remained an important textile as well, and across the Great Lakes region, barkcloth from the Kingdom of Buganda was held in high esteem for centuries.

Freeborn boys wore a bulla, a protective amulet hung around the neck, until they came of age.

In North Africa, men wore the burnous (a hooded cloak), and women wrapped themselves in the haik, a draped wrapping cloth.

Veiling practices ranged from the light head covering worn in daily life to the large outdoor wrap and separate face veil, such as the burqu', worn by many urban women in public.

Okumura describes very wide, loose şalvar tied at the waist, then a long-sleeved, cream-colored shirt of bürümcük, a raw silk crepe.

The V&A distinguishes boning from the busk, a stiffening element placed down the center front.

Women's dress relied on the farthingale, a hooped underskirt that created a wide, conical shape, while bodices were stiffened with busks — rigid inserts of wood, whalebone, or bone that shaped and reinforced the front of the bodice.

The crinoline gave way in the 1870s to the bustle, a padded structure that projected fabric dramatically behind the wearer, shifting visual emphasis to the back of the dress.

In Chinese the badge is called buzi.

Fiber garments were also worn: the Met's cache-sexe, a fiber modesty skirt thought to have been worn low on the hips, dates to the twelfth century and was made of three layers of plaited and twined cord, probably from the inner bark of the baobab tree.

Citizens wore closed leather shoes called calcei with the toga, and lighter sandals indoors.

India had long been one of the world's great textile exporters, renowned for its muslin, chintz, and calico fabrics.

Roman soldiers wore a woolen tunic, a sagum (a woolen military cloak), and caligae, hobnailed military sandal-boots whose tracks archaeologists can still identify.

The Paracas culture (c. 800 BCE–200 CE) is particularly renowned for its burial mantles: large cloths of cotton and camelid fiber — the wool of llamas and alpacas — embroidered in vivid colors with images of supernatural beings, animals, and human figures.

In the Andes, indigenous communities also domesticated camelids — llamas and alpacas, the alpaca some 6,000–7,000 years ago — and their soft wool became a prized textile fiber alongside cotton.

The long-sleeved overgarment often called a candys also presents a problem: Shahbazi notes continuing debate about the term and its identification.

Métis and French settlers cut blankets into the capote, a wrap-style coat that was especially popular with trappers because its wrap style made it easy to move and hunt in; it was in such demand that in 1706 the Hudson's Bay Company hired a tailor to make blankets into these coats.

In the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, survival depended on expertly tailored garments: caribou hide parkas, fur-lined boots, and mittens stitched with sinew thread using bone needles.

At Çatalhöyük, the remarkable Neolithic settlement in central Anatolia whose main mound was occupied from roughly 7400 to 6200 BCE, archaeologists have found carbonized fragments of plain-woven fabric, many of them used to wrap the dead.

Court fabrics included kemha (a heavy brocade), seraser (cloth of gold and silver), and çatma (cut velvet).

The carved railings at Bharhut, from the second century BCE and among the earliest narrative sculptures in South Asia, show dhotis, chaddars (lengths of cloth draped around the shoulders or across the body), and lengths of cloth wrapped around the hair in various styles.

In Persia, women wore the chador outdoors over richly decorated tunics and wide trousers or, from the middle of the century, short layered skirts, often made of boldly patterned or embroidered cloth.

Around 1600, women's headwear was the chahar-qad, a square cloth placed on the crown of the head and fastened with a thin silk ribbon; after 1625, paintings show a loose veil held by a small tiara or a silk ribbon.

Ikat weavers around Chirala in southern India made lungis and turbans with bold geometric motifs, a craft that later moved to Pochampally, where it flourished from the mid-twentieth century; in western Odisha, Sambalpuri ikat favored continuous floral patterns in cotton, while Chanderi in central India wove fine, transparent, lightweight saris of silk and cotton.

The Manchu theory. The Manchus wore long, loose robes called changpao, with slits down the sides that were convenient for riding and archery.

By the end of the dynasty, men commonly wore a long robe, the changshan, with a short jacket called a magua, a name meaning riding jacket.

Recurring elements include makara kundala earrings shaped as sea-creature heads; the channavira, a jewelled cross-belt over the chest, with a version for goddesses that is common in early Chola bronzes; the udarabandha band around the stomach; the katisutra or mekhala girdle worn over the drape, on male figures usually fastened with a lion-head clasp; keyura and other armlets on the upper arm; bangles; and anklets.

The chaperon, originally a simple hood, evolved into an elaborate hat with a long tail called a liripipe

Cowboys wore leather chaps, which descended from the chaparreras of Mexican vaqueros, along with riding boots and broad-brimmed hats such as John B. Stetson's "Boss of the Plains," introduced in 1865; the cowboy hat, the lasso, and pointed boots all trace back to the vaquero, and these practical garments became enduring symbols of the American West.

The charkha (spinning wheel) became an emblem of Indian nationhood, and wearing khadi signaled solidarity with the independence cause.

Mexican charros wore a distinctive horseman's outfit, a short jacket and fitted trousers with silver buttons under a wide-brimmed sombrero; it began as practical ranch workwear, was taken up by the upper classes after Emperor Maximilian adopted the dress of Mexican landowners in the 1860s, and became an enduring national icon.

The critical red came from chay root, and blue from indigo; yellow, possibly from turmeric, was applied directly to the cloth.

Next to the skin was a linen chemise or smock.

The qipao, also called the cheongsam, is a Chinese women's dress with a stand-up collar, a side closure, and side slits.

On the Great Plains, nations such as the Lakota and Cheyenne decorated clothing with porcupine quillwork and mineral-pigment designs, and after contact with glass beads made in Europe and obtained through trade; on a heavily beaded Cheyenne girl's dress, the beads added prestige and honor as well as weight.

Embroidery traditions included zardozi (gold wire embroidery) and chikankari (white-on-white embroidery, which may have begun in the Mughal period and later centered on Lucknow).

Women wore the short jeogori jacket paired with the voluminous chima skirt, while men wore the jeogori with baji trousers.

The subsequent Chimú kingdom continued this legacy, producing openwork gauze weaves, slit tapestry, and elaborately painted fabrics along Peru's northern coast.

In Mexico, the china poblana ensemble — a richly embroidered blouse with a sequined skirt — became a national symbol during the mid-century Wars of the Reform, a costume distinct from both Indigenous and European upper-class dress (its popular attribution to the 17th-century Puebla figure Catarina de San Juan has little historical basis, since the modern dress was invented in the 19th century).

Chinese silk embroidery flourished, above all in Suzhou, which earned the title City of Embroidery under the Qing; its fine split-silk needlework was used for clothing and household furnishings

India had long been one of the world's great textile exporters, renowned for its muslin, chintz, and calico fabrics.

The chiton, a tunic-like garment pinned or sewn at the shoulders, was the foundation of both male and female dress.

The chlamys, a short cloak pinned at the right shoulder, was worn by horsemen, soldiers, travelers, and young men in military training

The Chola dynasty (9th–13th century) presided over a flourishing of textile arts in southern India.

The unstitched cloth runs anywhere from about four to nine yards long and today is typically worn with a choli blouse.

An edict of 1871 encouraged samurai to cut off the chonmage topknot, and short Western haircuts became increasingly popular.

Smith also describes a ritual drape, the cinctus Gabinus, in which part of the toga was tied around the body as a belt while another part covered the head; persons offering sacrifices wore it, and its name points to an Etruscan origin.

Rural laborers kept to older, practical garments: in England, farmworkers had worn the loose linen or cotton smock-frock for centuries, and in the industrial towns of the north cheap, durable wooden-soled clogs were the everyday footwear of mill workers.

Humans carry one louse species in two forms: head lice, which live in the hair, and clothing lice (also called body lice), which live in clothes.

Their reds came mostly from Relbunium, a plant of the madder family; insect-derived cochineal, which produced brilliant reds and later became the dominant Andean red dye, has been detected in Nazca cloth only rarely.

Complex clothing is fitted to the body and may be worn in layers, which traps warm air far more effectively.

The Oba (king) wore regalia of coral beads — crowns, high collars, necklaces, beaded shirts, and aprons.

The oldest direct evidence of cordage is a fragment of three-ply cord made from inner bark fibers, found stuck to a Neanderthal stone tool at the Abri du Maras in southern France and dated to between 41,000 and 52,000 years ago.

The Egtved Girl, buried around 1370 BCE, wore a short woolen blouse and a knee-length corded skirt made of hanging wool strings, with a bronze belt disc at her waist.

In Paris, workers were recognized by the blouse, a long, often blue overgarment, while many carpenters preferred a jacket and trousers of corduroy.

Throughout these changes, the corset remained a constant foundation garment, worn by women of all classes and shaping the torso into the fashionable ideal.

The thirteenth century returned to a looser, softly draped silhouette: a cote (tunic or gown) worn under a surcote, an overgarment.

The cotehardie, a close-fitting garment that for men ended at the hips, replaced the loose cote and surcote.

By about 4000 BCE, coastal peoples in present-day Peru were weaving cloth of cotton.

There, the earliest direct evidence — cotton seeds and small spindle whorls at Dia on the upper Niger — dates only to the last century of the first millennium CE, so whether cotton weaving began in this ancient period remains an open question.

After Prince Albert's death in 1861, Queen Victoria wore black for the rest of her life, and mourning dress became an elaborate system: widows wore matte black crape for a year, then moved through stages of half-mourning in gray and shades of purple, with jewelry of black Whitby jet.

Brummell, the leading figure of Regency fashion, rejected ornament in favor of perfect cut, spotless white linen, and an immaculately tied cravat.

Then came the revolutionary crinoline — a cage-like frame of steel hoops, patented in the 1850s, that allowed skirts to reach extraordinary widths by the late 1850s.

Below it, women wore the cueitl, a wide piece of cloth wrapped around the lower body and secured at the waist.

In the Andes, weavers trained in Inca traditions went on producing fine cumbi tapestry cloth after the conquest, weaving imported Chinese silk and Spanish silver threads with Inca techniques and motifs, alongside the traditional camelid fibers, from alpaca to the prized vicuna.

Designers like Duro Olowu (Nigerian-born, London-based), Lisa Folawiyo (Nigeria), and Ozwald Boateng (British, of Ghanaian descent) brought African aesthetics to international runways, while Lagos Fashion Week (founded 2011), Dakar Fashion Week (founded 2002), and South African Fashion Week (founded 1997) established the continent as a serious player in the global fashion calendar.

New garments appeared over the jacket and trousers, including the dallyeong, a round-necked robe.

The toga shrank into a ceremonial garment worn by officials, and long-sleeved tunics like the dalmatic became fashionable.

Damask (named for Damascus) and muslin (named for Mosul) entered European languages as testaments to the region's prestige.

Men who made a career of this kind of refinement were called dandies.

Its account identifies the groom's danlyeong robe and samo hat, and the bride's hwalot or wonsam, with ceremonial headwear such as a jokduri.

Produced in state-controlled workshops called dar al-tiraz, these textiles were given as robes of honor (khil'a) to officials and foreign dignitaries, making clothing a direct expression of caliphal power.

The dashiki — a colorful, loose-fitting garment of West African origin — crossed the Atlantic in the 1960s, when African diasporic communities in the United States adopted it as a symbol of Black pride and African heritage.

