Abstract
Humans do not merely have bodies, they wear them. This article asks what happened when living beings began deliberately attaching made matter to their own bodies, and offers a genealogy of clothing as multimaterial remediation rather than a history of fashion. It reads the opening chapters of Genesis as a compressed theory of the moment at which nakedness, present but unnoticed, becomes felt, sayable and answered with made matter, first vegetal and improvised, then animal-derived and durable. It adapts the stratigraphy of multimateriality to wearable matter, from grown surfaces through found, displaced, transformed, combined, standardised and projectively fabricated covering, and confronts the archaeological problem that early clothing is perishable and survives mainly in lice, tools, beads and the bones of feet. Clothing is analysed as portable remediation of dwelling at a very small radius, as a reorganisation of embodiment at the body's surface, and as a case of fit that no specification can settle in advance. Turning outward, the article shows how stabilised clothing produces the unclothed other, whom nineteenth-century evolutionism and colonial administration misread as an earlier stage of humanity; how dress organises interrecursive visibility; how clothing is a mutable mobile whose deformation is the condition of its use; and how sizing turns continuous bodies into commensurable classes while technical garments carry engineered environments into places where bare bodies cannot live. At every scale, later layers of made matter remain answerable to the living bodies inside them.
I. Introduction: Why Humans Do Not Merely Have Bodies
For most people, most of the time, appearing in public without clothing is impossible. The impossibility springs less from survival, since an unclothed human body can tolerate most climates for the minutes it would take to cross a street, than from the expectation that the socially recognisable person appears as a materially modified body. In most human societies an adult who appears naked in a public place is understood as ill, mad, criminal, protesting, performing or holy, and very rarely as simply present. That already makes clothing theoretically peculiar among made things.
A chair remains outside the body that sits on it. A house surrounds bodies without touching them. A tool is held intermittently and then put down. Clothing is attached to the body for long periods, moves with it, changes its thermal relation to the air, changes what its skin touches, alters its outline and transforms its appearance to others, all at once and almost all the time. It therefore sits at an unusually intense junction of the five mediations through which human life is coordinated. It belongs to multisensorial embodiment, because it changes what the body feels and can do. It belongs to being-with, because it changes how bodies appear to one another. It modifies the body's exposure to dwelling, the non-human-made conditions of heat, cold, wind, sun and rain. It is multimaterial, since it consists of selected, transformed and combined matter. And it is saturated with multisymbolization, since what one wears classifies, signals and is read.
The article asks a deliberately elementary question: what happened when living beings began deliberately attaching made matter to their own bodies? The question calls for an evolutionary and civilisational genealogy rather than a history of fashion. Fashion, in the sense of rapidly changing styles, is one late and specific development within a much longer history in which humans progressively made their own embodiment multimaterial. Clothing is one of the foundational ways in which this happened, and perhaps the most intimate.
The account of made realities on which the article draws treats multimateriality as one of five mediations through which a living being remains coordinated with a world, alongside multisensorial embodiment, being-with, multiversal dwelling and multisymbolization. Embodiment, being-with and dwelling are the zoetic mediations, available to living beings that make nothing. Multimateriality and multisymbolization are the poietic mediations, in which recursive coordination is deposited into relatively durable material and symbolic form. Multimateriality rests on two preconditions, material dependence on conditions of dwelling and metabolic externalisation, and unfolds through six layers of relation to matter: recruited self-produced matter, recruited found matter, selected and displaced matter, transformed matter, combined matter and projectively fabricated matter. Its criterion is recursive uptake, since a material difference becomes multimaterial only when it enters a living being's further coordination. The layers accumulate rather than succeed one another, and found and made name relations to aspects of a material configuration, not classes of object. Later layers can reorganise the older relations on which they build, and they remain answerable to those relations, a principle that can be called downward answerability: a bridge reorganises the relation between two banks without suspending the river.
The article also uses the levels of recursivity. L1 is coordination proceeding without becoming separately salient. L2 is the felt catch, a change in the texture of coordination through disturbance, attraction or surprise, before anything is named. L3 is the first symbolic articulation of what was felt, and L4 the stabilisation of such articulations into portable categories, classifications and rules that travel beyond the situations that produced them.
The argument proceeds in four movements. It begins with Genesis, whose opening chapters present, in extraordinarily compressed form, a theory of the moment at which nakedness becomes a problem and is answered with made matter. It then turns to the evolutionary record, which is unusually difficult to read because early clothing rarely survives, and adapts the stratigraphy of multimateriality to wearable matter. A third movement develops clothing's distinctive achievements: portable remediation of dwelling, the reorganisation of embodiment at the body's surface, and fit. A final movement follows clothing outward into being-with and symbolisation: the production of the unclothed other, the interrecursive visibility of dressed bodies, the mutability that garments require, the sizing systems that make bodies commensurable for industry, and the technical garments that carry engineered environments into places where naked bodies cannot live.
II. Before Clothing: The Clothed Body Cannot Be Taken for Granted
Every animal body has a surface through which it meets the world, and most animal surfaces are grown rather than made. Fur, feathers, scales, shells and thickened skin regulate temperature, repel water, resist abrasion, deter predators and display colour and pattern to other animals. The body mediates temperature, touch, pain, vulnerability, movement and sensory exposure through its own tissues.
