There is one thing that every culture shares; they all wear cloths. No matter what corner of the earth you may be from you no doubt wear clothing on a daily basis. Maybe there are still a few Aborigine tribes that walk around stark naked, but they won’t be reading this, so for all intense purposes, everyone wears cloths.

Clothing in its most original form can be traced back to as far as there are records. The Bible tells the story of Adam and Eve being ashamed of their naked bodies after eating the forbidden fruit and thus covering up. You know the famous picture of Adam covering his stuff with a fig leaf. But what exactly is the early history of clothing?

•    Prehistoric: The original designers of clothing were the cavemen. While it is doubtful that they designed clothing out of embarrassment and more than likely did so due to cold weather, they were none the less the originators of fashion design. The prehistoric clothing was made out of the dried skins of different animals that were them woven or sewn together and perhaps covered with another animal’s fur. This type of clothing was crude at best, but it certainly did its job and kept the people warm.
•    The textile birth: A textile is a defined as a felt, or some type of spun fibers that are made into a yarn and then woven, netted, looped, or knitted to make fibers. The earliest known textile is believed to come from the Near East. Here it is believed that as far back as 6000 BC textiles in some form were used to wrap the dead of the people who lived at that time. Now everything we wear is made up of some type of textile.
•    Ancient India, Egypt, and China: These three ancient countries are credited with the discovery and perfection of much of the textiles that we all know and enjoy today. From these ancient civilizations the modern world was given the use of textiles such as cotton, silk, wool, and many more. Some hundreds to thousands of years later, the textile trade began and if the ancients only knew what they were creating, they would have had their heads spinning.
•    Other types of clothing through the years: Clothing experienced a myriad of changes as the years went on. In the Iron Age, much of what a man wore consisted of; you guessed it iron and other metals, at least on the outside. The styles became more elaborate and the designs more complex and eventually clothing came to be more like what it is today. All of the sudden people found themselves either paying a ridiculous amount of money, which was reserved for the rich, or they were dressing in rags because they were peasants.

Today there are hundreds, if not thousands of different fashions to choose from. Clothing can range in price from very affordable, to just plain ridiculous. But whatever clothing it is that you decide to put on your body, it all came from the most humble of beginnings. From the fig leaf to the sewn animal skins, clothing has certainly come a long, long way.