Clothing History of the Americas
Explore clothing in the Americas, from early textiles and Maya, Aztec, and Inca dress to colonial clothing, frontier workwear, and modern fashion.
Trace clothing in North, Central, and South America through six periods, with topic guides for Aztec and Inca dress and American frontier clothing. The era labels are shared with the rest of this site to make comparison easier; they do not imply that Indigenous American societies followed European historical divisions.
Start with the medieval Americas survey for Maya, Andean, and Pueblo clothing, the Aztec and Inca guides for closer studies, or the frontier guide for nineteenth-century workwear.
Sources: The Digital Florentine Codex; Tunic (1957.136); Denim: Fashion's Frontier.The Americas through time
Prehistoric American Clothing
Before 3000 BCE
From Arctic fur parkas to Peruvian cotton textiles, the diverse climates of the Americas spurred remarkably varied clothing traditions across thousands of years of prehistoric innovation.
Ancient Americas Clothing
3000 BCE - 500 CE
Ancient American civilizations produced technically sophisticated textiles, from embroidered Andean mantles of cotton and camelid fiber to Maya cotton weaving.
Medieval Americas Clothing
500 - 1500 CE
The civilizations of the medieval Americas — from Aztec featherworkers to Inca master weavers — created textile traditions of astonishing complexity.
Early Modern Americas Clothing
1500 - 1800
Colonial conquest, Indigenous resilience, and the blending of European, African, and Native traditions created a complex and layered clothing landscape across the Americas.
19th Century Americas Clothing
1800 - 1900
From frontier buckskin to department store ready-to-wear, the 19th-century Americas saw clothing evolve alongside westward expansion, industrialization, and the forging of new national identities.
Modern American Clothing
1900 - Present
Explore clothing in the Americas since 1900 through blue jeans, American sportswear, hip-hop style, and examples of contemporary dress in Latin America.
Garments, cultures, and traditions
American Frontier Clothing: What Cowboys, Pioneers, and Miners Really WoreAmerican frontier clothing and old West fashion beyond the movies: buckskin and blanket coats of the fur trade, calico and homespun on the pioneer trails, riveted work pants, vaquero-born cowboy gear, and Native trade-cloth dress.
Aztec Clothing: Mexica Dress, Textiles, and Tribute ClothWhat the Mexica wore before and after the Spanish conquest: loincloth and cape for men, blouse and wrapped skirt for women, cotton for the privileged, maguey for the poor, and an empire that collected cloth by the thousand.
History of Denim and Jeans: From Workwear to FashionSeparate denim's textile history from the history of riveted jeans, then follow work clothing into leisurewear, counterculture, and designer collections.
Inca Clothing and TextilesHow people dressed in the Inca Empire — tunics and wrap dresses of camelid fiber and cotton, fine tapestry cloth woven for the state, tocapu designs controlled by the ruler, and the survival of Inca weaving after the Spanish conquest.