Protection is only one of the things such surfaces do. Godfrey-Smith (2024), following Prum (2017), reports that the textbook account of feathers, in which they first insulated and only later enabled flight, has given way to the view that their initial role was at least partly display. Bright feathers and long tails are designed to be seen, and the coverings of animals were communicative surfaces long before anything was worn.
Some animals already recruit external matter onto their bodies. Caddisfly larvae bind sand grains and plant fragments with their own silk into cases they carry wherever they go. Decorator crabs attach fragments of algae, sponge and other organisms to hooked bristles on their shells, and the attached material camouflages them and in some species deters predators. Hermit crabs occupy the shells of dead gastropods and change them as they grow. Wearing external matter is accordingly no human monopoly. It belongs to a broad class of multimaterial relations in which found matter is recruited, and sometimes combined, to modify the conditions under which a body lives.
The human case begins from an unusual starting point. At some stage in the hominin lineage, bodies lost most of their hair and came to rely on sweating from exposed skin to shed heat during sustained activity. Genetic evidence from the gene that governs skin pigmentation suggests that dark, hairless skin had been established by around 1.2 million years ago (Rogers, Iltis and Wooding 2004). For a very long time, then, hominins were bodies without grown insulation, moving through environments that were sometimes hot, sometimes cold and often wet. Their capacity to recruit matter that had not been produced as part of their own bodies, and to attach it recurrently to themselves, was a response to a surface that growth no longer supplied.
This yields an elementary definition. Clothing begins when external matter is recursively recruited to modify the conditions under which embodiment proceeds. The definition is broader than fashion and narrower than merely carrying something. The matter must enter recurrently into the coordination of embodiment. A hide lying on the ground is one thing. A hide repeatedly wrapped around a body because it alters warmth, protection or appearance has entered a different relation, one in which the body's continuing coordination has come to depend on it.
The definition places clothing within the general threshold of multimateriality: material transformation becomes multimaterial mediation only when the transformation enters subsequent coordination. Clothing gives that principle an unusually intimate form. The matter enters the coordination of the body itself, at the body's own boundary, and it enters recurrently, day after day, so that the body's felt condition comes to include the garment as part of how things normally are.
III. Genesis: Nakedness Becomes a Problem
The opening chapters of Genesis provide an extraordinarily compressed sequence, whatever one takes their historical status to be. They can be read as a civilisational theory of the transition with which this article is concerned, and the precision of their structure repays close attention.
The man and the woman in the garden begin naked, and the narrative explicitly marks that they are naked without shame: "they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed" (Genesis 2:25). The remark matters enormously. Nakedness is present, yet it is no problem; it is not even a condition anyone notices. The Hebrew text then makes a play that no translation can fully keep. The humans are 'arummim, naked, and in the very next verse the serpent is 'arum, subtle or shrewd (Genesis 3:1). The words look and sound almost the same. Nakedness and cunning knowledge stand side by side before either has become consequential.
After the humans eat from the tree, "the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked" (Genesis 3:7). The absence of clothing is materially identical before and after. What changes is the relation to embodiment. Before the opening, nakedness is present without salience. Afterwards, the body has become available to itself under a new distinction, and the distinction is felt as inadequacy. When God calls to the man, he answers that he was afraid "because I was naked; and I hid myself" (Genesis 3:10), and God's reply is a question about where the distinction came from: "Who told thee that thou wast naked?" (Genesis 3:11). In the terms of Living Value Theory, a condition that had operated smoothly at L1 has become felt misalignment at L2 and has been articulated at L3, and the text is careful to present the articulation as something that could have been told.
Readings that take this moment as the birth of self-consciousness must fold several distinct changes into one word, and the levels of recursivity keep them apart. Before the eating, nakedness is coordination that has not become salient at all. After it, the body is felt as inadequate, which is L2, a change of texture before anything is said. God's question concerns L3, the articulation that made the felt condition sayable and therefore communicable, and it points forward to the portable categories of shame and covering that will settle at L4. The vocabulary of consciousness cannot draw these differences. Used broadly, it covers the whole sequence at once, and used narrowly it draws a single line through the middle of it. Neither use can say what the text says, that a coordination can be felt as wrong before, and separately from, being told that it is wrong.
The response is immediate and multimaterial: "they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons" (Genesis 3:7). The Hebrew word, hagorot, suggests girdles or loin coverings. The act is more complex than it first appears. The leaves are found. They are selected, since fig leaves are among the largest in the garden. They are displaced from the tree on which they grew. Several of them are combined by sewing, which presupposes some means of joining and some anticipation of the shape the joined leaves must take. Their new form is directed toward an anticipated effect on the body, which is to cover it where covering has come to matter. This is already far more than the use of a found object. It is combinatorial and projective multimateriality in miniature, performed by the first beings in the narrative to know they had bodies worth covering.