Japan led the way: Issey Miyake had shown in Paris since 1973, and in the early 1980s Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto astonished the Paris fashion world with deconstructed and asymmetrical garments that challenged Western conventions of beauty and fit.

In Mongolia, the deel is a long coat with a stand-up collar that fastens on the right.

In the woodlands of eastern North America, garments were made of tanned deerskin: before European contact, Ojibwe clothing was decorated with dyed porcupine quills or moose hair, shells, copper, bone, and animal teeth.

The establishment of the Delhi Sultanate around 1206 brought rulers from Central Asia, and with them the Persian language and the clothing traditions of the Islamic world, to northern India.

Reno tailor Jacob Davis had begun riveting the pockets of his work pants and soon made them of denim.

Cheap clothing depots selling affordable ready-made suits helped democratize fashion, and department stores such as Wanamaker's, which opened Philadelphia's first in 1876 and sent buyers to Europe for the latest novelties, brought fashionable ideals within reach of middle-class shoppers.

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries brought a flourishing of South Asian designer fashion.

A Shanghai qipao of about 1930 at the V&A is made of synthetic velvet and crepe with a devoré (burn-out) pattern and an Art Deco lace detail.

The famed Dhaka muslin, once so fine it was called "woven air," nearly vanished as weavers lost their livelihoods.

For men, the dhoti — an unstitched garment wrapped and tucked around the lower body — remained widely worn, as did the kurta (a long tunic) with pajama trousers, a combination still common today.

The men's thobe (or dishdasha) — a long robe — and the keffiyeh (or ghutra) head covering, held by an egal cord, remained standard dress; in Saudi Arabia they form the official national attire, in everyday and formal versions.

Under these outer garments the emperor and senior courtiers wore the divetesion (also spelled divitision), a long silk tunic with large sleeves, belted at the waist, which developed from the earlier dalmatic.

Cities like Timbuktu and Djenné grew into major markets on the trans-Saharan routes.

Late Jomon clay figurines, or dogu, frequently have detailed patterns etched on their arms and legs, which have led scholars to suggest that Jomon people may have elaborately tattooed themselves.

A separate museum resource describes the baby's collarless baenaetjeogori and the clothing worn for the first birthday, or dol.

The older Doric chiton was made of wool and fastened with pins at the shoulders, while the Ionic chiton, made of lighter linen, was wider and fastened with a row of small buttons or stitches along the arms, creating the appearance of sleeves.

This double ikat technique is highly sophisticated.

The doublet, a fitted padded jacket, was paired with trunk hose — short, puffed breeches stuffed with padding called bombast to achieve a rounded shape.

Court dress centered on the dragon robe, an elaborately embroidered silk garment featuring five-clawed dragons above waves and reserved for the imperial family; officials could be awarded similar robes with four-clawed python (mang) designs as a mark of favor.

Officials wore dragon robes under a surcoat bearing mandarin squares — embroidered badges indicating rank through specific bird or animal motifs.

Stone sculptures from Mohenjo-daro show men in draped garments — a long shawl drawn over the left shoulder — while terracotta figurines depict women wearing little more than a girdle or band about the loins beneath elaborate fan-shaped headdresses, indicating that clothing served decorative and possibly ritual functions alongside practical ones.

In West Africa, draped wrappers — rectangular lengths of cloth wound around the body — are among the earliest surviving garments: the Bandiagara cave cloths include wrappers or mantles alongside tailored tunics, and by the 17th century looms on the Bight of Benin were producing wrappers sewn from three or four breadths of cotton for trade along the coast.

Dubai Fashion Week (launched in 2023) and Riyadh Fashion Week (first held the same year) attracted international attention, while Lebanese-born designers such as Elie Saab and Reem Acra became fixtures of global red-carpet fashion.

Men wore a jeogori (short jacket) over baji (wide-legged trousers) with a long durumagi overcoat, topped by distinctive gat hats made of horsehair and bamboo.

The Egtved Girl, buried around 1370 BCE, wore a short woolen blouse and a knee-length corded skirt made of hanging wool strings, with a bronze belt disc at her waist.

In the early 1800s, the high-waisted Empire dress inspired by classical antiquity dominated, featuring a narrow columnar silhouette in lightweight muslin.

Beneath the kaftan, Ottoman men wore a gömlek (shirt), şalvar (wide trousers), and an entari (inner robe); the sultan crowned the ensemble with a turban of fine muslin wrapped around a tall cap, a headdress whose shape changed from reign to reign.

Ermine, with its distinctive black tail tips, remained the prerogative of royalty.

Maya men wore the ex (loincloth) and a mantle or pati tied around the shoulders, while women wore the huipil, a tunic-like garment woven in one or more panels and often decorated with brocaded or embroidered designs.

The exomis, a short tunic fastened over one shoulder only, left the working arm free and was associated with laborers and craftsmen

The eyed needle combined piercing and threading in one tool.

Women's dress relied on the farthingale, a hooped underskirt that created a wide, conical shape, while bodices were stiffened with busks — rigid inserts of wood, whalebone, or bone that shaped and reinforced the front of the bodice.

Fashion plates and magazines spread the latest styles, while paper sewing patterns let home dressmakers copy them

Spanish chain Zara, founded in 1975, and Swedish retailer H&M, founded in 1947, pioneered fast fashion — a term that appeared in The New York Times in 1989 in a report on Zara's arrival in New York — translating runway trends into affordable clothing with unprecedented speed.

Warriors who captured enemies in battle earned the right to increasingly prestigious costume, such as feathered warrior suits and jaguar uniforms, and insignia were made with featherwork — mosaics of tropical bird feathers painstakingly fixed to backings such as netting or agave paper.

In Istanbul, elite Ottoman women increasingly adopted Parisian fashion — including corsets and bodices cut in the European manner — while still wearing the ferace outdoor cloak and yashmak face veil in public; by the later decades of the century the yashmak had grown more transparent and the ferace was often worn open.

The spread of agriculture through the Fertile Crescent during the eighth and seventh millennia BCE brought with it the systematic cultivation of flax and the development of increasingly sophisticated spinning and weaving technologies.

Sultan Mahmud II's clothing reforms — first for his new army in the late 1820s, then for officials of every rank in 1829 — replaced the traditional turban with the fez — a brimless red felt cap.

Women covered their hair with a veil and a wimple, a cloth wrapped around the neck and chin, or with a barbette chin band and linen fillet band around the head.

Flax was one of the first domesticated crops, and north of the Alps its oldest traces come from the settlements of the first farmers, the Linearbandkeramik culture.

Han women were also subject to footbinding, the practice of tightly binding young girls' feet to create a small, lotus-like shape considered beautiful.

The Fort Rock sandals are made of shredded sagebrush bark, twined into a flat sole with a flap over the toes and tied around the ankle with a rope.

Early in the century, men still wore knee breeches or tight pantaloons, but by mid-century the frock coat worn with long trousers had become standard daytime dress.

Fullers washed and finished woolen cloth by treading it in vats of water mixed with urine, which was collected in pots set out along the streets.

In the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, survival depended on expertly tailored garments: caribou hide parkas, fur-lined boots, and mittens stitched with sinew thread using bone needles.

The long-sleeved furisode was worn by children and unmarried women on special occasions.

The earliest inhabitants of the Americas most likely entered from northeast Asia across the Beringia land bridge, exposed when Ice Age glaciers lowered sea levels, and living in that cold north required tailored clothing made from animal hides and furs.

English factory workers wore jackets and trousers of hard-wearing cotton fustian, so typical that working men were nicknamed "fustian jackets."

Officials wore a black cap, the futou, which began as a cloth wrapped round the head.

Egyptian feminists put aside their veils in the 1920s, and in the 1930s parliament made the galabiyya, the long gown of the fellahin (farmers), the uniform of state-run provincial schools.

Men wore a jeogori (short jacket) over baji (wide-legged trousers) with a long durumagi overcoat, topped by distinctive gat hats made of horsehair and bamboo.

In the Río de la Plata region, the gaucho wore the chiripá, a rectangular cloth passed between the legs like a diaper and held by a belt called a tirador, sometimes over white lace-fringed leggings; in the late 19th century it gave way to baggy imported bombachas trousers.

In its section on the cheongsam in Singapore from the 1920s to the 1940s, the National Museum of Singapore describes narrower, shorter sleeves and imported fabrics such as silk crepe, georgette, and chiffon, with geometric, floral, and Art Deco motifs.

Rajput courts in western India developed their own brilliant aesthetic, favoring vivid bandhani (tie-dye) cloth, flared angarkha robes, and, for women, wide skirts called ghaghra.

The rules known as ghiyar required Christians, Jews, and other non-Muslim subjects (dhimmis) to wear distinguishing marks.

Across the Atlantic, the American illustrator Charles Dana Gibson's Gibson Girl captured the same look for a sportier, more independent young woman, an ideal that lasted into the Edwardian era.

The Romantic period of the 1820s and 1830s was defined by gigot sleeves, also called leg-of-mutton sleeves, which ballooned at the shoulder and narrowed at the wrist.

During the Three Kingdoms period (57 BCE–668 CE), the kingdoms of Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla shared broadly similar dress customs, though regional variations are evident in surviving art and artifacts.

Goguryeo tomb paintings depict men and women wearing jeogori-like jackets paired with wide trousers or long skirts, with belted waists — an early form of what would eventually become the hanbok.

Hip-hop fashion, the invention of Black and Brown working-class youth — oversized silhouettes, gold chains, branded athletic wear, Timberland boots, and later the work of designers steeped in the culture, such as Pharrell Williams, Virgil Abloh, and Rihanna — became an influence to which twenty-first-century fashion, from luxury labels to everyday dress, owes a debt.

Beneath the kaftan, Ottoman men wore a gömlek (shirt), şalvar (wide trousers), and an entari (inner robe); the sultan crowned the ensemble with a turban of fine muslin wrapped around a tall cap, a headdress whose shape changed from reign to reign.

Garments were cut from a few large pieces, with extra width supplied by triangular gores set into the sides and skirt — a technique still used in the late medieval dresses from Herjolfsnes, where many narrow gores were a mark of fashion rather than of economy.

The jacket's front strings are called goreum.

Ornaments included ear spools, necklaces of shell beads, and the shell gorget, an ornament such as a carved shell disk hung on a cord around the neck.

In Korea, the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392) developed a distinctive dress tradition that balanced Chinese influence with indigenous style.

Fibers such as raffia palm, grass, and bast decay quickly, so how they were twisted into string or made into belts, skirts, or loincloths in this early period is largely lost.

A woven mat of alpine grass found with him was long described as a grass cloak for rain protection, though the museum that holds him now considers it more likely a mat or part of a backpack.

Further south, the civilization centered on Great Zimbabwe (built mainly between the 11th and 15th centuries) belonged to a region with its own cloth production.

The guayabera shirt, rooted in 19th-century Cuba and made largely in Mexico after the Cuban Revolution, became a formal shirt worn from Mexico to Miami; in the 1970s Mexican president Luis Echeverría wore it for government and business.

Chinese fashion experienced its own renaissance as designers like Guo Pei and Uma Wang gained global recognition, while a new generation of consumers embraced guochao, a movement celebrating Chinese heritage through contemporary design.

Three hooded gut-skin parkas from Nuulliit in northern Greenland, dated to the fourteenth century, show a cut with sleeve gussets and vertical gut-skin panels that Inuit used for at least 550 years.

