Practical functions of clothing include providing the human body protection against weather — strong sunlight, extreme heat or cold, and precipitation — also protection against insects, noxious chemicals, weapons, and contact with abrasive substances. In sum, clothing protects against anything that might injure the naked human body. Humans have shown extreme inventiveness in devising clothing solutions to practical problems.

See: armor, diving suit, bee-keeper's costume, motorcycle leathers, high-visibility clothing, and protective clothing.Clothing as social messageSocial messages sent by clothing, accessories, and decorations can involve social status, occupation, ethnic and religious affiliation, marital status and sexual availability, etc. Humans must know the code in order to recognize the message transmitted. If different groups read the same item of clothing or decoration with different meanings, the wearer may provoke unanticipated responses.

Social status
In many societies, people of high rank reserve special items of clothing or decoration for themselves as symbols of their social status. In ancient times, only Roman senators could wear garments dyed with Tyrian purple; only high-ranking Hawaiian chiefs could wear feather cloaks and palaoa or carved whale teeth. In China before the establishment of the republic, only the emperor could wear yellow. In many cases throughout history, there have been elaborate systems of sumptuary laws regulating who could wear what. In other societies (including most modern societies), no laws prohibit lower-status people from wearing high-status garments, but the high cost of status garments effectively limits purchase and display. In current Western society, only the rich can afford haute couture. The threat of social ostracism may also limit garment choice.

Occupation
Military, police, and firefighters usually wear uniforms, as do workers in many industries. School children often wear school uniforms, while college and university students sometimes wear academic dress. Members of religious orders may wear uniforms known as habits. Sometimes a single item of clothing or a single accessory can declare one's occupation or rank within a profession — for example, the high toque or chef's hat worn by a chief cook.Ethnic, political, and religious affiliationIn many regions of the world, national costumes and styles in clothing and ornament declare membership in a certain village, caste, religion, etc. A Scotsman declares his clan with his tartan. A Sikh may display his religious affiliation by wearing a turban and other traditional clothing. A French peasant woman may identify her village with her cap or coif.

Clothes can also proclaim dissent from cultural norms and mainstream beliefs, as well as personal independence. In 19th-century Europe, artists and writers lived la vie de Bohème and dressed to shock: George Sand in men's clothing, female emancipationists in bloomers, male artists in velvet waistcoats and gaudy neckcloths. Bohemians, beatniks, hippies, Goths, punks and Skinheads have continued the (countercultural) tradition in the 20th-century West. Now that haute couture plagiarizes street fashion within a year or so, street fashion may have lost some of its power to shock, but it still motivates millions trying to look hip and cool.

Marital status
Hindu women, once married, wear sindoor, a red powder, in the parting of their hair; if widowed, they abandon sindoor and jewelry and wear simple white clothing. Men and women of the Western world may wear wedding rings to indicate their marital status. See also Visual markers of marital status.

Attitudes and Perceived Attitudes Toward Sexuality
Throughout history, ideas of human sexuality have been inextricably linked to complex cultural, social and personal beliefs. In its role as both covering and adornment for the human body, and as the outward face humans present to their peers in society, clothing has historically proved to be a charged and versatile symbol.

Clothing's use as a representation of sexuality and of larger cultural identity varies with the same extraordinarily wide range and complexity of human beliefs themselves. What constitutes beauty, desirability, morality, modesty and other subjective intangibles varies radically from culture to culture, within different contexts in the same culture, and over time as different fashions rise and fall.
Attitudes about the morals and messages perceived to be conveyed by clothing have historically created much controversy between social and cultural groups. The inherent subjectivity of symbolic meaning presents issues for cross-cultural communications. Defined by sociological factors such as cultural background, religious convictions, class, age, gender, and even personal experience, the inherent subjectivity of the perceived symbolic meaning of clothing makes clothing a common point of contention between individuals as well.