Then comes the second covering. "Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them" (Genesis 3:21). The verse is more consequential than it first appears. The first human covering is vegetal and improvised, a remedy put together in haste. The second is animal-derived and durable, and many readers have noticed that it implies the first deaths in the narrative, the deaths of the animals whose skins are used. The story therefore already distinguishes two materially different solutions to the newly opened problem of naked embodiment, and it distinguishes their makers. The first garment is self-made. The second is made by another and placed on the body, so that clothing enters the story at once as craft and as care. Rabbinic tradition sharpened the verse further. Genesis Rabbah reports that the Torah scroll of Rabbi Meir read 'or with an aleph, light, rather than with an ayin, skin, so that the humans were clothed in garments of light (Genesis Rabbah 20:12). The variant shows how early readers sensed that the second clothing carried a significance beyond warmth.
The garments of skin are given just before the expulsion from the garden. That gives the narrative an extraordinary structure. An adequate dwelling is followed by a recursive opening of embodiment, then by clothing, then by the loss of the dwelling and entry into a harsher world of thorns, sweat and labour. Clothing becomes part of the equipment necessary for leaving Eden. The garden had supplied the conditions within which the naked body could live without remediation. After the expulsion, part of that environmental regulation is transferred onto the body itself. The garment becomes a small environment that travels.
Genesis thus presents clothing as multimaterial remediation following the breakdown of an original fit between body and dwelling, a much larger thing than modesty alone. The breakdown has two aspects that the narrative holds together without separating them. One is recursive, a new and uncomfortable knowledge of the body. The other is ecological, the loss of a world that asked nothing of the body's surface. Clothing answers both at once, and the rest of this article can be read as an unfolding of that double answer.
IV. The Archaeological Problem: Clothing Before Clothes Survive
The evolutionary reconstruction of clothing faces an unusually difficult problem. Early garments were made overwhelmingly from perishable materials: hide, fur, bark, grass, sinew and plant fibre. Stone tools survive for millions of years. Almost all early clothing has rotted. Clothing must accordingly be reconstructed from indirect traces, and the traces come from surprising places.
One of the most striking comes from lice. Human body lice live and lay their eggs in clothing, unlike head lice, which live in hair, and the two forms diverged when clothing offered a new habitat. Molecular estimates of that divergence range from about 70,000 years ago in the first study (Kittler, Kayser and Stoneking 2003) to about 170,000 years ago, with a lower bound near 83,000, in a later one (Toups et al. 2011). On the later estimate, anatomically modern humans in Africa were wearing clothing well before they left the continent. Tools supply other traces. Bone tools from Contrebandiers Cave in Morocco, dated to between 120,000 and 90,000 years ago, bear wear consistent with the preparation of hides and furs (Hallett et al. 2021). Neanderthals in France made specialised bone smoothers, of a kind still used by leatherworkers, around 50,000 years ago (Soressi et al. 2013). Eyed needles, which allow fitted pieces to be sewn together, appear in Siberia and China by roughly 40,000 years ago or earlier. At Sungir in Russia, burials around 34,000 years old contain thousands of ivory beads arranged in rows that follow the lines of garments long since decayed. Dyed and twisted flax fibres from Dzudzuana Cave in Georgia, around 30,000 years old, point to cordage and textiles (Kvavadze et al. 2009), and some Upper Palaeolithic figurines carry carefully carved representations of woven caps and bands (Soffer, Adovasio and Hyland 2000).
Even the body carries evidence. Habitual use of supportive footwear reduces the robusticity of the smaller toe bones, and a decline in that robusticity in human remains suggests that footwear was in regular use by around 40,000 years ago (Trinkaus 2005). A shoe that has long since disappeared has left its mark in the bones of the feet that wore it.
Gilligan (2010, 2019) has distinguished simple clothing, loosely draped hides and wraps, from complex clothing, fitted, tailored and layered garments that close around the body. Simple clothing could have been widespread for a very long time without leaving any trace at all. Complex clothing leaves more indirect evidence, in needles, awls and scrapers, and its appearance appears to be linked to the colonisation of colder environments.
The methodological point deserves to be carried into the wider multimaterial project. The archaeological visibility of a material is not proportional to its importance in past mesocosms. The durability of stone makes the material history of early humans look dominated by stone, when their lived worlds may have been dominated by hide, fibre, cordage, bindings, wraps and coverings that have left only faint and indirect traces. Godfrey-Smith (2024) makes the same observation about shelter: little is known about the dwellings of earlier human ancestors, and the artefacts whose history is known best are stone tools. Multimateriality directs attention toward this lost world of perishable technologies, in which some of the most consequential relations between human bodies and made matter were conducted.
V. A Stratigraphy of Wearable Matter
The stratigraphy of multimateriality has two preconditions, the dependence of living beings on conditions of dwelling they did not make and the metabolic externalisation through which their own activity leaves matter in the world, and six layers of relation to matter: recruited self-produced, recruited found, selected and displaced, transformed, combined and projectively fabricated. The relations are partially ordered and cumulative, and they should not be read as a universal chronological ladder through which every tradition passed in the same order. The layers can be adapted to wearable matter.
