The Evolution of Fashion Through Human Behavior

P icture ane of those ascent-of-man charts that depict a progression of profiles, from an ape walking on all fours to a slumped hominid to a modern human standing erect. What's missing? The modern human is naked. No accessories!

We may not discover a affiliate on fashion in science textbooks but ornamentation and tailoring accept played feature roles in our success as a species. On the prehistoric catwalks we creamed the Neanderthal competition on both functionality and style and went on to become the dominant hominid in virtually every climate zone on world.

As I discovered through a host of interviews with paleontologists, anthropologists, evolutionary psychologists, and fashion historians, dress don't just make the man—they make us human. Apparel and body ornament evolved in a suite of homo communication tools and behaviors that have shaped the runway of homo development and culture.

Dress don't only make the human—they brand us human.

Fashion has been as "crucial to the emergence of the mod man every bit music and trip the light fantastic toe, art and humor, and linguistic communication," says evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico. "It's a legitimate part of human nature."

That'south hardly news to the well-dressed man and adult female. Still, putting way and science in the same judgement can seem a little strange. So, to reassure you that the pride and excitement you feel when yous put on an Armani suit or a pair of Manolo Blahniks is emotionally legit, allow's plow back to our evolutionary past. The dawn of clothes reveals that we were born to strut.

Southince at that place are no prehistoric
scraps of article of clothing lying effectually, scientists have had to get artistic in their
quest to pin downwardly the point at which humans started wearing duds. They began to
scratch their heads and realized that one approach might exist an analysis of
lice. Trunk lice, adapted to clothing, seemed to be key.

Indeed, a recent analysis of lice
Deoxyribonucleic acid by David Reed, acquaintance curator of mammals at the Florida Museum of
Natural History, establish that humans probably wore their get-go clothing, torso
lice included, about 170,000 years ago, some 830,000 years after our ancestors
lost their body hair.

Why we shed our body hair is
debatable. One leading theory is that losing it allowed us to shed pre-clothing
lice and other blood-sucking, deadly parasites, which infested our ancestral
fur. Another theory is that when nosotros emerged from the forest to the blazing
savannah, nosotros needed to cool our body temperature, and exposed peel sweats.

In any effect, says Ian Gilligan, a
bioanthropologist at the Australian National University, who is an adept in
the prehistoric development of clothing, the engagement of 170,000 years ago makes
sense, as it roughly coincides with the penultimate ice age, 180,000 years ago.
"Humans only began to wear clothing when they needed to proceed warm," he says. Gilligan says that a few degrees beneath zero Celsius represents "the limit of human cold tolerance without protection."

Even before the widespread advent
of wearing apparel to keep warm, early humans decorated their bodies. "It is highly
probable that we were adorning ourselves with torso paints, found materials, and
animal skins for the entire history of our species," says Nina Jablonski, a
paleobiologist at Pennsylvania State University, and the author of Skin: A Natural History. "Beautification
creates a visual shorthand that tells others instantly who nosotros are, who we want
to associate with, and who we wish to be," she says.

In
the fossil tape, ornamentation began showing up roughly 75,000 years agone.
Archeologists believe ostrich shells were used as beads and red ochre was
probably used as body pigment. Past the fourth dimension of the Upper Paleolithic in Europe, 35,000
years ago, prove of bone needles suggests that people were making sophisticated,
tailored clothing with multiple layers that shielded them from the cold.

Neanderthals' lack of sophisticated clothing contributed to their extinction.

Neanderthal vesture, in
comparison, was shoddy. Gilligan argues that Neanderthals' lack of sophisticated
clothing contributed to their extinction, which happened during some sudden,
severe cold snaps around 40,000 to 35,000 years ago. "Only modern humans
equipped with tailored vesture managed to migrate into those most thermally
challenging places, and but after they had invented eyed needles and other
technologies for manufacturing sophisticated, multi-layered habiliment—including
the world'southward first underwear," Gilligan says.

During the Upper Paleolithic, our ancestors
poured huge amounts of time into ornamenting their garments. In Sungir, an
archaeological site due east of Moscow from 26,000 years ago, effectually 12,000 pierced mammoth ivory beads
were found in the graves of 3 individuals—a male person adult and two children—that
had been sewn onto manufactures of their vesture. Archeologists estimated that it
would have taken an hour to make each bead with stone tools—thousands
of hours of work. "It's non simply a little ornamentation," says anthropologist
Robert Boyd, coauthor ofNot By
Genes Lonely: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. "Information technology's a
big investment. This is a display of wealth."

And so, you lot can cease fretting virtually
being a dress horse; showing off in your finest threads is not fiddling only an
innate part of homo nature. Polly Wiessner, an anthropologist and professor at
the Academy of Utah, has studied how hunter-gatherer tribes in the Kalahari
Desert utilise body beautification to enhance personal identity and social
interaction. "The fact that all humans feel well when they know they look well,
and experience desperately when they expect poorly, suggests that the quest to look well by
socially stipulated standards is a biologically-based predisposition," she
says.