In North Africa, men wore the burnous (a hooded cloak), and women wrapped themselves in the haik, a draped wrapping cloth.

Elaborate hairstyling was another field for adornment: in Mali, Fulani women still wear hairstyles that incorporate amber beads, glass beads, and silver coins.

Samurai men wore hakama, wide pleated trousers or divided skirts, over the kimono; for formal occasions they wore the kamishimo, an ensemble of hakama and a matching sleeveless, stiff-shouldered vest (kataginu).

On the Korean peninsula, the hanbok continued as everyday dress under the Joseon dynasty.

The hanfu — a broad term for traditional Han Chinese clothing — was built around a long-sleeved, wrap-over robe, often tied at the waist with a sash.

During the Kofun period, named for its great burial mounds, clay haniwa figures were set on top of the tombs, and figures in military and ceremonial dress appear from the 400s to 500s.

Tokyo's street fashion, above all the experimental, colorful styles of the Harajuku district, was documented from 1997 by the influential magazine FRUiTS, while Uniqlo's affordable basics spread to stores worldwide and Muji became known for simple, monotone apparel.

The Indus Valley cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa reveal a civilization deeply engaged in textile production.

The Hausa weavers and embroiderers of what is now northern Nigeria became known for the riga, a voluminous embroidered gown worn by men as a status garment, whose large form is called babban riga ("big gown"); an example in Cleveland, dated to the late 1800s or by 1910, is lined at the hem with silk imported across the Sahara.

Haute couture — the tradition of custom-fitted, handmade clothing produced by elite fashion houses — flourished in the early 1900s under designers like Paul Poiret, who claimed to have freed women from the corset (though other designers were moving the same way) in favor of flowing, columnar silhouettes.

In the Caribbean and Brazil, enslaved and free Black women wore cloth headwrap styles rooted in West African traditions; in Bahia they were paired with the pano da costa shoulder cloth, a sign of West African heritage and prestige whose meanings casual observers often missed.

Alongside silk, most prehistoric East Asian clothing likely relied on plant fibers such as hemp (Cannabis sativa), which was first domesticated in East Asia in early Neolithic times and has long been an important source of fiber.

Women wore tall headdresses, including horned styles built over wire frames and, from the late 1440s, a tall cone-shaped turret that is often wrongly called a hennin, a name that belongs to the horned styles

Herjolfsnes in Greenland, where some 70 pieces of medieval clothing — body garments, hoods, caps, and stockings — survived after being reused as grave clothes for want of coffins

His clothing was a complex, layered ensemble: a hide coat stitched from goat and sheep skins, leggings made of goat hide, a sheepskin loincloth, a bearskin cap, and leather shoes laced with cowhide and stuffed with grass for insulation.

Lakota women's hide dresses of tanned deer hide featured intricately beaded yokes; a blue yoke, which became popular around 1850 to 1870, has been read as a lake reflecting the sky and a symbol of rebirth.

Stone hide-working tools, notably scrapers for preparing skins, go back far into the Pleistocene across Eurasia, and bone awls, the hide-piercing tools that preceded the eyed needle, are documented in the region from about 40,000 years ago at Yafteh Cave in Iran and 34,000 years ago at Hayonim Cave in Israel.

Iran saw similar state-driven changes: Reza Shah banned the veil in 1936, while after the 1979 Islamic Revolution the new government made the hijab compulsory for women, making clothing a flashpoint in political struggles over modernity, religion, and national identity.

Over this, a himation — a large rectangular cloth — could be wrapped around the body as an outer layer.

For formal occasions men wrapped a hip cloth over the loincloth and might add a matching head wrap.

Hip-hop fashion, the invention of Black and Brown working-class youth — oversized silhouettes, gold chains, branded athletic wear, Timberland boots, and later the work of designers steeped in the culture, such as Pharrell Williams, Virgil Abloh, and Rihanna — became an influence to which twenty-first-century fashion, from luxury labels to everyday dress, owes a debt.

Samurai dress centered on the hitatare, a two-piece outfit of a wide-sleeved jacket and trousers.

Burial sites from the Hongshan culture (c. 4700–2900 BCE) in northeastern China reveal differences in grave goods and personal adornment that imply distinctions of status.

The first loom known in the southern Levant appeared in the Chalcolithic period and was a horizontal ground loom.

The robes themselves were cut in the Manchu style, with sleeves ending in angled cuffs called horse-hoof cuffs, a reminder of the importance of horses in Manchu identity.

Hose — woolen leg coverings, held up by straps from a belt or laced to the doublet, which joined into a single garment in the fifteenth century

Houppelandes — voluminous gowns with wide, often fur-lined sleeves and high collars — swept the courts from the late fourteenth century onward

In South America, the site of Huaca Prieta on the coast of Peru has yielded cotton textiles roughly 6,000 years old (one indigo-dyed fragment is about 6,200 years old), among the oldest decorated cotton fabrics known in the Americas.

The hufu, or "foreign dress," combined a long patterned robe, a leather belt, long trousers, and boots, and paintings and pottery figurines show elite women wearing it.

Maya men wore the ex (loincloth) and a mantle or pati tied around the shoulders, while women wore the huipil, a tunic-like garment woven in one or more panels and often decorated with brocaded or embroidered designs.

The Huldremose Woman was found by peat cutters in northeastern Jutland in 1879 and lived sometime between 350 and 41 BCE.

The Nahuatl word ichcahuipilli means a padded cotton shirt, built from ichcatl, cotton, and huipilli.

The basic unit of Egyptian dress was a rectangle of cloth, the ifd, often translated "sheet."

The ikan was a lighter court dress: the outer robe worn with full trousers called sashinuki, without the stone belt.

Surviving fragments show the decorated cloth in circulation: cottons patterned by ikat dyeing, probably brought from India, at Nahal 'Omer, a village on the trade route between Petra and Gaza, and Indian block-printed cottons in Egypt.

Ikat weaving — in which yarns are resist-dyed before being placed on the loom — takes its most demanding form in the patola silks of Gujarat, where both warp and weft threads were tied and dyed before weaving to create intricate geometric and figurative patterns.

The Inca, who rose to power around Cusco in the 1400s and ruled until the Spanish conquest of 1532, made textile production a matter of state.

Indian cotton textiles had for centuries been shipped across the Indian Ocean to the East African coast, and in West-Central Africa Indian cloth, brought by European traders, entered the markets of the Kongo kingdom, where its colors and designs resembled Kongo's own.

In the Buganda kingdom, bark cloth was made in workshops in almost every village, though its production slowed after Arab caravan traders brought cotton cloth in the nineteenth century, while Yoruba towns such as Abeokuta remained centers of indigo dyeing.

Further east, Kano became a center of indigo-dyed cloth: its Kofar Mata dye pits, where dyers plunge cloth into indigo, are said to have been founded in 1498.

In Yemen, garments of indigo-dyed cotton became a lasting tradition, with the dye associated above all with the town of Zabid.

In the Sahara, the Tuareg came to be called the "blue people of the desert" for the deep blue that indigo-dyed garments gave them; such garments were costly and reserved for the elite, and blue pigment on the skin signaled high status.

Cotton (Gossypium arboreum) was cultivated and woven by the Indus Valley civilization, and fragments of cotton cloth discovered at the site of Mohenjo-daro date to the third millennium BCE.

The older Doric chiton was made of wool and fastened with pins at the shoulders, while the Ionic chiton, made of lighter linen, was wider and fastened with a row of small buttons or stitches along the arms, creating the appearance of sleeves.

By the end of the period, five layered robes had become standard, and these were called itsutsuginu, "five robes."

In Mesoamerica, agave fibers (known as ixtle) and cotton, which Mesoamericans domesticated independently (remains from the Tehuacán Valley date to roughly 5,500–4,300 years ago), were both woven into textiles in prehistoric times.

A common pairing was the izar, a cloth wrapped around the lower body, and an upper wrap, most often the rida'.

The Jacquard loom, introduced in France in 1804, used punched cards to weave complex patterns automatically

Jade ornaments were also worn on the body: one Hongshan jade figure is drilled with holes for suspension and was probably worn as a pendant, perhaps by a shaman — an early link between adornment and rank that foreshadows the costume hierarchies of later Chinese dynasties.

The jama, a long crossover robe tied at the side, became the foundation of Mughal male dress, worn over fitted trousers.

Jamdani — a fine muslin textile historically known as Dhakai after the city of Dhaka — preserved the art of supplementary weft weaving, with weavers creating intricate floral and geometric patterns directly on the loom without sketching designs onto the fabric itself.

Japanese resist dyeing — including stencil-dyed katazome and tie-dyed shibori — decorated everything from luxurious silk kimono to cotton summer kimono

Women wore the short jeogori jacket paired with the voluminous chima skirt, while men wore the jeogori with baji trousers.

Surah 33:59 tells the Prophet's wives and daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks, the jilbab (plural jalabib), over themselves, "Thus is it likelier that they will be known and not be disturbed."

One valuable Han silk was jin, a polychrome patterned silk.

Under the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), the grandest court garment was the jisün (Chinese zhisun), a robe given by the emperor for court banquets.

Korean artisans excelled in jogakbo, the art of piecing together scraps of silk and ramie into wrapping cloths with compositions that anticipated modern abstract art.

The junihitoe — a layered court costume whose name means "twelve layers," though the number of robes varied, and five layered robes became standard by the end of the period — exemplified the Heian period's (794–1185 CE) emphasis on color combination and aesthetic refinement.

Under Louis XIV, the justaucorps, a long coat with wide turned-back cuffs, replaced the doublet as the standard male garment by the 1670s, worn over a waistcoat and paired with breeches and silk stockings.

South Korea's K-fashion rose to international prominence alongside the Korean Wave (Hallyu), which began in the late 1990s.

Bringing the folded end up from the front and tucking it in behind the waist makes the kachcham, which turns a drape into something closer to trousers without a stitch being sewn.

Tamil has an old word for such a breast band, the kachchu.

Okumura lists kemha (brocade), kadife (velvet), çatma (brocaded velvet), seraser (silk with gold and silver threads), and satin, along with lighter silks such as taffeta and a gauze-like fabric called vala.

At the Ottoman court, the kaftan was an outer garment made in luxurious textiles.

Chola inscriptions name weaving communities — the Kaikkolar, later known as Sengunthar, and the Saliyar among them.

The kalamkari temple hanging cited here, painted with scenes from Hindu mythology, was made in 1881–82; the V&A's process samples, dated about 1919, demonstrate painting with a bamboo pen and the use of mordants.

Women wore the kalasiris, a close-fitting sheath dress with shoulder straps — the name is borrowed from the Greek historian Herodotus, who used it for a fringed linen tunic worn by Egyptians, and modern writers apply it loosely to the sheath dress.

A man who was kamar band, "waist bound up," was ready for action and service, and a dagger could be lodged securely in the sash.

The domed kamelaukion, topped by a cross, first appears in a portrait of John II Komnenos (reigned 1118 to 1143) and then replaced the older open crown.

Samurai men wore hakama, wide pleated trousers or divided skirts, over the kimono; for formal occasions they wore the kamishimo, an ensemble of hakama and a matching sleeveless, stiff-shouldered vest (kataginu).

