Battle of Backbone Mountain

The Clothing Portal

A garment factory in Bangladesh

Clothing (also known as clothes, garments, dress, apparel, or attire) is any item worn on the body. Typically, clothing is made of fabrics or textiles, but over time it has included garments made from animal skin and other thin sheets of materials and natural products found in the environment, put together. The wearing of clothing is mostly restricted to human beings and is a feature of all human societies. The amount and type of clothing worn depends on gender, body type, social factors, and geographic considerations. Garments cover the body, footwear covers the feet, gloves cover the hands, while hats and headgear cover the head, and underwear covers the private parts.

Clothing has significant social factors as well. Wearing clothes is a variable social norm. It may connote modesty. Being deprived of clothing in front of others may be embarrassing. In many parts of the world, not wearing clothes in public so that genitals, breast, or buttocks are visible could be considered indecent exposure. Pubic area or genital coverage is the most frequently encountered minimum found cross-culturally and regardless of climate, implying social convention as the basis of customs. Clothing also may be used to communicate social status, wealth, group identity, and individualism. (Full article...)

Textile is an umbrella term that includes various fiber-based materials, including fibers, yarns, filaments, threads, different fabric types, etc. At first, the word "textiles" only referred to woven fabrics. However, weaving is not the only manufacturing method, and many other methods were later developed to form textile structures based on their intended use. Knitting and non-woven are other popular types of fabric manufacturing. In the contemporary world, textiles satisfy the material needs for versatile applications, from simple daily clothing to bulletproof jackets, spacesuits, and doctor's gowns. (Full article...)

Textile arts are arts and crafts that use plant, animal, or synthetic fibers to construct practical or decorative objects. (Full article...)

Selected articles - load new batch

Did you know (auto generated)

  • ... that pioneering Daily News camerawoman Evelyn Straus had her clothes custom-made to carry her film and flashbulbs?
  • ... that Church Clothes 4 deals with Christian hip hop artist Lecrae's faith deconstruction and reconstruction?
  • ... that after being criticized for dressing "like a doll" at an important meeting, pioneering Russian feminist Anna Filosofova replied that "clothes do not make the woman"?
  • ... that Jacqueline Kennedy did not want to make her clothes the focus of her 1962 goodwill tour of India and Pakistan, but still wore 22 different outfits in the first nine days?
  • ... that during the Second World War, the British government's campaign Make-Do and Mend encouraged the public to fashion men's clothes into womenswear?
  • ... that during a renovation of 4 Park Avenue, workers found a sealed room with women's clothes and shoes that was not in the building's blueprints?

More Did you know

Dried teasel pod

Related portals

Selected image

Queen Nefertari in a sheer, pleated linen garment, Egypt, c. 1298-1235 BC
Queen Nefertari in a sheer, pleated linen garment, Egypt, c. 1298-1235 BC
Credit: Maler der Grabkammer der Nefertari

The history of clothing and textiles attempts an objective survey of clothing and textiles throughout human history, identifying materials, tools, techniques, and influences, and the cultural significance of these items to the people who used them. Textiles, defined as felt or spun fibers made into yarn and subsequently netted, looped, knit or woven to make fabrics, appeared in the Middle East during the late Stone Age. From ancient times to the present day, methods of textile production have continually evolved, and the choices of textiles available have influenced how people carried their possessions, clothed themselves, and decorated their surroundings.

General images - load new batch

The following are images from various clothing-related articles on Wikipedia.

Selected quote

Adam Smith
Observe the accommodation of the most common artificer or daylabourer in a civilized and thriving country, and you will perceive that the number of people, of whose industry a part, though but a small part, has been employed in procuring him this accommodation, exceeds all computation. The woollen coat, for example, which covers the day-labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production. How many merchants and carriers, besides, must have been employed in transporting the materials from some of those workmen to others who often live in a very distant part of the country? How much commerce and navigation in particular, how many ship-builders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers, must have been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which often come from the remotest corners of the world? What a variety of labour, too, is necessary in order to produce the tools of the meanest of those workmen! To say nothing of such complicated machines as the ship of the sailor, the mill of the fuller, or even the loom of the weaver, let us consider only what a variety of labour is requisite in order to form that very simple machine, the shears with which the shepherd clips the wool. The miner, the builder of the furnace for smelting the ore the feller of the timber, the burner of the charcoal to be made use of in the smelting-house, the brickmaker, the bricklayer, the workmen who attend the furnace, the millwright, the forger, the smith, must all of them join their different arts in order to produce them.

Main topics

Recognized content

Extended content

Featured articles

Good articles

Featured pictures

Featured portals


Subcategories

Category puzzle
Category puzzle
Select [►] to view subcategories
Select [►] to view subcategories

WikiProjects

Things you can do


Here are some tasks awaiting attention:

Associated Wikimedia

The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:

  • Commons
    Free media repository
  • Wikibooks
    Free textbooks and manuals
  • Wikidata
    Free knowledge base
  • Wikinews
    Free-content news
  • Wikiquote
    Collection of quotations
  • Wikisource
    Free-content library
  • Wikiversity
    Free learning tools
  • Wiktionary
    Dictionary and thesaurus
Discover Wikipedia using portals