Both preconditions are visible in the hairless human body at once. Its sweating skin depends on thermal, mechanical and hydrological conditions that it cannot alter, and its metabolism continually externalises heat, moisture, oils and shed skin into whatever lies against it. Clothing enters a coordination that metabolism has already begun, and garments become habitats as well as coverings, which is why the body louse, a creature of clothing, is among the best witnesses to early clothing use.
The first layer is recruited self-produced covering, the grown surface of hair, fur, feathers, scales and shell described above. It is tissue rather than deposited matter, and it marks the boundary case at which an organism's own product and an external structure shade into one another, as they do in the shell of a mollusc. The human lineage lost most of this layer, and the layers that follow can be read as the recruitment of external matter to do what growth no longer did.
The second layer is recruited found covering. An existing piece of plant matter, hide or bark is placed against the body with little or no alteration. A large leaf held against rain, a hide from a kill draped across the shoulders, a mat of grass tied around the waist all belong here.
The third is selected and displaced covering. Specific materials are sought because of their thermal, protective, tactile or visual properties, and they are carried for later use. The selection of certain hides over others, of fur for cold and leather for abrasion, and the storing of coverings for the cold season, introduce a temporal relation to the garment: it is prepared for a body's future need rather than seized in the moment of discomfort.
The fourth is transformed covering. Hides are scraped, softened, smoked or tanned so that they neither rot nor stiffen; fibres are stripped, twisted and spun; materials are cut, pierced and shaped. Much of the knowledge embodied in early clothing belongs here, since a raw hide is a poor garment and a well-prepared one can last for years.
The fifth is combined clothing. Separate pieces are tied, laced, stitched or woven into forms that no single piece of material could supply. This is the relation Gilligan calls complex clothing. The clothing of the Tyrolean Iceman, some 5,300 years old, shows it in detail: a coat of strips of goat and sheep hide stitched together, leggings, a loincloth, a bearskin cap, shoes with bearskin soles and deerskin uppers stuffed with grass for insulation, and a cloak or mat of woven grass. The ensemble combines materials from several species, each chosen for its properties, into a layered system fitted to one body and one mountain environment.
Standardisation and reproduction form a late intensification of this fifth layer. Looms, recurring forms, patterns, guild regulations, measured cloth and eventually industrial manufacture allow garments to be made according to specifications that travel between makers. The sewing machine, commercialised in the mid-nineteenth century, and the ready-made garment industry that followed it made clothing a mass-produced object for the first time.
The sixth layer is projectively fabricated clothing. Garments can be specified before they exist according to anticipated form, dimensions, material behaviour and purpose. Technical textiles intensify this enormously, since the desired performance of a fabric, its breathability, water resistance, stretch or resistance to heat, can increasingly guide the design of the material itself. The first five layers can be sustained by feedback from past cases, in the sense Godfrey-Smith (2024), following Wright (1976), gives the phrase: what kept a body warm or protected before is made again. The sixth adds the pursuit of a represented outcome that no earlier garment has achieved.
The non-supersession principle holds throughout. Humans still wrap found or minimally prepared fabrics around themselves. In South Asia, the dhoti and the sari are woven lengths of cloth draped and tied without cutting or stitching, and a long-standing preference in many Hindu ritual contexts for unstitched cloth keeps an older relation to wearable matter at the centre of ceremonial life. Men performing the Hajj put on ihram, two unstitched white cloths, and so return to a lower layer of the stratigraphy as a condition of ritual purity. Clothes are still cut and tied, hand tailoring persists, individually fitted clothing coexists with industrial sizing, and engineered membranes coexist with sheepskin, wool and cotton. A garment is found in some respects and made in others: a sheepskin coat is found in its pelt, transformed by tanning and combined by stitching. The contemporary wardrobe is stratigraphic, and a single person may wear garments from every layer on a single day.
VI. Clothing as Portable Remediation of Dwelling
Strictly speaking, clothing belongs to multimateriality, since dwelling names the non-human-made conditions of a place: its temperatures, winds, rains, light and terrain. What clothing does is to carry with the body a made modification of the dwelling conditions to which the body is exposed. The phrase portable dwelling names this achievement, provided it is understood as a portable remediation of dwelling rather than as a second kind of dwelling. In that sense the phrase is more than metaphor.
Buildings modify the body's exposure to dwelling conditions by modifying a place. Clothing modifies it by modifying the body's immediate interface with the world. A house creates a habitable volume at a site, and bodies travel to it. A coat creates a habitable microclimate that accompanies the person wherever the person goes. Architecture brings the body to a made environment; clothing brings a made environment with the body. The distinction is not absolute, since tents, yurts and caravans occupy the ground between them, but it reveals two profoundly different strategies of multimaterial remediation.
Clothing regulates temperature, moisture, wind, sunlight, friction, impact, contamination, insects and exposure to the gaze of others. It enables bodies to inhabit environments in which unclothed human bodies could remain only briefly or with great difficulty. The Arctic peoples who developed double-layered caribou-skin parkas, trousers and boots made it possible to live through winters of extreme cold with little more than a lamp and a snow house, since the most important shelter was worn. The physiologists who first tried to quantify this achievement devised a unit for it, the clo, defined as the insulation needed to keep a resting person comfortable indoors at about twenty-one degrees (Gagge, Burton and Bazett 1941). The clo is itself a small monument to projective multimateriality, a symbolic measure of the portable environment a garment provides.