The kandys, a long-sleeved coat draped over the shoulders like a cape, was a mark of high status, though scholars still debate exactly which garment in Persian art the Greek word refers to.

In southern Africa, the Ndebele people developed a distinctive tradition of beaded garments, with surviving examples going back to the late nineteenth century, while Kanga cloths — rectangular printed cotton wraps — emerged as a characteristic garment along the East African coast, in demand there by the 1860s.

Kanchipuram. The Kanjivaram silk sari is often presented as timeless, but the historian Vijaya Ramaswamy describes silk weaving as "a latecomer" to the Kanchipuram region, which was known for cotton, and says that the British encouragement of sericulture led some weavers there to take up silk.

Further east, Kano became a center of indigo-dyed cloth: its Kofar Mata dye pits, where dyers plunge cloth into indigo, are said to have been founded in 1498.

Along the Swahili coast, men wore the kanzu, a long white robe, with a hip wrap and a fez or turban in what a Berlin museum record of 1890 Zanzibar photographs calls the Swahili-Arab style, while women's kanga cloths became everyday dress; the printed Swahili sayings that give kanga a literary dimension were added from the early 1900s.

A long-sleeved inner robe went under a short-sleeved kaftan of heavier silk, and over both went the kapaniçe, a long fur-lined outer robe with jeweled buttons.

For full court dress, two pieces were added: the karaginu, a short jacket worn over the layered robes, and the mo, a skirt tied at the back of the waist and trailing behind.

For everyday wear he wore the kariginu, literally "hunting robe," open at the sides, which began as private dress and later became formal wear for lower-ranking officials.

The sultans also patronized luxury textiles in royal workshops, or karkhanas, a practice the Mughals continued.

The visible layers at the sleeve openings and hem were carefully coordinated according to seasonal color schemes, a practice called kasane no irome.

Meanwhile, the Parsi community in western India developed distinctive embroidered gara saris whose silk embroidery drew on Chinese styles encountered through the Parsi China trade, and the Kashmiri shawl remained one of the most coveted luxury textiles in the world, prized in both South Asian and European fashion.

Shibori tie-dyeing produced patterns ranging from minute dots to elaborate stitched and bound designs, while kasuri (ikat weaving) created softly blurred patterns, often indigo and white, by resist-dyeing threads before weaving.

Japanese resist dyeing — including stencil-dyed katazome and tie-dyed shibori — decorated everything from luxurious silk kimono to cotton summer kimono

Recurring elements include makara kundala earrings shaped as sea-creature heads; the channavira, a jewelled cross-belt over the chest, with a version for goddesses that is common in early Chola bronzes; the udarabandha band around the stomach; the katisutra or mekhala girdle worn over the drape, on male figures usually fastened with a lion-head clasp; keyura and other armlets on the upper arm; bangles; and anklets.

In ancient Mesopotamia, one of the earliest and most distinctive garments was the kaunakes, a skirt or wrap made from sheepskin with the fleece left on, or later woven to imitate tufted fleece.

Bedouin men of Arabia and the Syrian desert wore a coarse cotton shirt under a woollen mantle, the abba, with a keffiyeh headcloth held in place by a camel-hair cord, the agal.

Court fabrics included kemha (a heavy brocade), seraser (cloth of gold and silver), and çatma (cut velvet).

Their coats were mostly kemp, coarse bristly hair that cannot be spun, over a short undercoat of fine wool.

The Asante continued to innovate in kente weaving — in 1817 the British visitor Thomas Bowdich described cloths made "in all the varieties of colour, as well as pattern" — while maintaining the symbolic pattern systems that made each cloth a wearable text.

In West Africa, the kente cloth of the Asante kingdom — woven in narrow strips on specialized looms and assembled into brilliantly patterned garments — remained a powerful symbol of status and identity.

Scarlet was the name of the most expensive grade of fine woolen cloth, always dyed wholly or partly with kermes, a costly red dye made from insects.

Song-era advances in silk weaving — particularly kesi (cut silk tapestry) — produced textiles of extraordinary intricacy, with pictorial designs that blurred the line between fabric and painting.

Recurring elements include makara kundala earrings shaped as sea-creature heads; the channavira, a jewelled cross-belt over the chest, with a version for goddesses that is common in early Chola bronzes; the udarabandha band around the stomach; the katisutra or mekhala girdle worn over the drape, on male figures usually fastened with a lion-head clasp; keyura and other armlets on the upper arm; bangles; and anklets.

The khadi cloth — hand-spun and hand-woven — would later become the signature fabric of Indian nationalism.

In present-day Mali, Fulani (Fulbe) communities became known for khasa (kaasa) blankets — wool blankets, sometimes incorporating handspun cotton, with geometric patterns; museum examples such as these date from the early 20th century, so how far back the form goes is uncertain.

Produced in state-controlled workshops called dar al-tiraz, these textiles were given as robes of honor (khil'a) to officials and foreign dignitaries, making clothing a direct expression of caliphal power.

Over it went the khimar, an unstitched wrap that could be draped in many ways, including over the face.

Yemeni and Persian traders had used the monsoon winds to sail the Indian Ocean since the first century CE, and by the 12th century trading posts and mosques stretched from Mogadishu in the north to Kilwa in the south; cloth was among the goods merchants brought to the coast, and ivory among those they took away.

The court drew on the finest fabrics of the empire — gossamer-weight muslin from Bengal and fine woollen shawls from Kashmir, the home of pashmina and of shahtoosh, a wool so fine that its shawls are said to slide through a ring — while Varanasi wove heavy kimkhab brocade, its ground densely overlaid with gold and silk thread.

Men and women wore variations of the kimono, a wrapped garment secured with a long waist sash called an obi, and its fabrics, colors, and patterns displayed the wearer's taste and wealth.

Kyoto's Costume Museum describes the outfit as a jacket called kinu worn with hakama trousers by men or a skirt, mo, by women.

Over it went the kirtle (called the côte-hardie in France), a full-length dress, usually of wool, laced tightly through the bodice.

The agbada — a flowing, wide-sleeved robe, called riga in Hausa — is today pan-Nigerian men's national dress, while wax-print cloth, also called kitenge, enjoyed a revival from the mid-2000s and new kanga designs keep coming: Zanzibar's largest kanga dealership sends up to 30 a month to its factory in Mumbai.

For country life and sport, men wore the belted tweed Norfolk jacket with matching knickerbockers, breeches that buckled or buttoned below the knee.

Men and women alike lined their eyes with kohl, a dark cosmetic that Egyptians also seem to have valued for blocking the glare of the sun and repelling flies.

On November 1, 1940, an imperial ordinance established a national uniform for men, the kokuminfuku.

Persian men wore the kolah cap and coats pleated at the waist.

After the dynasty, Nader Shah, a Sunni, introduced a four-pointed cap, the kolah-e naderi, usually red, representing the first four caliphs.

Belting could draw up extra length to create a pouch of cloth, called a kolpos, above the waist.

The layered court robes of the Heian era gradually gave way to the kosode, a smaller-sleeved garment that had served as an undergarment at the Heian court, though people of low status also wore it.

| Oman | Dishdasha; kumma cap and massar headdress; bisht; khanjar for important events | Abaya with a lahaf headscarf in cities; in rural areas, colorful wide trousers with tunic tops or dresses |

For men, the dhoti — an unstitched garment wrapped and tucked around the lower body — remained widely worn, as did the kurta (a long tunic) with pajama trousers, a combination still common today.

Wolfgang Messerschmidt's chapter on Achaemenid clothes distinguishes the riding outfit from the Persepolitan court robe, which he calls a kypassis.

The riding hat that Greeks called the tiara or kyrbasia was a hood of felt, leather or soft cloth, with a pointed neck guard and long side flaps that could be tied over the chin.

Hurstwic calls the wool overtunic the kyrtill and describes it as relatively tight in the upper body, with a skirt from thigh length to knee length.

Designers like Duro Olowu (Nigerian-born, London-based), Lisa Folawiyo (Nigeria), and Ozwald Boateng (British, of Ghanaian descent) brought African aesthetics to international runways, while Lagos Fashion Week (founded 2011), Dakar Fashion Week (founded 2002), and South African Fashion Week (founded 1997) established the continent as a serious player in the global fashion calendar.

On the Great Plains, nations such as the Lakota and Cheyenne decorated clothing with porcupine quillwork and mineral-pigment designs, and after contact with glass beads made in Europe and obtained through trade; on a heavily beaded Cheyenne girl's dress, the beads added prestige and honor as well as weight.

Senators wore tunics with a broad purple stripe, the latus clavus, while men of the equestrian order wore a narrow stripe, the angustus clavus.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, European designers like Cristobal Balenciaga, Hubert de Givenchy, and Yves Saint Laurent continued to set global trends, with Saint Laurent's Le Smoking tuxedo for women, first shown in 1966, becoming one of his most recognizable signatures.

The production of leather from animal hides required considerable skill: skins had to be cut free, scraped clean, and worked into leather or pelts.

Alfred Jacob Miller's pictures of trappers, based on his 1837 journey west, show heavily fringed buckskin coats, "Indian style" leggings of brain-tanned buckskin cut tight from knee to ankle, and moccasins; trappers were also known to wear fringed buckskin pantaloons cut with the buttoned front fall of the era's trousers — a practical fusion of European and Native American clothing traditions.

Film costumes set national trends: the lehenga choli (skirt and blouse sets) and saris worn by film heroines shaped bridal fashion for decades, while leading men's screen wardrobes, from Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra's denim in Sholay (1975) to Shah Rukh Khan's leather jacket in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), shaped everyday style.

In Egypt, linen woven from locally grown flax was the fabric of choice for nearly all classes of society.

A popular fabric was linsey-woolsey, a mix of linen and wool that was cheaper than pure wool but still warm and strong.

The chaperon, originally a simple hood, evolved into an elaborate hat with a long tail called a liripipe

From the late 1910s through the interwar years, Coco Chanel brought a revolutionary approach: her little black dress, tweed suits, and jersey knits transformed luxury from ostentatious ornament into understated elegance.

In the Andes, indigenous communities also domesticated camelids — llamas and alpacas, the alpaca some 6,000–7,000 years ago — and their soft wool became a prized textile fiber alongside cotton.

Women wore a large wrap dress, the aksu, held at the waist by a sash called a chumpi, with a shoulder mantle, the lliclla, on top.

Despite older claims, the excavations of 1993–2017 found no loom weights or spindle whorls in the site's Neolithic levels.

The grandest imperial garment was the loros, a long scarf embroidered with gold and set with pearls and jewels, crossed over the torso.

By the century's end, the lounge suit — ancestor of the modern business suit — was gaining acceptance for everyday wear.

In East Africa, Maasai men and women around 1900 still dressed entirely in leather, warriors in calfskin cloaks and women in sewn goatskin garments edged with a few rows of beads.

Traces of madder (a red dye derived from the Rubia plant) were reported on cotton fragments from Mohenjo-daro, an early example of dyed cotton cloth — though that identification, made with the analytical techniques of the excavation era, may not be reliable, and dyed fibers older still are known elsewhere, including dyed cotton microfibers from Tel Tsaf in the Jordan Valley dating to about 5200–4700 BCE.

By the end of the dynasty, men commonly wore a long, side-fastening robe, the changshan, with a short jacket, the magua, a name meaning riding jacket.