The failure to recognize that cultural differences in the sexual meaning of clothing can hold distinctly different meanings for different cultures or individuals can create tremendous misunderstandings between peoples. For example, some Muslim women proudly wear a head or body covering as an expression of modesty (see hijab, burqa or bourqa, chador and abaya), while others are required to wear them by male elders of their communities; many Western Muslims and women's rights activists fail to see the distinction, and much controversy has taken place as a result. As another example, persons of a particular background may feel that a woman's choice of dress indicates flirtatious intent or even sexual availability, while the woman may feel quite differently and may be expressing her own standard of beauty.

Sexual fetishes involving clothing
Because clothing and adornment are closely related to ideas of human sexuality and sexual display, humans have developed clothing fetishes. They may be strongly aroused by the sight of another person wearing clothing and accessories they consider arousing or sexually exciting. Sometimes the object of clothing becomes the object of arousal itself. Fetishes have been documented in every culture and have been recorded throughout history. Common fetishes involving clothing include arousal by or involving shoes, leather, uniforms, or lingerie.

Religious habits and special religious clothing
Religious clothing might be considered a special case of occupational clothing. Sometimes it is worn only during the performance of religious ceremonies. However, it may also be worn everyday as a marker for special religious status.

Christian liturgical clothing (vestments)
Christian clerical clothing (non-liturgical dress)
Christian monastic habits
Buddhist monastic dress
Orthodox Jewish dress
Hindu religious dress
Muslim religious dress
Paper
Rubber
PVC
Reinforcing materials such as wood, bone, plastic and metal may be used to stiffen garments such as corsets, bodices, or swimsuits.

Clothing maintenance
Clothing, once manufactured, suffers assault both from within and from without. The human body inside sheds skin cells and body oils, and exudes sweat, urine, and feces. From the outside, sun damage, damp, abrasion, dirt, and other indignities afflict the garment. Fleas and lice take up residence in clothing seams. Well-worn clothing, if not cleaned and refurbished, will smell, itch, look scruffy, and lose functionality as when buttons fall off and zippers fail.

In some cases, people simply wear an item of clothing until it falls apart. Cleaning leather presents difficulties; one cannot wash bark cloth tapa without dissolving it. Owners may patch tears and rips, and brush off surface dirt, but old leather and bark clothing will always look old.But most clothing consists of cloth, and most cloth can be laundered and mended (patching, darning, but compare felt.

Humans have developed many specialized methods for laundering, ranging from the earliest "pound clothes against rocks in running stream" to the latest in electronic washing machines and dry cleaning (dissolving dirt in solvents other than water).
In past times, mending was an art. A meticulous tailor or seamstress could mend rips with thread raveled from hems and seam edges so skillfully that the darn was practically invisible. When the raw material — cloth — was worth more than labor, it made sense to expend labor in saving it. Today clothing is considered a consumable item. Mass-manufactured clothing is less expensive than the time it would take to repair it. Many people prefer to buy a new piece of clothing rather than to spend their time mending old clothes. But the thrifty still replace zippers and buttons and sew up ripped hems.

The life cycle of clothing
Used, no-longer-wearable clothing was once desirable raw material for quilts, rag rugs, bandages, and many other household uses. It could also be recycled into paper. Now it is usually just tossed into the trash. Used but still wearable clothing can be sold at consignment shops, flea markets, online auction, or just donated to charity. Charities usually skim the best of the clothing to sell in their own thrift stores and sell the rest to merchants, who bale it up and ship it to poor Third World countries, where vendors bid for the bales and then make what profit they can selling used clothing.

Early 21st-century clothing styles
Western fashion has to a certain extent become international fashion, as Western media and styles penetrate all parts of the world. Very few parts of the world remain where people do not wear items of cheap, mass-produced Western clothing. Even people in poor countries can afford used clothing from richer Western countries.
However, people may wear ethnic or national dress on special occasions or if carrying out certain roles or occupations. For example, most Japanese women have adopted Western-style dress for daily wear, but will still wear expensive silk kimonos on special occasions. Items of Western dress may also appear worn or accessorized in distinctive, non-Western ways. A Tongan man may combine a used T-shirt with a Tongan wrapped skirt, or tupenu.Western fashion, too, does not function monolithically. It comes in many varieties, from expensive haute couture to thrift store gruMainstream Western or international stylesInternational standard business attire global in influence, just as business functions globally.
Haute couture

Regional styles
Clothing of Europe and Russia
Clothing in the Americas
United States mainstream fashion
For example: "Catalogue" fashion, regional styles such as preppy or Western wear.