This adds another dimension to the comparative analysis of made things: the radius of dwelling remediation. A garment modifies millimetres or centimetres of air around the body. A room modifies metres, a building larger enclosed volumes, and settlements, irrigation systems and infrastructures increasingly extensive environments. Clothing may therefore be the smallest recurrent made environment human beings inhabit. Its small radius is the source of its great advantage. A remediation that extends only a few centimetres from the skin can be carried anywhere the body goes, adjusted by adding or removing a layer, and shared across very different places, which is why clothing, rather than architecture, made possible the first human movements into cold environments.
The radius also reveals a trade-off. Remediation at small radius must be carried, and it must be carried by the body itself, adding weight, restricting movement and requiring maintenance. Remediation at large radius stays behind when the body leaves. Human beings live continuously between these radii, passing from garment to room to building to street, and adjusting their clothing as they cross each threshold. The layering of clothing and the layering of built environments are complementary answers to the same problem of fitting a body to changing conditions.
VII. The Body–Clothing Interface: Where Does Embodiment End?
When someone walks in shoes, where does the walking occur? The question is less idle than it sounds. Shoes change the length of stride, the way the heel strikes the ground, the sensation of the surface and the tolerance for stones and heat. Gloves change grip and touch; spectacles change vision; armour changes vulnerability; a corset changes posture and breathing; a wetsuit changes thermal exchange with water. In each case the intervention is far from merely symbolic. Embodiment itself is materially reorganised.
Merleau-Ponty (2012 [1945]) described how a woman wearing a hat with a tall feather keeps a safe distance between the feather and objects that might break it, without calculating, and how a blind man's cane becomes an area of sensitivity through which he perceives the street. The garment and the instrument are incorporated into the body's practical sense of itself. The point is sometimes put as an extension of the body into its artefacts. That vocabulary can mislead if it suggests that the artefact simply becomes part of the biological organism. The stronger point is relational. Clothing alters the conditions under which embodied recursive coordination proceeds. A person experiences the world through a clothed body, and the clothing is part of how the world is encountered without becoming part of the organism that encounters it.
Incorporation has a characteristic temporal signature. A garment that works withdraws from attention. The wearer of well-fitting shoes does not feel the shoes; the coordination of foot, shoe and ground proceeds at L1, and the feather in the hat is negotiated without calculation. The garment returns to salience when it fails. A seam that rubs, a collar tag that itches or a wet sleeve that clings becomes the centre of the day, a felt disturbance at L2 that can absorb the whole of one's attention. Wellbeing in clothes therefore consists largely of not noticing them, and it leaves correspondingly little trace in what people say about their clothing.
The alteration can reach the organism over time. The evidence from toe bones shows that footwear, worn across a lifetime, changes the shape of the feet that wear it (Trinkaus 2005). Habitual clothing is thus a form of habituation in the strict sense, a made deposit that reshapes the living conditions through which a body develops. Children who grow up in shoes and children who grow up barefoot grow different feet. The garment remains outside the body and yet enters into its formation. The change is of a different kind from those Godfrey-Smith (2024) describes for cooking and stone tools, which have left marks in inherited human guts, teeth and hands. The toe bones record how each body grows under a habit, and nothing in them shows an inherited change.
This means that clothing cannot be assigned exclusively to multimateriality. The garment is multimaterial, but its effects emerge through the alignment of multimateriality with multisensorial embodiment, with the dwelling conditions it remediates, and with the being-with before whom it is worn. The shoe works only in relation to a foot, a ground and, often, an expectation that feet in this place will be shod. Multimaterial remediations remain fully multimediated, in the same way that a bridge stands only where gorge, river, travellers and builders align, and a garment shows this with special intimacy because it lies against the body.
VIII. Fit: The Body's Answer to the Garment
Clothing gives an unusually clear example of mesocosmic fit. A garment may be beautifully designed. It may satisfy every measurement in its specification and be manufactured exactly as planned. It can still fit badly. The final relation is between this made form and this living body, and no amount of symbolic specification can settle that relation in advance.
Fit is dynamic rather than geometrical. Bodies bend, swell, sweat, age, gain and lose weight, become pregnant, develop injuries and move differently at different moments. A garment that fits a standing body may bind a running one. A shoe that fits for ten minutes may cause pain after ten kilometres, when the foot has swollen and the leather has not yet yielded. Fit is therefore something that happens over time, in use, and it can be discovered only by wearing. The body's answer cannot be completely anticipated through symbolic specification. The tailor cannot legislate the body into fitting the garment, as the engineer cannot legislate a river into fitting a bridge.
Fit is also negotiated from both sides. Leather shoes are broken in: the leather stretches and softens where the foot presses, while the foot hardens where the leather rubs, until the two have adjusted to each other. A garment that fits after a month of wear is a different object from the one that was bought, and the body inside it is subtly different too. Successful fit is muted in the way described above, and the shoes that have finally fitted are the shoes nobody thinks about.