In Mesoamerica, cotton was the primary textile fiber of the lowlands, while maguey (agave) fiber served highland communities.

By 1900, Sears, Roebuck and Co. was one of the world's greatest merchandisers, and for rural residents mail-order catalogs offered ready-made goods like those found in city shops and department stores.

Recurring elements include makara kundala earrings shaped as sea-creature heads; the channavira, a jewelled cross-belt over the chest, with a version for goddesses that is common in early Chola bronzes; the udarabandha band around the stomach; the katisutra or mekhala girdle worn over the drape, on male figures usually fastened with a lion-head clasp; keyura and other armlets on the upper arm; bangles; and anklets.

Gods wear the makuta, or crown, in forms ranging from Shiva's crown of piled, matted hair to the conical crown of goddesses.

After Bengal came under Mughal rule, an office called the malmal khas supervised Bengal muslins and silks for the courts at Delhi and Agra.

In Qing dynasty China, the Manchu court dress system, centered on the dragon robe, remained in force.

Officials wore dragon robes under a surcoat bearing mandarin squares — embroidered badges indicating rank through specific bird or animal motifs.

The mantua, the dominant gown around 1700, gave way by the 1730s to the robe à la française, an open-fronted gown worn over wide panniers (side hoops that extended the skirt laterally) that created the characteristic wide-hipped silhouette of the Rococo period.

In China, the Zhongshan suit (now most commonly known as the Mao suit) emerged as a form of national dress meant to embody modern values and a notion of equality and uniformity in the new Chinese Republic.

| Oman | Dishdasha; kumma cap and massar headdress; bisht; khanjar for important events | Abaya with a lahaf headscarf in cities; in rural areas, colorful wide trousers with tunic tops or dresses |

Sewing machines, synthetic dyes like mauveine, and mass-produced textiles fundamentally changed how clothing was made and who could afford it.

The basic male garment was the maxtlatl, a loincloth or breechcloth.

Older still, evidence from the earlier site of Mehrgarh in Balochistan suggests that cotton fibers were being used as early as the sixth millennium BCE — the earliest known cotton in the Old World.

Recurring elements include makara kundala earrings shaped as sea-creature heads; the channavira, a jewelled cross-belt over the chest, with a version for goddesses that is common in early Chola bronzes; the udarabandha band around the stomach; the katisutra or mekhala girdle worn over the drape, on male figures usually fastened with a lion-head clasp; keyura and other armlets on the upper arm; bangles; and anklets.

In the northeast, Muga silk — a golden-hued silk for which Assam is renowned — was woven into mekhela chadors prized for their luster and durability.

The 19th century was the period in which the modern men's suit took shape.

As the new state consolidated its power, all women were required to wear the "Islamic" mode of dress in public: a loose gown that left only the face and hands uncovered, with the head and neck covered by a black chador or a thick scarf (meqnaʿa).

In Mexico, this mixing was later celebrated in the china poblana — an embroidered white blouse and sequined skirt ensemble, distinct from both Indigenous and European upper-class dress, that became an icon of Mexican identity — though the costume in its familiar form dates to the 19th century, and its popular link to Catarina de San Juan, a 17th-century South Asian-born woman in Puebla remembered as a symbol of mestizo womanhood, has little historical basis.

Bosen Zhang summarizes its account: in the early Tang, women riders at court followed the older Qi and Sui custom of wearing the mili, a covering for the head and body worn by women going out.

The new government mandated Western-style military uniforms for its armed forces and encouraged officials to adopt Western dress as a symbol of modernization.

Han tombs were filled with mingqi, objects made to accompany the dead in the afterlife.

In the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, survival depended on expertly tailored garments: caribou hide parkas, fur-lined boots, and mittens stitched with sinew thread using bone needles.

For full court dress, two pieces were added: the karaginu, a short jacket worn over the layered robes, and the mo, a skirt tied at the back of the waist and trailing behind.

The subsequent Nazca (c. 100 BCE–650 CE) and Moche (c. 200–850 CE) cultures continued this tradition of textile excellence.

The early twenty-first century saw the emergence of modest fashion as a global movement with deep roots in the Middle East.

Yemeni and Persian traders had used the monsoon winds to sail the Indian Ocean since the first century CE, and by the 12th century trading posts and mosques stretched from Mogadishu in the north to Kilwa in the south; cloth was among the goods merchants brought to the coast, and ivory among those they took away.

Cotton (Gossypium arboreum) was cultivated and woven by the Indus Valley civilization, and fragments of cotton cloth discovered at the site of Mohenjo-daro date to the third millennium BCE.

Mogadishu, which Ibn Battuta visited about 1331 before sailing on to Mombasa and Kilwa, was known for cloth of superior quality, named after the town and exported to Egypt and elsewhere.

Sumptuary laws regulated fabrics, colors, and dyeing techniques by social class: samurai wore formal dress such as the kamishimo — a stiffened, sleeveless jacket and pleated trousers, often of hemp in small stenciled patterns — bearing family crests (mon), while wealthy merchants, periodically barred from luxuries such as purple or red fabric, embroidery, and intricate shibori tie-dyeing, turned to subtler displays of wealth, such as forbidden colors worn beneath plain outer clothing, while artisans developed new techniques that imitated banned ones.

In practice, the women's garment worn most widely was monpe, loose work pants.

Block printing — in which carved wooden blocks were used to stamp patterns onto cloth — and mordant dyeing — in which fabrics were treated with chemical fixatives before being dipped in dye baths to produce vibrant, colorfast hues — allowed South Asian artisans to produce richly colored cotton textiles for export, not only as luxuries but for everyday use as far away as Egypt.

Silk weaving was well established on the peninsula by the first centuries CE, and Korean weavers have long made fine ramie cloth (known as mosi), valued because it is comfortable in hot summer weather.

Mountain men and fur trappers, who supplied the beaver pelts for the felt hats fashionable in the 1820s and 1830s, went about in buckskin.

After Prince Albert's death in 1861, Queen Victoria wore black for the rest of her life, and mourning dress became an elaborate system: widows wore matte black crape for a year, then moved through stages of half-mourning in gray and shades of purple, with jewelry of black Whitby jet.

In the northeast, Muga silk — a golden-hued silk for which Assam is renowned — was woven into mekhela chadors prized for their luster and durability.

India had long been one of the world's great textile exporters, renowned for its muslin, chintz, and calico fabrics.

In the translation by H. A. R. Gibb, the sultan's usual dress was a velvety red tunic made of the European fabric called mutanfas, and on his head he wore a golden skullcap bound with a gold band.

The cave of Nahal Hemar in the Judean Desert preserves linen yarn and non-loom-made fabrics, with calibrated radiocarbon dates around 8000 BCE.

Chinese sources called it "one-color dress," because at these feasts everyone from the emperor to the musicians wore the same color, jeweled with pearls and jade and made of nasij, a silk woven with gold.

In the Southwest, Navajo weavers made blankets of smooth wool handspun from Churro sheep, a breed the Spanish introduced in 1598, setting indigo blue from Mexico against natural white and brown-black wool; from the 1860s, triangles and diamonds appeared over the striped bands of their chief-style blankets, which Plains peoples avidly acquired through trade.

The subsequent Nazca (c. 100 BCE–650 CE) and Moche (c. 200–850 CE) cultures continued this tradition of textile excellence.

In southern Africa, the Ndebele people developed a distinctive tradition of beaded garments, with surviving examples going back to the late nineteenth century, while Kanga cloths — rectangular printed cotton wraps — emerged as a characteristic garment along the East African coast, in demand there by the 1860s.

The Skrydstrup woman, buried about 1300 BCE, wore a short-sleeved woolen blouse whose neckline and sleeves were decorated with rows of buttonhole stitches, an early example of needlelace.

In India, the long achkan habitually worn by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru became the model for the Nehru jacket (a hip-length, mandarin-collared coat), a distinctly Indian style of menswear, while women continued to wear the sari in its remarkable regional diversity — from the nine-yard Maharashtrian Marathamoli drape, its centre pleat brought between the legs and tucked in at the back, to the light, fine-textured Bengali tant in cotton.

Royal regalia included the striped nemes headcloth and the double crown, which joined the white crown of Upper Egypt to the red crown of Lower Egypt.

In the settled farming villages of the Neolithic revolution, flax stalks were retted, beaten, and combed, and spinning the fibers onto a spindle produced thread; in the pile dwellings around the Alps, looms for weaving stood in almost every house.

After World War II, Christian Dior's 1947 New Look — with its cinched waist, padded hips, and voluminous skirt — reasserted Paris as the center of fashion.

They name a garment (vasas) worn with an overgarment or mantle, and, from the Atharvaveda onward, the nivi, an undergarment that was probably a simple apron of cloth, worn especially by women.

Red came partly from nocheztli, cochineal.

The Nok culture of central Nigeria is known for terracotta sculptures with elaborate hairstyles and jewelry.

For country life and sport, men wore the belted tweed Norfolk jacket with matching knickerbockers, breeches that buckled or buttoned below the knee.

The nōshi had the same cut as the court robe but was not tied to the colors of rank, and the emperor, the crown prince, princes, and senior nobles wore it as everyday dress.

Oak-coffin burials at Borum Eshøj, Egtved, Skrydstrup, Trindhøj, and Muldbjerg have yielded some of the best-preserved costumes in Europe.

The Oba (king) wore regalia of coral beads — crowns, high collars, necklaces, beaded shirts, and aprons.

Men and women wore variations of the kimono, a wrapped garment secured with a long waist sash called an obi, and its fabrics, colors, and patterns displayed the wearer's taste and wealth.

One name for that large veil is odhni; a later set from Lahore, of about 1855, pairs a kurta and choli with one.

Pakistan developed its own sartorial identity around the shalwar kameez, which became standard dress for both men and women, while Sri Lanka's national dress incorporated the osariya style of sari draping alongside influences from colonial-era fashion.

Enslaved Africans in colonies such as Virginia were typically issued the cheapest and coarsest clothing, much of it of rough osnaburg linen, but found ways to personalize their dress within these constraints.

The most extraordinary window into prehistoric European dress is Ötzi the Iceman, a naturally mummified man discovered in the Alps dating to approximately 3300 BCE.

Norse women fastened the straps of their dresses with a pair of large oval brooches.

Civilians and soldiers alike wore the paenula, a hooded, circular cloak.

Government workers and schoolboys were to wear the Pahlavi cap, a cylindrical hat with a bill; only the clergy and leaders of other recognized religions were exempt.

For men, the dhoti — an unstitched garment wrapped and tucked around the lower body — remained widely worn, as did the kurta (a long tunic) with pajama trousers, a combination still common today.

Married women wore the stola, a long sleeveless dress hung from shoulder straps, over their tunic, and might add a palla (a draped shawl) when going out.

The end of the sari that is finally draped over the shoulder is the pallu, and on Banarasi saris a hunting scene can appear in the pallu alone.

A velvet cheongsam of about 1965 combines synthetic panne velvet, a psychedelic print, and bust darts, which the V&A identifies as a feature of Western tailoring.

The mantua, the dominant gown around 1700, gave way by the 1730s to the robe à la française, an open-fronted gown worn over wide panniers (side hoops that extended the skirt laterally) that created the characteristic wide-hipped silhouette of the Rococo period.

