Have you ever been threading one leg through a pair of pants in the morning and wondered…why do we wear clothes anyway? Or wondered why pockets in clothing designed for girls are sometimes smaller than the pockets in clothing designed for boys? In this episode we tackle questions about clothes with fashion historian and writer Amber Butchart.
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- Many people think we started to wear clothes for practical reasons of warmth and protection because we don’t have fur like other animals.
- The particular types and styles of clothes we wear are connected to where we live and what kind of culture we grow up in, and what time period we’re living in.
- Pockets used to be a separate garment, two pockets on a string that women would tie around their waist to be worn underneath their overskirt. This allowed women to carry all kinds of things in their pockets.
- In modern times, women's clothes sometimes have no pockets, which makes clothes cheaper to produce, or their pockets are smaller because in current fashion clothes for women are often mean to be tighter than men's clothes.
- Cultural codes built up across time determine what parts of the body should be covered up and which can be exposed.
- But when it comes to fashion, what you wear communicates something about you to the outside world, and clothing has gone through many changes throughout history.
- Clothing today can communicate a lot of different ideas. Everybody makes a decision every morning when they get up as to what they're going to put on their body.