Garments can also be designed to remediate the body. Belts, braces, corsets, orthopaedic shoes, maternity garments and compression stockings deliberately alter embodied form or support it. Some interventions of this kind have been coercive and harmful. The binding of girls' feet in late imperial China, which broke and folded the bones over years to achieve a culturally prized shape, is the extreme case of a made form imposing its demands on a growing body until the body conformed, at the cost of lifelong disability. Most remedial garments are gentler, and many are therapeutic, but the principle is the same: made matter at the body's surface can reshape the living form beneath it.
Fit is therefore recursively negotiated between made matter and living form. The garment answers to the body, and the body, over time, can be made to answer to the garment. Neither answer is final, since bodies keep changing and garments keep wearing, and the relation must be re-established continually. In this respect clothing displays, at the smallest scale and with the most immediate feedback, the ongoing work of fit that every multimaterial remediation requires.
IX. From Nakedness to Civilisation: The Production of the Unclothed Other
Clothing very rapidly becomes more than protection, and it may never have been protection alone. The order of functions in the origin of coverings is uncertain, as the case of feathers has already shown. Ornament in the human lineage is also old. Pierced shell beads, worn on cords, are known from about 75,000 years ago in South Africa (Henshilwood et al. 2004) and from perhaps 100,000 years ago in Israel and Algeria (Vanhaeren et al. 2006), earlier than any surviving evidence of fitted clothing. Protection and display were probably entangled from the start, and the sequence from thermal need to symbolic elaboration is better treated as a tendency than as a rule.
Once particular forms of covering are stabilised within a community, their absence becomes symbolically consequential. Nakedness itself thereby becomes culturally produced. This is the key reversal. Nakedness appears at first to be simply what exists before clothing. Once clothing is socially stabilised, nakedness becomes an interpreted condition, defined in relation to expected clothing and readable as poverty, shame, madness, innocence, defiance, eroticism or holiness. Genesis records this reversal in its own terms: the humans were naked before, but they could know it only after.
What holds such a stabilisation in place is convention. Godfrey-Smith (2024) argues, against Harari's (2014) account of shared fictions, that much of what sustains large-scale human coordination consists of interlocking behaviour and expectations within a community, and that conventions of this kind are fragile without being illusory. Dress rules are conventions in this sense. They hold while people expect one another to comply, and they are enforced by the ordinary discomfort of being the one who does not. The Genesis question, who told thee, asks in its own way how such a convention comes to be installed in a body that had lived without it.
Nakedness can accordingly be achieved as well as suffered. Digambara Jain monks, the sky-clad, renounce clothing as the final possession, and their nakedness is the most elaborated condition in their tradition rather than the least. Some ascetics in Hindu traditions go naked for comparable reasons. Such practices presuppose the whole symbolic system of clothing that they renounce, since only in a clothed world can nakedness signify renunciation.
This reversal gives a route into the evolutionary anthropology of the nineteenth century and into colonial representation. European observers repeatedly treated degrees and styles of bodily covering as indicators of supposed degrees of civilisation. Morgan's (1877) sequence of savagery, barbarism and civilisation was built on technologies and institutions, and travellers, missionaries and administrators applied the same logic to dress. Missionaries in southern Africa and the Pacific made the adoption of European clothing a visible sign of conversion, and in doing so turned the body's surface into a site of colonial transformation (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997). Where converts were required to wear European dress as proof of conversion, the body's surface was made to speak in a symbolic form set by others, an instance of forced misarticulation. The loincloth became an enormously loaded object. Minimal clothing was read as evidence of a position on an imagined evolutionary hierarchy, rather than as a technical adaptation to hot climates or a bodily convention with its own history and rules.
This is a characteristic error of level. An observable difference in clothing, articulated at L3, was translated at L4 into a portable comparative classification in which more clothed meant more civilised and less clothed meant more primitive. The mistake lay in treating one historically specific clothing regime as the scale on which all human societies could be ranked, while the noticing of clothing differences was entirely legitimate. The classification also compressed a continuum of wraps, paints, ornaments and garments into the two-value distinction of clothed and naked, and binaries are always L4 operations: the mesocosm contains coverings of many kinds and degrees, and no line at which the clothed become the naked. The classification then travelled independently of the observations that had occasioned it, applied to people its authors had never seen.
The move had a temporal structure that Fabian (1983) identified as the denial of coevalness. Once clothed embodiment had become the norm of the fully social person, the naked or differently clothed other could be imagined as occupying an earlier stage of human history, a living remnant of the condition from which Europeans had supposedly emerged. A chronological sequence was projected spatially onto contemporary populations. The Genesis narrative, read through this lens, could be pressed into the service of the same projection, with the unclothed other cast as still dwelling in a state before the fall or before civilisation.
The history also contains its reversal. In 1921 Gandhi adopted the short dhoti, the garment of the poorest Indian peasants, as his public dress, making the loincloth a sign of solidarity and a refusal of imported cloth (Tarlo 1996). A decade later Winston Churchill derided him as a half-naked fakir. The phrase repeated the evolutionist classification exactly, and Gandhi's clothing had been designed to make that classification recoil on those who used it. The loincloth was the same object in both cases, and the symbolic system in which it was read had been contested and partly overturned. It was a reopening of a settled classification by the party it disadvantaged, and Gandhi bore the cost of the reopening with his own body.