United States alternative fashion
These fashions are often associated with fans of various musical styles.
See also Goth, Hippie, Grunge, Hip-hop, and Fetish-wear
Clothing in Asia

Origin and history of clothing
According to archaeologists and anthropologists, the earliest clothing probably consisted of fur, leather, leaves or grass, draped, wrapped or tied about the body for protection from the elements. Knowledge of such clothing remains inferential, since clothing materials deteriorate quickly compared to stone, bone, shell and metal artifacts. Archeologists have identified very early sewing needles of bone and ivory from about 30,000 BC, found near Kostenki, Russia, in 1988.
Mark Stone, an anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, has conducted a genetic analysis of human body lice that shows they first evolved only 72,000 to 42,000 years ago. Since most humans have very sparse body hair, body lice require clothing to survive, so this suggests a surprisingly recent date for the invention of clothing. Its invention may have coincided with the spread of modern Homo sapiens from the warm climate of Africa, thought to have begun between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago.

(Note that some religions dispute the scientific accounts of human evolution and early history, and embrace accounts of human origins, including the origins of clothing, based on sacred texts or myths. See Traditional accounts of the origin of clothing.)
Some human cultures, such as the various peoples of the Arctic Circle, until recently made their clothing entirely of furs and skins, cutting clothing to fit and decorating lavishly.

Other cultures have supplemented or replaced leather and skins with cloth: woven, knitted, or twined from various animal and vegetable fibres. See weaving, knitting, and twining.Although modern consumers take clothing for granted, making the fabrics that go into clothing is not easy. One sign of this is that the textile industry was the first to be mechanized during the Industrial Revolution; before the invention of the powered loom, textile production was a tedious and labor-intensive process. Therefore, methods were developed for making most efficient use of textiles.

One approach simply involves draping the cloth. Many peoples wore, and still wear, garments consisting of rectangles of cloth wrapped to fit — for example, the Scottish kilt or the Javanese sarong. Pins or belts hold the garments in place. The precious cloth remains uncut, and people of various sizes can wear the garment.
Another approach involves cutting and sewing the cloth, but using every bit of the cloth rectangle in constructing the clothing. The tailor may cut triangular pieces from one corner of the cloth, and then add them elsewhere as gussets. Traditional European patterns for men's shirts and women's chemises take this approach.

Modern European fashion treats cloth much more prodigally, typically cutting in such a way as to leave various odd-shaped cloth remnants. Industrial sewing operations sell these as waste; home sewers may turn them into quilts.
In the thousands of years that humans have spent constructing clothing, they have created an astonishing array of styles, many of which we can reconstruct from surviving garments, photos, paintings, mosaics, etc., as well as from written descriptions. Costume history serves as a source of inspiration to current fashion designers, as well as a topic of professional interest to costumers constructing for plays, films, television, and historical reenactment.

Future trends
As technologies change, so will clothing.

Man-made fibers such as nylon, polyester, Lycra, and Gore-Tex already account for much of the clothing market. Many more types of fibers will certainly be developed, possibly using nanotechnology. For example, military uniforms may stiffen when hit by bullets, filter out poisonous chemicals, and treat wounds.
"Smart" clothing will incorporate electronics. Clothing may incorporate wearable computers, flexible wearable displays (possibly leading to fully animated clothing and some forms of invisibility cloaks), medical sensors, etc.
Present-day ready-to-wear technologies will presumably give way to computer-aided custom manufacturing. Harmless laser beams (usually white light) will measure the customer; computers will draw up a custom pattern and execute it in the customer's choice of cloth.

Clothing industry
The clothing industry is concentrated outside of western Europe and America, and garment workers often have to labor under poor conditions. Coalitions of NGO's and trade unions like the Clean clothes campaign (CCC) seek to improve these conditions as much as possible by sponsoring awareness-raising events, which draw the attention of both the media and the general public to the workers' plight.