In Brazil, Afro-Brazilian women in Bahia wore shoulder shawls and headwraps reminiscent of the West African gèlè, and the pano da costa cloth they wore was a potent sign of West African heritage and prestige; the baiana dress of their descendants carries that long legacy of expression through dress.

The Paracas culture (c. 800 BCE–200 CE) is particularly renowned for its burial mantles: large cloths of cotton and camelid fiber — the wool of llamas and alpacas — embroidered in vivid colors with images of supernatural beings, animals, and human figures.

The parivattam is the deity's own cloth, tied around a devotee's head as a temple honor — a use in which the value lay in who bestowed the cloth rather than in the cloth itself.

Meanwhile, the Parsi community in western India developed distinctive embroidered gara saris whose silk embroidery drew on Chinese styles encountered through the Parsi China trade, and the Kashmiri shawl remained one of the most coveted luxury textiles in the world, prized in both South Asian and European fashion.

The court drew on the finest fabrics of the empire — gossamer-weight muslin from Bengal and fine woollen shawls from Kashmir, the home of pashmina and of shahtoosh, a wool so fine that its shawls are said to slide through a ring — while Varanasi wove heavy kimkhab brocade, its ground densely overlaid with gold and silk thread.

Maya men wore the ex (loincloth) and a mantle or pati tied around the shoulders, while women wore the huipil, a tunic-like garment woven in one or more panels and often decorated with brocaded or embroidered designs.

Courtiers might wear an angarkha (a chest-wrapping coat) in its place, and tie a patka (a wide sash) at the waist.

In Gujarat, patola double-ikat silk weaving survived as a specialized craft of the Salvi community of Patan, with each sari requiring painstaking labor to align pre-dyed warp and weft threads into precise patterns.

Okumura also names the peçe, worn widely among Turkish women, which appears in many sixteenth-century miniatures.

A short jacket called a spencer or a long coat called a pelisse was worn over the thin gown for warmth, along with large cashmere shawls imported from Kashmir or imitated in Paisley, Scotland.

Women sometimes wore the peplos, a heavier woolen garment folded over at the top and pinned at the shoulders.

Elaborate periwigs — large curled wigs — became essential for men of rank, and by the 1680s Paris, together with the royal court at Versailles, had become the capital of European fashion.

Women of the Mughal court wore the peshwaz, a long, front-opening robe often made of sheer muslin, over pajama trousers, with a large head-cover or shawl.

The petasos, a wide-brimmed hat, protected travelers from the sun

In nineteenth-century Bengal, Jnanadanandini Devi helped popularize a drape adapted from Parsi style, worn with a blouse and petticoat; accounts of her innovations also identify English influences on the blouse.

In the 1840s the look became more demure: sloping shoulders, a long pointed bodice, and a dome-shaped skirt supported first by layers of stiffened petticoats.

Punjabi phulkari (floral embroidery) is documented in later surviving work from before the 1947 Partition.

Women of the Tang court wore ruqun — a short jacket (ru) with a skirt (qun) — often paired with a shawl called a pibo.

Beyond bark cloth, prehistoric sub-Saharan Africans made use of plant fibers: at Border Cave in South Africa, a lump of beeswax and plant resin wrapped in vegetal fibers, probably used for hafting tools, dates to about 40,000 years ago.

Organic materials like these seldom survive, so how much clothing people in the warm tropical regions south of the Sahara wore, and whether animal skins and plant materials served mainly for protection, warmth, or ceremony, is largely unknown.

Evidence from lake dwelling sites in Switzerland and other Alpine regions has preserved remarkable fragments of Neolithic textiles, including woven linen cloth and plant-fiber cordage.

Ikat weavers around Chirala in southern India made lungis and turbans with bold geometric motifs, a craft that later moved to Pochampally, where it flourished from the mid-twentieth century; in western Odisha, Sambalpuri ikat favored continuous floral patterns in cotton, while Chanderi in central India wove fine, transparent, lightweight saris of silk and cotton.

In the Andean regions, the poncho evolved from Precolumbian tunics.

On the Great Plains, nations such as the Lakota and Cheyenne decorated clothing with porcupine quillwork and mineral-pigment designs, and after contact with glass beads made in Europe and obtained through trade; on a heavily beaded Cheyenne girl's dress, the beads added prestige and honor as well as weight.

Poulaines, or crakows, were shoes with extravagantly long pointed toes, named for Poland and its city of Kraków, where the style was believed to have originated

She also records a breast cloth of the same period, the pratidi, and embroidered wrap skirts called pesas.

International brands took notice: Nike announced the Pro Hijab in 2017.

Surviving cloth, such as fragments from the bottom of the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá, and pseudomorphs, traces of decayed fiber replaced by minerals on pots and other objects in Maya tombs

The National Museum of Denmark says that their shape is not well known and suggests a type of plus fours gathered under the knee, worn with socks or puttees, long strips of cloth wound around the legs.

Men wore a qaba (robe) fastened with a narrow belt or sash over trousers tapering to the ankle, and over the 17th century the court robe came to be cut close to the torso; in 1736 a French traveler likened the cut of Persian men's dress to European clothing and contrasted it with the long, loose robes of the Ottomans.

The caliph al-Mansur (r. 754–775) is usually credited with requiring court officials to wear black robes on ceremonial occasions, and the caliph himself wore black with a tall cap, the qalansuwa.

Men and women alike wore a long shirt, the qamis, and over it a variety of robes, usually tunics or wraps, with a mantle over everything in public; only the very poor owned a single wrap or tunic.

The qilin is a mythical beast.

Han Chinese men had been required since the conquest to adopt Manchu-style dress, while some historians trace the qipao to the long one-piece robes of Manchu women.

The large cotton cape or blanket, the quachtli (also spelled cuachtli), was a length of cotton tribute cloth, and such cloths could serve as a kind of currency before the conquest and in the early colonial period.

Specialist artisans called amanteca, organized in guilds, created dazzling cloaks, headdresses, shields, and fans using feathers from birds such as the quetzal, macaw, cotinga, and roseate spoonbill.

In 1645 the Qing court ordered all Han Chinese men to shave their heads, wear the Manchu queue, and change their dress.

The Inca also used textiles for record-keeping: the quipu, a device of knotted colored strings, recorded numerical and perhaps other kinds of information, making Andean cloth not merely a covering for the body but a medium of communication and governance.

Women wore ao jackets or blouses over long, pleated qun skirts.

In the Kongo Kingdom, raffia cloth woven from palm fiber was produced in large quantities, serving as both garment material and currency.

Raffia palm fiber was woven into cloth in Central Africa, a tradition whose age is hard to establish, though highly sophisticated raffia cloths were already being collected from the Congo in the 16th century.

Silk weaving was well established on the peninsula by the first centuries CE, and Korean weavers have long made fine ramie cloth (known as mosi), valued because it is comfortable in hot summer weather.

Chinese rank badges, also called mandarin squares, were textile insignia attached to officials' robes.

The rebozo, a long rectangular shawl once used as a modesty garment and for carrying babies and goods, exemplified this cultural fusion: the finest are still woven on Mesoamerican backstrap looms, silk rebozos were favored by wealthy colonial women in San Luis Potosí, and their ikat dyeing is a technique the Spanish brought to Mexico from Asia.

Osage women cut and folded ribbon into designs and sewed them by hand onto wool to make ribbonwork, an art learned from female relatives.

A common pairing was the izar, a cloth wrapped around the lower body, and an upper wrap, most often the rida'.

Cowboys wore leather chaps, which descended from the chaparreras of Mexican vaqueros, along with riding boots and broad-brimmed hats such as John B. Stetson's "Boss of the Plains," introduced in 1865; the cowboy hat, the lasso, and pointed boots all trace back to the vaquero, and these practical garments became enduring symbols of the American West.

Dubai Fashion Week (launched in 2023) and Riyadh Fashion Week (first held the same year) attracted international attention, while Lebanese-born designers such as Elie Saab and Reem Acra became fixtures of global red-carpet fashion.

The best cloth was called royal linen.

The ruff, a pleated and starched collar radiating outward from the neck, became the defining accessory of the age, worn by both men and women.

Women of the Tang court wore ruqun — a short jacket (ru) with a skirt (qun) — often paired with a shawl called a pibo.

Russet, a gray or brown woolen cloth, was the cloth of the poor: England's 1363 sumptuary statute named russet and blanket as the cloths for carters, ploughmen, oxherds, and shepherds.

Roman soldiers wore a woolen tunic, a sagum (a woolen military cloak), and caligae, hobnailed military sandal-boots whose tracks archaeologists can still identify.

After a portrait of the young Prince Albert Edward in a sailor's uniform in 1846, the sailor suit became one of the most popular outfits for European children, a fashion that lasted into the early twentieth century.

From the thirteenth century the sakkos, a loosely belted tunic, became the main imperial garment for men, and the loros was simplified, apparently sewn onto the tunic by the fourteenth century.

Chola inscriptions name weaving communities — the Kaikkolar, later known as Sengunthar, and the Saliyar among them.

Beneath the kaftan, Ottoman men wore a gömlek (shirt), şalvar (wide trousers), and an entari (inner robe); the sultan crowned the ensemble with a turban of fine muslin wrapped around a tall cap, a headdress whose shape changed from reign to reign.

Ikat weavers around Chirala in southern India made lungis and turbans with bold geometric motifs, a craft that later moved to Pochampally, where it flourished from the mid-twentieth century; in western Odisha, Sambalpuri ikat favored continuous floral patterns in cotton, while Chanderi in central India wove fine, transparent, lightweight saris of silk and cotton.

In Denmark, a ninth-century grave at Fløjstrup held a small blue band of silk samite, the oldest find of silk in Denmark.

Its account identifies the groom's danlyeong robe and samo hat, and the bride's hwalot or wonsam, with ceremonial headwear such as a jokduri.

Brazilian fashion found its showcase in Sao Paulo Fashion Week, launched in 1995, which grew into Latin America's biggest fashion event.

Greek lexicographers recorded a Persian word for this undergarment, which they wrote as sarapis.

He called the jama sarbgati, "covering the whole body"; the drawers yarpirahan, "the companion of the coat"; the patka katzeb; and the shawl parmnarm.

Photographs add detail: at the opening of telegraph service in Tehran on 26 April 1926, the Persians attending wore the sardārī (a frock coat reaching below the knees), European trousers and brimless egg-shaped hats.

The sari, still the most typical form of South Asian women's dress, was worn throughout the 19th century, but its draping styles and the contexts in which it was worn shifted considerably.

Many of the bronze and terracotta heads from Ife carry fine vertical striations across the face that may depict scarification; among the later Yoruba, face markings identified a person's family and sub-group, though whether the Ife lines record real face marks is still uncertain.

Scarlet was the name of the most expensive grade of fine woolen cloth, always dyed wholly or partly with kermes, a costly red dye made from insects.

Court fabrics included kemha (a heavy brocade), seraser (cloth of gold and silver), and çatma (cut velvet).

Carbonized silk fabric wrapped around children's burials at Qingtai and Wanggou in Henan, dated to roughly 3500–3300 BCE, is among the oldest surviving woven silk, and parts of a primitive loom from the Hemudu culture in Zhejiang show how early weaving developed in the south — evidence of a sophisticated understanding of sericulture even in this remote period.