X. Clothing and Interrecursive Visibility
Clothing does something that buildings and medicines generally do not. It materially reorganises how a person appears to another person, and the wearer knows this. I choose clothes partly in anticipation of how you will perceive me. You interpret my clothing knowing that I may have chosen it with your interpretation in mind. I may then anticipate that knowledge in turn, dressing to seem as though I had not thought about how I would seem. Clothing therefore enters directly into interrecursivity, the coordination of beings whose responses respond to one another.
This goes further than the familiar claim that clothing communicates identity. Clothing is a materially fabricated intervention in recursive mutual perception. The concept of interrecursive visibility captures it: the clothed person presents a materially modified body to others while recursively anticipating how that modification will be perceived. Goffman (1959) described the presentation of self in everyday life as a continuous management of impressions, and Simmel (1957 [1904]) saw in fashion a simultaneous drive to imitate others and to differentiate oneself from them. Terence Turner (2012 [1980]) called the dressed and decorated surface of the Kayapo body a social skin, the boundary at which the individual is made social. Each of these accounts registers a part of interrecursive visibility. What the multimaterial account adds is that the visibility is made: it is carried by selected, transformed and combined matter, and it is subject to all the constraints of that matter as well as to the expectations of observers.
Godfrey-Smith's (2024) account of animal communication helps to state what is at stake. He defines a communicative interaction by the alignment of habits on the sender side and on the receiver side, so that a sign works because producers and interpreters are on the same page, and its particular physical form can be largely arbitrary within limits. Dress codes are alignments of this kind, sustained by both sides at once: the wearer dresses for a reading, and the reader reads in the expectation of a dressing. His bowerbirds show the same structure in a simpler form. The bird manipulates collected objects to affect another bird, which makes them tools for social interaction rather than for building, and a male watched by his guide tore down a bower that drew no response from visiting females and built another, revising the display in answer to its reception. Human clothing extends this relation into a fabricated surface that is worn continuously and read across a whole society.
The concept allows very different practices to be located within one underlying process. A uniform makes a body visible as a member of an institution and invisible as an individual. Mourning dress makes grief visible and asks others to respond to it. Ceremonial clothing marks a body as occupying a role for the duration of a rite. Professional clothing signals competence and the right to be trusted with a body or with money. Seductive clothing reveals and conceals in a calibrated relation to anticipated desire. Military camouflage inverts the process, using made matter to reduce a body's visibility to hostile observers, which is interrecursive visibility turned against itself. Fashion accelerates the whole process, turning the anticipation of others' perception into a system of change so rapid that garments can lose their visible meaning before they wear out.
Interrecursive visibility has a selfrecursive counterpart. The mirror allows the wearer to see the clothed body as others will see it, and the habit of checking one's appearance before leaving home is a small rehearsal of the interrecursive encounter to come. The garment thus organises how bodies appear to one another and how each body appears to itself in anticipation of others. No other class of made things is so continuously implicated in both.
XI. Clothing as the Paradigmatic Mutable Mobile
Latour's (1986) immutable mobile gains its power by travelling while retaining its form. It is one configuration among several that arise when travelling and changing shape are treated as independent variables, since a made form can travel and hold its shape, travel and change it, stay in place and change, or stay in place and hold. Clothing succeeds through the opposite property to the immutable mobile. It must move, and it must change shape continually while it does. Sleeves bend at the elbow, shoes flex at every step, fabric folds and unfolds, elastic stretches and recovers. A garment that rigidly preserved its geometry would be unusable except as armour, and even armour must articulate.
Clothing is therefore a particularly clear mutable mobile. More precisely, successful garments maintain their identity and their functional relations through controlled material deformation. A shirt is recognizably the same shirt whether folded in a drawer, hanging on a line or stretched across a moving back, and its usefulness depends on its passing continually among these shapes without tearing, bagging or losing its hold on the body.
This suggests a further general multimaterial variable: required mutability. For some made things, deformation is failure. A bridge should flex only within narrow limits, and a tablet that changes shape has probably degraded. For others, deformation is the condition of successful use. A shirt must deform almost continuously, a shoe must bend thousands of times a day, and a sock must stretch around a heel and recover its shape afterwards. Required mutability can be specified and engineered, and much of the history of textiles is a history of making fabrics that deform in controlled ways: knitted structures that stretch in one direction and not another, bias-cut cloth that drapes, elastane that returns to its length.
The distinction clarifies why clothing wears out as it does. Controlled deformation repeated many thousands of times is also a source of fatigue, and garments fail at the places where they deform most: at elbows, knees, heels and seams. Their mutability and their mortality are the same property seen at different timescales.
XII. Sizing: Making Continuous Bodies Symbolically Commensurable
Industrial clothing introduces a problem of its own. Actual bodies vary continuously and in many dimensions at once: height, girth, the proportions of limbs and torso, the shape of shoulders, hips and feet. Mass manufacture cannot produce a unique garment for every body. It therefore converts bodily variation into portable classes: small, medium and large; numbered dress sizes; waist and inside-leg measurements; collar sizes; shoe sizes; cup sizes; children's ages.