See: armor, diving suit, bee-keeper's costume, motorcycle leathers, high-visibility clothing, and protective clothing.Clothing as social messageSocial messages sent by clothing, accessories, and decorations can involve social status, occupation, ethnic and religious affiliation, marital status and sexual availability, etc. Humans must know the code in order to recognize the message transmitted. If different groups read the same item of clothing or decoration with different meanings, the wearer may provoke unanticipated responses.

Social status
In many societies, people of high rank reserve special items of clothing or decoration for themselves as symbols of their social status. In ancient times, only Roman senators could wear garments dyed with Tyrian purple; only high-ranking Hawaiian chiefs could wear feather cloaks and palaoa or carved whale teeth. In China before the establishment of the republic, only the emperor could wear yellow. In many cases throughout history, there have been elaborate systems of sumptuary laws regulating who could wear what. In other societies (including most modern societies), no laws prohibit lower-status people from wearing high-status garments, but the high cost of status garments effectively limits purchase and display. In current Western society, only the rich can afford haute couture. The threat of social ostracism may also limit garment choice.

Occupation
Military, police, and firefighters usually wear uniforms, as do workers in many industries. School children often wear school uniforms, while college and university students sometimes wear academic dress. Members of religious orders may wear uniforms known as habits. Sometimes a single item of clothing or a single accessory can declare one's occupation or rank within a profession — for example, the high toque or chef's hat worn by a chief cook.Ethnic, political, and religious affiliationIn many regions of the world, national costumes and styles in clothing and ornament declare membership in a certain village, caste, religion, etc. A Scotsman declares his clan with his tartan. A Sikh may display his religious affiliation by wearing a turban and other traditional clothing. A French peasant woman may identify her village with her cap or coif.

Clothes can also proclaim dissent from cultural norms and mainstream beliefs, as well as personal independence. In 19th-century Europe, artists and writers lived la vie de Bohème and dressed to shock: George Sand in men's clothing, female emancipationists in bloomers, male artists in velvet waistcoats and gaudy neckcloths. Bohemians, beatniks, hippies, Goths, punks and Skinheads have continued the (countercultural) tradition in the 20th-century West. Now that haute couture plagiarizes street fashion within a year or so, street fashion may have lost some of its power to shock, but it still motivates millions trying to look hip and cool.

Marital status
Hindu women, once married, wear sindoor, a red powder, in the parting of their hair; if widowed, they abandon sindoor and jewelry and wear simple white clothing. Men and women of the Western world may wear wedding rings to indicate their marital status. See also Visual markers of marital status.

Attitudes and Perceived Attitudes Toward Sexuality
Throughout history, ideas of human sexuality have been inextricably linked to complex cultural, social and personal beliefs. In its role as both covering and adornment for the human body, and as the outward face humans present to their peers in society, clothing has historically proved to be a charged and versatile symbol.

Clothing's use as a representation of sexuality and of larger cultural identity varies with the same extraordinarily wide range and complexity of human beliefs themselves. What constitutes beauty, desirability, morality, modesty and other subjective intangibles varies radically from culture to culture, within different contexts in the same culture, and over time as different fashions rise and fall.
Attitudes about the morals and messages perceived to be conveyed by clothing have historically created much controversy between social and cultural groups. The inherent subjectivity of symbolic meaning presents issues for cross-cultural communications. Defined by sociological factors such as cultural background, religious convictions, class, age, gender, and even personal experience, the inherent subjectivity of the perceived symbolic meaning of clothing makes clothing a common point of contention between individuals as well.

The failure to recognize that cultural differences in the sexual meaning of clothing can hold distinctly different meanings for different cultures or individuals can create tremendous misunderstandings between peoples. For example, some Muslim women proudly wear a head or body covering as an expression of modesty (see hijab, burqa or bourqa, chador and abaya), while others are required to wear them by male elders of their communities; many Western Muslims and women's rights activists fail to see the distinction, and much controversy has taken place as a result. As another example, persons of a particular background may feel that a woman's choice of dress indicates flirtatious intent or even sexual availability, while the woman may feel quite differently and may be expressing her own standard of beauty.