Having a biologically based manner sense, you might say, is not limited to humans. Other animals are into adornment. Decorator venereal attach seaweed, sponges, and anemones onto their shells for camouflage. Bowerbirds decorate courtship areas with artful piles of flowers, irised shells, $.25 of colorful fungus, and other objects from the forest floor. Almost famously, of course, the male peacock fans out his magnificent tail feathers to attract female mates. And it'south truthful, evolutionary biologists tell us, when we dress to print, nosotros're non and so different from the proud peacock or dancing bowerbird.

But virtually animal display tactics
serve basic survival and mating purposes. We tin can use manner to express a broad
range of human emotion and intention, thanks to the organ below our hats.
Fashion tin can exist seen equally a form of symbolic communication ("a simplifying
stand-in for something complex," says primatologist Robert Sapolsky), standard operating procedure of the evolved human being brain.
Paleontologist Ian Tattersall, author of Becoming
Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness , says mode is an example of our
unique cognitive ability to dispense meaning and data. "Trunk
ornament and clothing, and the significance that we impute to them, are
intimately tied into the kind of animate being that we are," Tattersall says.

Wiessner goes further. Echoing the groundbreaking
work of developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello, who
claims that humans alone are able to sense the intentions of one another, she
says that because we can "read the minds of others … we can attach a whole
range of meaning to certain bodily decorations that animals can't."

"Fashion is near showing that you lot accept inventiveness or taste that others don't have," Miller says.

To evolutionary psychologist
Miller, expressing and understanding a whole range of meanings is a trait
bestowed on u.s. past development, equally a means to attract sexual partners. In his 2001
book, The Mating Heed, Miller argues
that "our minds evolved not just every bit survival machines, only as courtship
machines." He writes that human traits that seem to have no directly survival
benefits—"humour, storytelling, gossip, art, music, self-consciousness, ornate
linguistic communication, imaginative ideologies"—evolved to entice and entertain sexual
partners. Information technology's a provocative thesis that has its critics, who maintain that
Miller overplays the role of sexual pick among the circuitous biological and
cultural forces that have molded united states of america as a species. Nonetheless it'south a view that
underscores the importance of fashion in expressing a richness of personal and
social traits.

Fashion "is all most signaling and
display, it'south about showing that you've got some resources or inventiveness or
taste that others don't have," Miller says. "You gain higher status in your
group and among your rivals, and that status translates into better access to
food and shelter, friend networks and social back up."

Marking Twain, known for his natty white suits, once opined, "Naked people have trivial or no influence in society." The great wit was more profound than he may have known. "If other people favor you lot, you really accept an advantage in human society," says anthropologist Wiessner. "If you can nowadays yourself positively and look attractive—even if you're not peculiarly attractive—it tin evidence wealth, it tin can show social connections. You lot're more than likely to get people to invest in y'all."

Today, in a consumer order with countless
fashion choices, we have more ability than ever to arts and crafts our own identities and
signal the groups and subcultures with which we acquaintance. "With mass-produced
fashion," Miller says, "yous're showing off not what kind of way you lot can
afford, merely what kind of person you lot are, what your personal traits are, what
your interests and values are. The divergence between somebody wearing a black,
$20 heavy metal T-shirt and another wearing a $20 polo shirt is not wealth—it's
about lifestyle, personality. It'south about showing that y'all're a fellow member of a
certain subculture."

Valerie Steele, director and chief curator
of the Museum at the Fashion Establish of Technology in New York, agrees that contemporary
style allows people to clothing what they desire and not be fixed in identify in a
social lodge. People of all means, for instance, she says, "wear blue jeans."
Steele also reminds u.s. that style allows us to enhance our physical
characteristics. "Clothing tin make the body do things that it wouldn't be able
to do otherwise—like my eyeglasses can brand me encounter better, my shoes can protect
my feet," she says.

And engineering makes human being identity
even more fluid. "The whole idea of the cyborg is related to fashion," Steele says. After all, she adds, prosthetics
tin be seen "as another kind of accessory that yous put on your body to enable
y'all to do more things." Soon enough, eyeglasses will double every bit wearable
computers. Currently a new moving ridge of designers is employing computer-aided design
to create 3D-printed garments for private customers, based on a body scan. And
scientists are creating materials, with microminiaturization, that tin change
patterns or colors at the whim or mood of the wearer.

As
ever, fashion is tapping into our innate ability to express who and what we
desire to be, opening new doors to self-expression and social influence. Look
again at our chart of the ascent of homo. This fourth dimension, imagine Human sapiens properly clothed and
accessorized. How could it be otherwise? Without fashion, nosotros would not be homo
at all.

Jeanne Carstensen is a author in
San Francisco. Her work has appeared in the New
York Times, Salon, Modern Farmer and other publications.