This is an extraordinary L4 operation. A continuously variable living body is redescribed through standardised symbolic coordinates, so that garments can be manufactured in advance for bodies that are absent, anonymous and not yet encountered. Some of the coordinates are old. Traditional English shoe sizes increase in steps of a third of an inch, the length of a barleycorn. Many are recent. Systematic sizing expanded with the mass production of military uniforms in the nineteenth century, and in the United States a large anthropometric survey of women in the late 1930s supplied data for standardised women's sizes (O'Brien and Shelton 1941). Sizing is accordingly an intersymbolic system for making heterogeneous bodies sufficiently commensurable for projective multimaterial production.
The sizing system is intersymbolically coherent. Sizes are arranged in orderly sequences, each defined by measurements, each related to the next by regular increments, and each printed on a label that travels with the garment across the world. Downward answerability nonetheless arrives, in the fitting room. Someone eventually tries the garment on. The symbolic size says that this should fit, and the body answers. The gap between nominal size and lived fit exhibits the distinction between intersymbolic fit and mesocosmic fit with almost comic clarity. A person can be a medium in one shop, a large in another and a small in a third, while remaining exactly the same body, because each manufacturer has mapped the continuous space of bodies onto its symbolic classes in its own way. The practice known as vanity sizing, in which the numbers attached to given measurements drift downward over time to flatter buyers, shows the symbolic system drifting further still from the bodies it claims to classify.
Returns of clothing bought without trying it on, a large and costly problem for online retailers, are downward answerability expressed as logistics. Garments travel to bodies on the strength of a symbolic size, fail to fit and travel back. The body's answer, which a fitting room once delivered in minutes, is now delivered through the postal system.
XIII. Technical Clothing: Engineering the Body's Possible Worlds
The historical trajectory of clothing culminates in garments designed for increasingly specific environments and performances: rainwear, protective clothing, fire-resistant suits, diving suits, mountaineering clothing, sportswear, medical compression garments and spacesuits. Here projective multimateriality becomes extreme. Desired bodily conditions are specified in advance. What range of temperatures must the body tolerate? How much moisture must pass outward while rain is kept out? How much pressure must be applied, or retained? What impacts must be absorbed? Which gases must be kept in and which kept out? How much flexibility must the joints retain? The garment is engineered backward from anticipated embodied requirements, and its materials are increasingly designed to meet those requirements rather than selected from what the world supplies.
The spacesuit is the limiting case, and it makes the thesis of portable remediation literal. The surrounding environment is incompatible with unprotected human life, so an elaborate made microenvironment must travel with the body, supplying pressure, oxygen, temperature control and protection from radiation and micrometeoroids. The suits worn on the Moon during the Apollo programme were built of many layers of specialised materials, and they were made by a company better known for manufacturing brassieres and girdles, whose seamstresses sewed their layers by hand to tolerances measured in fractions of a millimetre (de Monchaux 2011). The most projectively engineered garment of its age thus depended on one of the oldest layers of the stratigraphy, the skilled combining of materials by stitching, and on the expertise of workers whose craft had been developed in the making of underwear.
Technical sophistication does nothing to transcend embodiment. The greater the technical sophistication of a garment, the more exact its answerability to embodied requirements becomes. The Apollo suits were fitted to each individual astronaut, because a pressurised suit that fitted badly would fatigue the hands, rub the shoulders raw and restrict the movements on which a mission depended. Every advance in the capacity to carry an engineered environment into a hostile world increased the precision with which that environment had to fit the particular body inside it.
XIV. Conclusion: After Nakedness
The humans of Genesis first inhabit a world in which naked embodiment requires no material remediation. Then nakedness becomes recursively salient. They fabricate coverings, God clothes them more durably, and they leave the garden. Whether or not the narrative is treated as historical description, it captures something profound about clothing: a living body encounters a mismatch between itself and the world, and it recruits matter to change the relation.
From there, human history produces ever more elaborate versions of the same operation. Clothing protects and regulates heat. It changes how bodies move. It creates portable remediations of dwelling that let bodies go where they could not otherwise go. It makes bodies socially recognisable and changes what can be hidden and what shown. It allows people to fabricate their appearance to others and to rehearse that appearance before a mirror. It turns continuous bodily variation into industrial sizing systems. Eventually it enables human beings to carry small engineered environments into places in which naked bodies could not survive for a minute.
The earliest relation never disappears. There remains a body underneath, and the final test of every garment, however symbolically elaborate or technologically sophisticated, is still the encounter between living embodiment, made matter and a world. A garment that meets that test disappears into the coordination it serves, and the history of clothing is in large part a history of things that worked well enough to go unnoticed.
Human beings remained embodied when they began to clothe themselves and made their embodiment increasingly multimaterial. Clothing placed selected and transformed matter at the moving boundary between body and world, creating protection, portable remediation of dwelling and a recursively visible social surface. The history of clothing is therefore the history of living bodies learning to alter the conditions of their own embodiment by carrying made worlds with them, rather than a history of escape from naked nature or merely a history of changing symbols.
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