Beginnings Of Fashion: Why Do We Wear Clothes?

A team of researchers led by Dr Ian Gilligan, Honorary Associate in the discipline of Archaeology at the University of Sydney, are the first to suggest that eyed needles were a new technological innovation used to adorn clothing for social and cultural purposes, marking the major shift from clothes as protection to clothes as an expression of identity.

“Eyed needle tools are an important development in prehistory because they document a transition in the function of clothing from utilitarian to social purposes,” says Dr Ian Gilligan.

Dr Gilligan and his co-authors reinterpret the evidence of recent discoveries in the development of clothing in their paper, Paleolithic eyed needles and the evolution of dress.

“Why do we wear clothes? We assume that it’s part of being human, but once you look at different cultures, you realise that people existed and functioned perfectly adequately in society without clothes,” Dr Gilligan says. “What intrigues me is the transition of clothing from being a physical necessity in certain environments, to a social necessity in all environments.”

The earliest known eyed needles appeared approximately 40,000 years ago in Siberia. One of the most iconic of Paleolithic artefacts from the Stone Age, eyed needles are more difficult to make when compared to bone awls, which sufficed for creating fitted clothing. Bone awls are tools made of animal bones that are sharpened to a point. Eyed needles are modified bone awls, with a perforated hole (eye) to facilitate the sewing of sinew or thread.

As evidence suggests bone awls were already being used to create tailored clothes, the innovation of eyed needles may reflect the production of more complex, layered clothing, as well as the adornment of clothes by attaching beads and other small decorative items onto garments.

“We know that clothing up until the last glacial cycle was only used on an ad hoc basis. The classic tools that we associate with that are hide scrapers or stone scrapers, and we find them appearing and going away during the different phases of the last ice ages,” Dr Gilligan explains

Dr Gilligan and his co-authors argue that clothing became an item of decoration because traditional body decoration methods, like body painting with ochre or deliberate scarification, weren’t possible during the latter part of the last ice age in colder parts of Eurasia, as people were needing to wear clothes all the time to survive.