The Raiment under the Tree

I am not a clothes horse and never have been. This is unlike my dad who enjoyed being a natty dresser. As a builder he wore plaid flannel and work jeans on most days, but he enjoyed the opportunity to spiff up in tie and jacket at Rotary meetings and Builders Association meetings and other occasions when more casual attire would have been perfectly acceptable. He left behind a walk-in closetful of jackets and dress shirts – even a tuxedo.  Even in my trim days they didn’t fit me, so I don’t still have them. Nor did I inherit the natty gene. Once out of prep school (where tie and jacket were required by the dress code) I tied a half-Windsor so seldom that whenever my mom spotted me with one she took my picture.

Autumn 1970. If the items
still fit I'd probably still wear
them, bell bottoms and all. 

I was not (and am not) actually averse to the notion of donning semi-formal or formal attire. I just don’t bother much. Moreover, like many long-single men, I keep and wear clothes not just for years but for decades, and so look typically a bit rumpled. When the garments eventually are tossed out or donated, it is not because they are out of fashion. It is because they truly have frayed away or no longer fit. Save for one overcoat, I don’t believe I have anything in my closet remaining from the 1960s but there is more than one item from the 1970s. These items remain because they still fit, meaning they were considerably too big at the time they were bought.

The reader might remember being disappointed as a small child when a gift under the tree turned out to be clothes instead of toys. Those days are long gone, for in 2017 I’m gifting myself with more clothes than in any year in the past decade – maybe more all other nine years of the decade combined. I’m happy to get them, even if I begrudge the cost. Not that the budget for them was high: just high for me. This splurge was because I’ve finally accepted that I will not fit into 1997 clothes ever again. 1997 was the last year I could wear something from 1972 without straining buttons or fabric (though perhaps straining taste). I think 20 years is long enough to sustain the fantasy that my corporeal dimensions of 1997 are recoverable. So, I emptied out much of the closet and acquired apparel that fits. I still won’t look natty, but at least the buttons will button.

People have been donning fashions for a very long time. Prehistoric and ancient clothes don’t survive well in the archeological record, so we don’t know what the earliest ones were like. Though ancient garb is depicted in early historical art, we don’t have many samples of the actual articles; those few come only from sites extraordinarily well suited to conservation such as Egyptian tombs. We can’t know for sure why people started wearing clothes in the first place, but we can make a pretty fair estimate of when thanks to lice. Lice are persnickety creatures. Each species of louse prefers a specific species of host. Though uncommon, it is possible for a louse to jump host species, but when this happens it quickly adapts over surprisingly few generations to become a new species itself. Nearly every mammal species has only one cohabiting louse species. Humans are rare in having three species of louse that are ours alone: head lice, body lice, and pubic lice. DNA studies can show how long ago species diverge, and body lice diverged from head lice some 107,000 years ago. (DNA shows pubic lice diverged from gorilla lice; the less said about that the better.) “Body lice” is a misnomer, for they do not cling to the body. They instead have claws specially adapted to cling to the interior of clothing, which means clothes have been around for at least 107,000 years. That is some 40,000 years before modern humans spread beyond Africa, so warmth probably wasn’t the prime motivation for dressing up.

Sumerian catwalk

What fashions looked like for the first 100,000 years or so is anyone’s guess. We have 5300-year-old remains of cold weather attire from Ötzi, a middle-aged fellow whose body was found in the Alps where it had been frozen in ice for all those millennia. He had a sheep hide coat, goatskin leggings, bear fur hat, intricately made deerskin and string shoes stuffed with hay, and a woven grass cape. A man after my own heart, he repeatedly had repaired his well-worn coat. He’d probably owned it for decades. Had Ötzi not died a violent death in his mid-40s – a flint arrowhead is lodged in the body – he might have kept it for a decade or two more. Middle-age spread was less of an issue with residents of Europe’s cool climes back then, so he wouldn’t have needed tailoring or a replacement.

Not being Ötzi – and on the whole I’m pleased with that – I do need replacements, but now I should be good for another 20 years. 

ZZ Top – Sharp Dressed Man