The sewing machine — Elias Howe patented his machine in 1846, and Isaac Singer's machine, patented in 1851, came to dominate the trade — was soon put to work making shirts and pants in a growing number of mills and sweatshops.

Pakistan developed its own sartorial identity around the shalwar kameez, which became standard dress for both men and women, while Sri Lanka's national dress incorporated the osariya style of sari draping alongside influences from colonial-era fashion.

The shawl — a large rectangle of fabric wrapped around the body — was worn by Assyrian and Babylonian elites, often fringed and richly decorated; the Assyrian palace reliefs carve the embroidery of court dress in fine detail.

Personal adornment survives better: shell beads dating to about 75,000 years ago from Blombos Cave in South Africa represent some of the earliest known jewelry, and ostrich eggshell beads (made in eastern and southern Africa for at least 50,000 years, and found at Border Cave, where one bead has been directly dated to about 42,000 years ago) point to a rich tradition of decorating the body.

Kings wore a finely pleated royal kilt, the shendyt, and during the New Kingdom elite men layered sheer, elaborately pleated garments over their kilts.

The sherwani, a long structured coat, emerged during this period as a formal garment blending Mughal tailoring traditions with British frock coat influences.

Sumptuary laws regulated fabrics, colors, and dyeing techniques by social class: samurai wore formal dress such as the kamishimo — a stiffened, sleeveless jacket and pleated trousers, often of hemp in small stenciled patterns — bearing family crests (mon), while wealthy merchants, periodically barred from luxuries such as purple or red fabric, embroidery, and intricate shibori tie-dyeing, turned to subtler displays of wealth, such as forbidden colors worn beneath plain outer clothing, while artisans developed new techniques that imitated banned ones.

A linen shirt worn next to the skin

Bone tools more than 61,000 years old from Sibudu Cave in South Africa include a slender point that its excavators suggest may have been a pin or needle, and a polished, spatula-shaped tool whose wear resembles that on tools used to process animal hides; direct evidence for stitched clothing this early nevertheless remains thin.

Over the kirtle, women of means wore a gown or surcote; the sideless surcote, worn over the fitted côte-hardie, was preserved as a ceremonial court garment into the fifteenth century.

The origins of silk production in China reach far deeper into prehistory than once believed.

Nanjing's silk brocades, known as yun brocade and woven with gold and silver thread, were reserved for the imperial family under the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, and under the Qing the imperial silk bureau at Jiangning (Nanjing), in operation from 1645 to 1904, brought the craft to its peak.

Archaeological evidence from the Yangshao culture (c. 5000–3000 BCE) and related Neolithic sites along the Yellow River suggests that silk was being produced by the fourth millennium BCE, and traces of silk protein in graves at Jiahu, in Henan, are about 8,500 years old — though whether the earliest silk came from domesticated silkworms (Bombyx mori) or wild moths is still uncertain.

During the Three Kingdoms period (57 BCE–668 CE), the kingdoms of Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla shared broadly similar dress customs, though regional variations are evident in surviving art and artifacts.

In the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, survival depended on expertly tailored garments: caribou hide parkas, fur-lined boots, and mittens stitched with sinew thread using bone needles.

The sinus was the large overfold hanging across the front of the body.

Persian influence had introduced the sirwal, tailored drawers worn by women in particular, and in Mamluk Egypt a woman's basic wardrobe was drawers, a qamis, and a gown, with a hair veil and scarf.

Rural laborers kept to older, practical garments: in England, farmworkers had worn the loose linen or cotton smock-frock for centuries, and in the industrial towns of the north cheap, durable wooden-soled clogs were the everyday footwear of mill workers.

A nobleman's formal dress was the sokutai.

Mexican charros wore a distinctive horseman's outfit, a short jacket and fitted trousers with silver buttons under a wide-brimmed sombrero; it began as practical ranch workwear, was taken up by the upper classes after Emperor Maximilian adopted the dress of Mexican landowners in the 1860s, and became an enduring national icon.

The Song dynasty (960–1279 CE) shifted toward a more restrained aesthetic.

Designers like Duro Olowu (Nigerian-born, London-based), Lisa Folawiyo (Nigeria), and Ozwald Boateng (British, of Ghanaian descent) brought African aesthetics to international runways, while Lagos Fashion Week (founded 2011), Dakar Fashion Week (founded 2002), and South African Fashion Week (founded 1997) established the continent as a serious player in the global fashion calendar.

In warmer southern regions, clothing was lighter: among the Timucua of Florida, as early European observers described them, men wore a loincloth, and women wore a similar wrap with an upper covering usually made of deerskin or Spanish moss.

A short jacket called a spencer or a long coat called a pelisse was worn over the thin gown for warmth, along with large cashmere shawls imported from Kashmir or imitated in Paisley, Scotland.

The Yangshao people of Banpo left fragments of woven cloth on human remains in graves, and spindle whorls — small weighted discs used in hand spinning — are common finds at Neolithic Chinese sites, showing how widespread spinning was.

In the settled farming villages of the Neolithic revolution, flax stalks were retted, beaten, and combed, and spinning the fibers onto a spindle produced thread; in the pile dwellings around the Alps, looms for weaving stood in almost every house.

Early linen thread was often made by splicing: strips of flax fiber were overlapped and twisted together between thumb and finger, held by the plant's own natural glue.

Next to her head lay a cap made in the technique called sprang, and her elaborate hairstyle must have taken several hours to arrange with help.

For civilian officials, the stambouline — a black frock coat worn with the fez — became the standard formal outfit, blending European tailoring with Ottoman identity.

Married women wore the stola, a long sleeveless dress hung from shoulder straps, over their tunic, and might add a palla (a draped shawl) when going out.

A Viking woman typically wore a strap dress over an undergarment or smock.

The late twentieth century saw the Americas produce another seismic shift in global fashion: streetwear.

Woven on narrow strip looms by male weavers, kente consisted of long, thin bands of silk or cotton stitched together into a large wrapper.

Underneath, Roman women and men wore a subligaculum, a loincloth, and women wore a strophium, a band of cloth wrapped around the chest.

Underneath, Roman women and men wore a subligaculum, a loincloth, and women wore a strophium, a band of cloth wrapped around the chest.

Sumptuary laws regulated fabrics, colors, and dyeing techniques by social class: samurai wore formal dress such as the kamishimo — a stiffened, sleeveless jacket and pleated trousers, often of hemp in small stenciled patterns — bearing family crests (mon), while wealthy merchants, periodically barred from luxuries such as purple or red fabric, embroidery, and intricate shibori tie-dyeing, turned to subtler displays of wealth, such as forbidden colors worn beneath plain outer clothing, while artisans developed new techniques that imitated banned ones.

Dresses were simply tailored, and women also wore the sunbonnet, often of colorful calico stretched over wire or wooden frames.

The thirteenth century returned to a looser, softly draped silhouette: a cote (tunic or gown) worn under a surcote, an overgarment.

The Suzhou embroidery tradition became particularly renowned, and under the Qing Suzhou earned the title City of Embroidery; artisans split silk threads into halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, or even finer strands to create works so detailed they resemble paintings.

The Swadeshi movement of the early 1900s had its roots in nineteenth-century efforts to revive India's industries and support indigenous production.

Tablet-woven bands appear in Danish graves from Roman times onward, and a ninth-century Viking woman buried at Bryndum in Denmark wore a wool dress dyed blue with woad, its straps made from a tablet-woven band.

On its front was the tablion, a rectangular purple panel usually decorated with gold thread.

The same summary describes a rule about the tailasan, a mantle.

A tailcoat for evening and formal dress, or a frock coat for day

Unlike the draped and wrapped garments of Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Persians wore tailored and sewn clothing — fitted tunics, trousers, and sleeved coats.

The new ruling class wore tailored and stitched garments, extending their role in northern court dress alongside older draped clothing.

The distinctive early Safavid taj — a twelve-gored cap with a tall, pointed finial, around which the turban was wound — was a symbol of the Shia dynasty, its twelve gores standing for the twelve Shia imams.

It says the takauchiyah, a coat of the Indian form, had formerly been tied on the left, and Akbar ordered it to be tied on the right and made with a round skirt.

The Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) was fascinated by all things foreign: men and women often dressed in foreign fashions, and fashion changed remarkably quickly during the dynasty's first century.

In India, the long achkan habitually worn by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru became the model for the Nehru jacket (a hip-length, mandarin-collared coat), a distinctly Indian style of menswear, while women continued to wear the sari in its remarkable regional diversity — from the nine-yard Maharashtrian Marathamoli drape, its centre pleat brought between the legs and tucked in at the back, to the light, fine-textured Bengali tant in cotton.

These dress reforms set the stage for the broader Tanzimat program, launched in 1839, which sought to modernize and centralize the Ottoman state, often drawing on European models.

Finely woven interlocked tapestry garments were a privilege of the nobility; in one surviving tunic that was likely royal, the threads number roughly 100 per centimeter (about 250 per inch).

The Wari empire, which rose to power near modern Ayacucho and flourished c. 500–1000 CE, produced fine tapestry weave tunics with bold, highly abstract designs, worn by and buried with elite men, with some of the highest thread counts of any handwoven fabric.

The Tarkhan Dress is the oldest surviving woven garment.

London's punk movement — driven by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren — injected anarchic energy into fashion with bondage suits, safety pins, and deliberately slashed and ripped clothing, and Westwood later reworked Scottish tartan in collections such as Anglomania (1993).

The caliph Umar II (717–720) seems to have been the first to order such marks; al-Mutawakkil (847–861) reissued them, requiring yellow shawl-like head cloths called taylasan.

Etruscan men wore the tebenna, a semicircular mantle draped over the body that is widely considered the ancestor of the Roman toga.

The Indus Valley people also appear to have been early practitioners of textile dyeing.

The style became known as the Thakurbari sari, and she taught it to other women through advertisements in the Bamabodhini Patrika.

The men's thobe (or dishdasha) — a long robe — and the keffiyeh (or ghutra) head covering, held by an egal cord, remained standard dress; in Saudi Arabia they form the official national attire, in everyday and formal versions.

Empresses of the eleventh and twelfth centuries are often shown with a shield-shaped end to the loros, which scholars call the thorakion; whether it was a separate garment is debated.

Men wore the tilmatli, a cloak fastened on one shoulder and described as the most important part of male dress; the finest capes, some of them feathered, could be reserved for the ruler alone.

Hip-hop fashion, the invention of Black and Brown working-class youth — oversized silhouettes, gold chains, branded athletic wear, Timberland boots, and later the work of designers steeped in the culture, such as Pharrell Williams, Virgil Abloh, and Rihanna — became an influence to which twenty-first-century fashion, from luxury labels to everyday dress, owes a debt.

Cities like Timbuktu and Djenné grew into major markets on the trans-Saharan routes.

Tiraz — fabrics bearing embroidered, woven, or occasionally painted inscription bands, often with the name of the ruling caliph — served as both luxury goods and instruments of political authority.

The clearest dress rule in the Inca world concerned tocapu, the small square designs woven into elite garments.

The toga, Rome's most iconic garment, was a large semicircular cloth of wool draped over the body in prescribed folds.

The toga candida, artificially whitened to a brilliant white, was worn by men running for office; it gives us the word "candidate"

The Met describes the bust of Severus Alexander (reigned 222 to 235 CE) as wearing a toga contabulata, with a large overfold across the chest, a type distinctive of later Roman portraits in formal civic dress.