Sexual fetishes involving clothing
Because clothing and adornment are closely related to ideas of human sexuality and sexual display, humans have developed clothing fetishes. They may be strongly aroused by the sight of another person wearing clothing and accessories they consider arousing or sexually exciting. Sometimes the object of clothing becomes the object of arousal itself. Fetishes have been documented in every culture and have been recorded throughout history. Common fetishes involving clothing include arousal by or involving shoes, leather, uniforms, or lingerie.

Religious habits and special religious clothing
Religious clothing might be considered a special case of occupational clothing. Sometimes it is worn only during the performance of religious ceremonies. However, it may also be worn everyday as a marker for special religious status.

Christian liturgical clothing (vestments)
Christian clerical clothing (non-liturgical dress)
Christian monastic habits
Buddhist monastic dress
Orthodox Jewish dress
Hindu religious dress
Muslim religious dress
Paper
Rubber
PVC
Reinforcing materials such as wood, bone, plastic and metal may be used to stiffen garments such as corsets, bodices, or swimsuits.

Clothing maintenance
Clothing, once manufactured, suffers assault both from within and from without. The human body inside sheds skin cells and body oils, and exudes sweat, urine, and feces. From the outside, sun damage, damp, abrasion, dirt, and other indignities afflict the garment. Fleas and lice take up residence in clothing seams. Well-worn clothing, if not cleaned and refurbished, will smell, itch, look scruffy, and lose functionality as when buttons fall off and zippers fail.

In some cases, people simply wear an item of clothing until it falls apart. Cleaning leather presents difficulties; one cannot wash bark cloth tapa without dissolving it. Owners may patch tears and rips, and brush off surface dirt, but old leather and bark clothing will always look old.But most clothing consists of cloth, and most cloth can be laundered and mended (patching, darning, but compare felt.

Humans have developed many specialized methods for laundering, ranging from the earliest "pound clothes against rocks in running stream" to the latest in electronic washing machines and dry cleaning (dissolving dirt in solvents other than water).
In past times, mending was an art. A meticulous tailor or seamstress could mend rips with thread raveled from hems and seam edges so skillfully that the darn was practically invisible. When the raw material — cloth — was worth more than labor, it made sense to expend labor in saving it. Today clothing is considered a consumable item. Mass-manufactured clothing is less expensive than the time it would take to repair it. Many people prefer to buy a new piece of clothing rather than to spend their time mending old clothes. But the thrifty still replace zippers and buttons and sew up ripped hems.

The life cycle of clothing
Used, no-longer-wearable clothing was once desirable raw material for quilts, rag rugs, bandages, and many other household uses. It could also be recycled into paper. Now it is usually just tossed into the trash. Used but still wearable clothing can be sold at consignment shops, flea markets, online auction, or just donated to charity. Charities usually skim the best of the clothing to sell in their own thrift stores and sell the rest to merchants, who bale it up and ship it to poor Third World countries, where vendors bid for the bales and then make what profit they can selling used clothing.

Early 21st-century clothing styles
Western fashion has to a certain extent become international fashion, as Western media and styles penetrate all parts of the world. Very few parts of the world remain where people do not wear items of cheap, mass-produced Western clothing. Even people in poor countries can afford used clothing from richer Western countries.
However, people may wear ethnic or national dress on special occasions or if carrying out certain roles or occupations. For example, most Japanese women have adopted Western-style dress for daily wear, but will still wear expensive silk kimonos on special occasions. Items of Western dress may also appear worn or accessorized in distinctive, non-Western ways. A Tongan man may combine a used T-shirt with a Tongan wrapped skirt, or tupenu.Western fashion, too, does not function monolithically. It comes in many varieties, from expensive haute couture to thrift store gruMainstream Western or international stylesInternational standard business attire global in influence, just as business functions globally.
Haute couture

Regional styles
Clothing of Europe and Russia
Clothing in the Americas
United States mainstream fashion
For example: "Catalogue" fashion, regional styles such as preppy or Western wear.

