Girls working in a mill, about 1900 AD By about 1900, though, cloth and clothing got cheap enough that there was a big change in how people thought about clothes. Instead of wearing many layers of clothes, a lot of people started to wear different clothes every day. Young kids wore cotton dresses - both [...]
A velocipede Bicycles were invented bit by bit in many different countries. They grew out of earlier inventions like wheels (from Central Asia) and wheelbarrows (from China), but Karl von Drais, a German inventor, built the first riding machine with two wheels, one in front of the other, that you had to balance on, in 1817. Like wheelbarrows, this [...]
French women wearing pants (Paris, 1922) Even though European men had started wearing pants in the early 1800s, women in Europe didn't really start to wear pants until about 100 years later, in the early 1900s. Slowly more and more women started to wear pants, just as men had. But although by the 1900s pretty [...]
Medieval peasant clothing, from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (1400s AD, now in Chantilly) In Medieval Europe, as in the Roman period, most people wore loose linen or wool tunics like big baggy t-shirts. Men mostly wore tunics down to their knees, though old men and monks wore their tunics down to the ground, and so did kings [...]
It was hot in the Islamic Empire. So people mostly dressed to protect themselves from the sun. The best way to keep from getting sunburns was to keep your skin covered with cloth as much as possible. At the same time, people also believed that God wanted them to cover up. They thought this especially about women, so that men [...]
A pair of pants (braccae) from Germany from the 400s AD German clothing was like the clothing of Central Asia in that German men, and often women, wore pants under their tunics to keep them warm. This was different from the clothing of the Mediterranean and West Asia, where men and women both [...]
Ming dynasty (1400s AD) painting by Tang Yin People in China generally wore tunics (like long t-shirts). Women wore long tunics down to the ground, with belts, and men wore shorter ones down to their knees. Sometimes they wore jackets over their tunics. In the winter, when it was cold, people wore padded jackets [...]
Plaid wool fabric from about 1000 BC, western China Central Asia is pretty far north, so it's pretty cold there. Clothes were really important to keep you from freezing to death. A lot of clothing inventions got started in Central Asia. The world's oldest bone and ivory needles (if they really are needles) [...]
Kyrgyz women spinning Around 1000 AD, the Mongols were still wearing mostly hemp clothing like the earlier Scythians. But in addition to their tunics, the Mongols sewed the hemp into long jackets that overlapped in the front and tied at the waist like a bathrobe. By the 1200s AD, the Mongols had invaded [...]