The toga picta, dyed purple and embroidered in gold, was worn by generals celebrating a triumph and, under the emperors, by consuls and by praetors presiding at the games

The toga praetexta, with a purple border, was worn by magistrates and priests — and by freeborn children

The toga pulla, in dark wool, was worn in mourning

The toga virilis, plain and undyed, was worn by adult male citizens; putting it on for the first time, usually between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, marked a boy's coming of age

A top hat, by far the dominant hat for all occasions

High-status Celts wore the torc, a heavy neck ring, often of gold.

Trabea: a toga ornamented with purple horizontal stripes.

Along the West African coast, European traders — the Portuguese from the fifteenth century, followed by the Dutch and English — brought trade cloth, much of it Indian cotton re-exported through Europe alongside European fabrics, which African consumers adopted selectively, according to consistent preferences for particular colors and patterns.

The trans-Saharan trade routes that connected West Africa to North Africa and the Mediterranean profoundly shaped the region's textile culture.

Much of the pile dwellers' clothing was woven from linen and nettle, or from tree bast, the inner bark of trees, usually lime.

The famous "Priest-King" statue shows a figure wearing a trefoil-patterned shawl draped over one shoulder, suggesting that even in this early period, textile decoration and draping style carried social meaning.

Early in the century, men still wore knee breeches or tight pantaloons, but by mid-century the frock coat worn with long trousers had become standard daytime dress.

The doublet, a fitted padded jacket, was paired with trunk hose — short, puffed breeches stuffed with padding called bombast to achieve a rounded shape.

Beneath the toga, both men and women wore a tunica — a simple sewn garment similar to the Greek chiton.

Sultan Mahmud II's clothing reforms — first for his new army in the late 1820s, then for officials of every rank in 1829 — replaced the traditional turban with the fez — a brimless red felt cap.

The researchers who studied it think that every member of a Pueblo community, from infants to adults, probably owned a turkey-feather blanket.

Coromandel dyers drew reds from chay root and blue from indigo, and possibly yellow from turmeric.

Shoes were leather turnshoes, stitched inside out and then turned so the seam sat on the inside.

From the late 1910s through the interwar years, Coco Chanel brought a revolutionary approach: her little black dress, tweed suits, and jersey knits transformed luxury from ostentatious ornament into understated elegance.

The Twelve Symbols of imperial authority — sun, moon, stars, mountain, dragon, pheasant, and six other motifs — also adorned the Qing emperors' robes, linking Manchu rulers to symbols of the natural universe said to date back to around 2000 BCE.

These early Peruvian weavers produced remarkably sophisticated fabrics, most of them made by twining — twisting pairs of weft threads around the warp threads by hand — alongside a smaller number of plain-woven cloths.

One of the most prized colors was Tyrian purple, extracted in tiny quantities from murex sea snails and so costly that it became a lasting symbol of power.

The basic dress of a Heian court lady was a robe called the uchiki, worn over an unlined robe called the hitoe, with a red divided skirt (hakama) and, beneath everything, a white kosode.

Recurring elements include makara kundala earrings shaped as sea-creature heads; the channavira, a jewelled cross-belt over the chest, with a version for goddesses that is common in early Chola bronzes; the udarabandha band around the stomach; the katisutra or mekhala girdle worn over the drape, on male figures usually fastened with a lion-head clasp; keyura and other armlets on the upper arm; bangles; and anklets.

The umbo was a bunch of cloth pulled up from beneath the sinus and draped over it.

Silla had adopted Tang-style court dress for its officials in 649, shortly before it unified the peninsula, and Unified Silla (668–935 CE) kept close ties with the Tang, so its dress shared Tang design features.

After Mahmud II abolished the Janissaries in 1826 and created a new Western-organized army, the robes and turbans of earlier centuries gave way to Western-style uniforms, and the sultans themselves came to dress like Western commanders, in dark suits of black or dark blue, with jackets embroidered at the collar and cuffs and trousers with bands down the sides.

Men wore a tunic called an unku, woven as one piece of cloth, folded, and sewn up the sides, with a cloak on top in cold weather.

Chola bronze figures depict unstitched wrapped lower garments and elaborate ornaments.

Its temple bronzes show deities in wrapped unstitched garments, the folds of the lower cloth arranged in a regular, schematic pattern from the Chola period onward, yet rendered so lightly that the figures are "barely covered by garments and ornaments that move, yet cling to the bodies."

Designers such as Berlin's Natascha von Hirschhausen and Estonia's Reet Aus have answered with zero-waste pattern cutting and upcycled materials made from factory leftovers.

They are credited with developing the upright loom.

Early forms included the üsküf, worn by sultans and by the Janissaries, and the sultans wrapped a turban around it when they attended council meetings.

Dhamija notes that both wore a wrapped head covering, the usnisa, quite distinct from the later turban, and she records a post-Vedic breast cloth, the pratidi.

By post-Vedic times these draped garments had developed into a costume with names of its own: the antariya, a lower wrapper held in place by a sash or a girdle of jewelry, and the uttariya, an upper wrapper draped in many folds; the dhoti, wrapped and tucked into a kind of unstitched pantaloon and still widely worn by men, continues the same unstitched principle.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, anyone with pretensions to elegance wore vair and miniver, furs made from the skins of northern squirrels, until sable, lynx, and other exotic furs replaced them in the 1450s.

Veiling practices ranged from the light head covering worn in daily life to the large outdoor wrap and separate face veil, such as the burqu', worn by many urban women in public.

The standard male garment was a single length of cloth wrapped at the waist — the veshti of Tamil usage.

In the Andes, weavers trained in Inca traditions went on producing fine cumbi tapestry cloth after the conquest, weaving imported Chinese silk and Spanish silver threads with Inca techniques and motifs, alongside the traditional camelid fibers, from alpaca to the prized vicuna.

This created a dual wardrobe of yofuku (Western clothing) and wafuku (Japanese clothing): by the end of the century, businessmen, teachers, doctors, and bankers in the cities wore suits during business hours.

The riveted trousers were called waist overalls; the term "blue jeans" only came into wide use in the 1960s.

Under Louis XIV, the justaucorps, a long coat with wide turned-back cuffs, replaced the doublet as the standard male garment by the 1670s, worn over a waistcoat and paired with breeches and silk stockings.

The Wari empire, which rose to power near modern Ayacucho and flourished c. 500–1000 CE, produced fine tapestry weave tunics with bold, highly abstract designs, worn by and buried with elite men, with some of the highest thread counts of any handwoven fabric.

On the warp-weighted looms of these villages, the warp threads hung vertically, weighted at their lower ends with clay weights, and the cloth could be woven in panels up to about a meter wide.

Zubayda (d. 831), the wife of Harun al-Rashid, is said to have been the first to wear sandals embroidered with gemstones, and a single length of the multicolored silk called washi made for her was said to cost 50,000 dinars.

One of the most significant textile developments of the century was the introduction of wax print cloth to West Africa.

In the settled farming villages of the Neolithic revolution, flax stalks were retted, beaten, and combed, and spinning the fibers onto a spindle produced thread; in the pile dwellings around the Alps, looms for weaving stood in almost every house.

After the Yonghui era they took up the curtained hat, or weimao, with a silk mesh falling from the brim to the neck, and after Wu Zetian's reign the mili died away.

Woad (blue), madder (red), and weld (yellow) were still the staple dye plants of the great Flemish cloth industry centuries later.

After Prince Albert's death in 1861, Queen Victoria wore black for the rest of her life, and mourning dress became an elaborate system: widows wore matte black crape for a year, then moved through stages of half-mourning in gray and shades of purple, with jewelry of black Whitby jet.

Many elite Egyptians of both sexes kept their hair cropped or shaved and wore wigs, made of human hair, for formal occasions.

Women covered their hair with a veil and a wimple, a cloth wrapped around the neck and chin, or with a barbette chin band and linen fillet band around the head.

By the Bronze Age, European communities were dyeing yarns and finished cloth blue, yellow, green, and other colors, with woad among the sources of blue, a far cry from the unadorned animal hides of their Ice Age ancestors.

In the Andes, indigenous communities also domesticated camelids — llamas and alpacas, the alpaca some 6,000–7,000 years ago — and their soft wool became a prized textile fiber alongside cotton.

Numerous spindle whorls and fragments of woven cotton cloth have been recovered from these sites, and the many whorls found in the houses of Mohenjo-daro show that spinning was common there, practised by rich and poor alike.

Evidence from lake dwelling sites in Switzerland and other Alpine regions has preserved remarkable fragments of Neolithic textiles, including woven linen cloth and plant-fiber cordage.

Tūhura Otago Museum adds that censors, who conducted special investigations for the emperor and reported on other officials, had their own badge with a mythical creature, the xiezhi.

Archaeological evidence from the Yangshao culture (c. 5000–3000 BCE) and related Neolithic sites along the Yellow River suggests that silk was being produced by the fourth millennium BCE, and traces of silk protein in graves at Jiahu, in Henan, are about 8,500 years old — though whether the earliest silk came from domesticated silkworms (Bombyx mori) or wild moths is still uncertain.

The Yangshao people of Banpo left fragments of woven cloth on human remains in graves, and spindle whorls — small weighted discs used in hand spinning — are common finds at Neolithic Chinese sites, showing how widespread spinning was.

In Istanbul, elite Ottoman women increasingly adopted Parisian fashion — including corsets and bodices cut in the European manner — while still wearing the ferace outdoor cloak and yashmak face veil in public; by the later decades of the century the yashmak had grown more transparent and the ferace was often worn open.

Outdoors, women covered themselves with a large enveloping cloak called a ferace and a face veil or yaşmak.

This created a dual wardrobe of yofuku (Western clothing) and wafuku (Japanese clothing): by the end of the century, businessmen, teachers, doctors, and bankers in the cities wore suits during business hours.

Yuzen dyeing, named for the Kyoto fan painter Miyazaki Yūzen, whose designs were popular around the 1690s, allowed artisans to paint elaborate pictorial scenes directly onto silk using rice-paste resist techniques, transforming the kimono into a wearable canvas.

Embroidery traditions included zardozi (gold wire embroidery) and chikankari (white-on-white embroidery, which may have begun in the Mughal period and later centered on Lucknow).

Banarasi silk weavers in Varanasi continued weaving silks patterned in gold and silver zari thread — a surviving 19th-century sari blouse of rose silk carries Varanasi-woven zari motifs — adapting designs to changing tastes while drawing on techniques built up over centuries.

In China, the Zhongshan suit (now most commonly known as the Mao suit) emerged as a form of national dress meant to embody modern values and a notion of equality and uniformity in the new Chinese Republic.

In southern Africa, Zulu men and women wore beadwork to indicate status and the passing of rites of passage, and to express group values and identities.

Zulu beadwork — intricate patterns of colored glass beads strung into panels, necklaces, and garment embellishments — used imported European trade beads to create a distinctly African visual language: beadwork was exchanged in courtship and could carry messages through its colors and structure, though styles, colors and their meanings varied between groups, from area to area and from one generation to the next.

In the Pact of Umar, a text of uncertain date, they promise not to imitate Muslims' "garments, the qalansuwa, the turban, footwear, or the parting of the hair," and to bind the zunnar, a belt, round their waists.