United States alternative fashion
These fashions are often associated with fans of various musical styles.
See also Goth, Hippie, Grunge, Hip-hop, and Fetish-wear
Clothing in Asia

Origin and history of clothing
According to archaeologists and anthropologists, the earliest clothing probably consisted of fur, leather, leaves or grass, draped, wrapped or tied about the body for protection from the elements. Knowledge of such clothing remains inferential, since clothing materials deteriorate quickly compared to stone, bone, shell and metal artifacts. Archeologists have identified very early sewing needles of bone and ivory from about 30,000 BC, found near Kostenki, Russia, in 1988.
Mark Stone, an anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, has conducted a genetic analysis of human body lice that shows they first evolved only 72,000 to 42,000 years ago. Since most humans have very sparse body hair, body lice require clothing to survive, so this suggests a surprisingly recent date for the invention of clothing. Its invention may have coincided with the spread of modern Homo sapiens from the warm climate of Africa, thought to have begun between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago.

(Note that some religions dispute the scientific accounts of human evolution and early history, and embrace accounts of human origins, including the origins of clothing, based on sacred texts or myths. See Traditional accounts of the origin of clothing.)
Some human cultures, such as the various peoples of the Arctic Circle, until recently made their clothing entirely of furs and skins, cutting clothing to fit and decorating lavishly.

Other cultures have supplemented or replaced leather and skins with cloth: woven, knitted, or twined from various animal and vegetable fibres. See weaving, knitting, and twining.Although modern consumers take clothing for granted, making the fabrics that go into clothing is not easy. One sign of this is that the textile industry was the first to be mechanized during the Industrial Revolution; before the invention of the powered loom, textile production was a tedious and labor-intensive process. Therefore, methods were developed for making most efficient use of textiles.

One approach simply involves draping the cloth. Many peoples wore, and still wear, garments consisting of rectangles of cloth wrapped to fit — for example, the Scottish kilt or the Javanese sarong. Pins or belts hold the garments in place. The precious cloth remains uncut, and people of various sizes can wear the garment.
Another approach involves cutting and sewing the cloth, but using every bit of the cloth rectangle in constructing the clothing. The tailor may cut triangular pieces from one corner of the cloth, and then add them elsewhere as gussets. Traditional European patterns for men's shirts and women's chemises take this approach.

Modern European fashion treats cloth much more prodigally, typically cutting in such a way as to leave various odd-shaped cloth remnants. Industrial sewing operations sell these as waste; home sewers may turn them into quilts.
In the thousands of years that humans have spent constructing clothing, they have created an astonishing array of styles, many of which we can reconstruct from surviving garments, photos, paintings, mosaics, etc., as well as from written descriptions. Costume history serves as a source of inspiration to current fashion designers, as well as a topic of professional interest to costumers constructing for plays, films, television, and historical reenactment.

Future trends
As technologies change, so will clothing.

Man-made fibers such as nylon, polyester, Lycra, and Gore-Tex already account for much of the clothing market. Many more types of fibers will certainly be developed, possibly using nanotechnology. For example, military uniforms may stiffen when hit by bullets, filter out poisonous chemicals, and treat wounds.
"Smart" clothing will incorporate electronics. Clothing may incorporate wearable computers, flexible wearable displays (possibly leading to fully animated clothing and some forms of invisibility cloaks), medical sensors, etc.
Present-day ready-to-wear technologies will presumably give way to computer-aided custom manufacturing. Harmless laser beams (usually white light) will measure the customer; computers will draw up a custom pattern and execute it in the customer's choice of cloth.

Clothing industry
The clothing industry is concentrated outside of western Europe and America, and garment workers often have to labor under poor conditions. Coalitions of NGO's and trade unions like the Clean clothes campaign (CCC) seek to improve these conditions as much as possible by sponsoring awareness-raising events, which draw the attention of both the media and the general public to the workers' plight.

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