Magic and tech: clothing and fashion

We humans are peculiar in a great many regards, but one of those is our clothing. Call it a cultural imperative, but we all wear clothes. Those few of us that don’t, such as nudists or those few indigenous peoples who still haven’t adopted at least a loincloth, are seen as odd by the rest of our species. (The story of Genesis is at pains to point out that, once they received the higher wisdom of the tree, Adam and Eve very specifically became “ashamed” of their nakedness.) But the big picture tells a different story: as life on this planet goes, we are the weird ones. Only humans feel the need to cover some or most of their bodies in some other substance most of the time.

This may be from an evolutionary quirk, as humans are a rarity in another way. How many other animals choose to leave their evolved habitat? Very few. That’s not just how evolution works, but why. Species adapt to their environments, and there’s a kind of “inertia” that keeps them there. It’s probably because adapting is hard, and where’s the reproductive advantage in doing it all over again?

Putting something on

The first and most obvious choices for human clothing, looking back to prehistoric times, were likely animal skins. Despite the misguided crusades of PETA and others, that’s still an attractive option today. How many of you own a leather jacket, or a fur coat, or something of that sort? Skins are a good choice for protecting us from the elements (one of the original and most important uses for clothing), because, hey, it works for the animals they belong to.

Any culture can make clothing out of animals. It’s not that hard to do, all things considered. And there’s a lot of technological progress that can be made there. Tanning, the process of transforming raw hides into leather, may have been one of the defining developments of the Neolithic, alongside agriculture and villages, if only because it’s one of our oldest examples of a “manufacturing” process.

A few other materials coming from animals see use for clothing. Wool is the big one, but the hair of a few other mammals can also work. Biblical-style sackcloth, for instance, used animal hair, as did medieval hairshirts, strangely enough. Outside of the mammals, we also find silk, which comes from the cocoon of the silkworm. Like hair, silk is a fiber, and we can spin fibers into threads, then weave threads into cloth. Simple as that.

But the best fibers, in terms of cost, ease of use, and animal ethics, come in the form of plant fibers. And it’s those that formed the basis for most day-to-day clothing in the Western world until modern times. As a matter of fact, even our synthetic world of polyester and nylon and the like still holds ample evidence of plant use. I’m wearing an awful lot of cotton right now, for example, and linen (from flax) hasn’t gone away after all these centuries.

Dressing up

Intimately related to clothing is the idea of fashion. It’s all well and good to say that humans cover themselves with animal or plant parts, but how they do so is one of the hallmarks of a culture. What parts do we cover? (That’s a more nuanced question than you might think; in America, it’s different for men and women and children.) What sorts of clothes are acceptable? What kinds of styling do we use, and when?

A lot of questions like this are highly specific to a culture, and it’s hard to draw many general conclusions. Most every culture agrees that the pelvic region should be covered, for instance—though even that is not universal. And it’s rare to find a place that doesn’t have a fashion “hierarchy”, where certain people are expected to wear “better” clothes at certain times. Think of a suit, a tuxedo, or our “Sunday best”, then compare that to what we might wear at the beach, or just around the house.

One of the more interesting—and more visible—aspects of fashion is color. At some point long ago, our ancestors discovered they could dye those materials they used for their clothing. Today, we take that for granted, but it wasn’t always thus. Purple is seen as a royal color in the West because one shade of purple (Tyrian purple) was once worn exclusively by royalty. And why did they choose that particular purple? Because it was just about the most expensive kind of dye you could find: literally worth its weight in silver.

Throughout the ages, that becomes the refrain of high fashion. And high fashion eventually trickles down to low fashion, but low fashion has made its own developments in the meantime. Some of those developments are modern, such as the boxer briefs I’m wearing as I write this. Others have a much longer history, like sandals. Sometimes, the history is longer than you’d expect; art from over 2,000 years ago shows women wearing something that looks an awful lot like a bikini.

Fashionable magic

Whatever form it takes, fashion is an integral part of a culture, and it’s also an important part of any study of clothing. Thus, as we turn to our magical realm, we’ll treat the two of them as inseparable.

First, though, we need to make the clothes. In olden days, that was a laborious, time-consuming task. It’s not a stretch to say that the whole Industrial Revolution came about as a way to simplify that task. Spinning fibers into threads took so much time that some researchers have concluded that it was effectively a constant job for medieval-era women. They’d do it while they weren’t doing anything else, and sometimes when they were. Weaving was likewise hard work. Dyers might have been respected, but only if you weren’t downwind of them. And forget about all those things we take for granted, like zippers or standard sizes.

Industry changed all that, and so can magic. We’ve already seen how magic, within the boundaries we have set, can improve the manufacturing capabilities of our realm. Applying that to clothes-making will likely be one of the first things the mages do. It’s a no-brainer. In our world, it was one of the first true cases of factory automation. That’s not going to be any different if it’s magic powering the factories. (Putting all those women out of work will have…interesting consequences.)

On the other hand, dyeing doesn’t get much of a boost from magic. It’ll benefit from the advances in chemistry made possible by magic itself and the general inquisitiveness that magic will bring, but there are fewer direct applications. Processing the materials for dyes might be automated, though, in much the same way as spinning thread. The same goes for extracting the plant fibers for clothes in the first place; every American student has heard of Eli Whitney and the cotton gin.

One thing is for certain: magic will make clothes cheaper across the board. When clothes cost less, people will have more of them. Even the poorest folks will be able to afford richly dyed fabrics instead of plain whites, browns, and grays. That’s the point when fashion becomes “mainstream”. Once a sufficient percentage of the population has access to finery, styles can develop. Fashion transforms from a noble quirk to a cultural phenomenon. What form it will take is nearly impossible to predict. And it’s a moving target, even in older times. How many people do you know in 2017 wearing bell-bottoms or tie-dyed shirts? How many have you seen in corsets and pantaloons outside of reenactments?

To end this post, let’s look at one very intriguing possibility that sprang from the development of clothes: computers. I know that sounds crazy, but bear with me. Weaving complex fabric patterns on a loom is difficult. It’s hard to make a machine that can do that, and harder still to develop one that can change its patterns. Joseph Marie Jacquard did just that about 200 years ago. He created a mechanized loom that could change its weave based on a pattern of holes punched in a series of “input” cards. Punched cards. Herman Hollerith took them for his census-counting machine at the end of the 19th century. Sixty or so years later, IBM used them to store the data for their first computers.

Now, the “programming language” of Jacquard looms isn’t Turing-complete, and nobody would claim that someone using the loom was truly programming a computer, but the seed of the idea is there. In fact, almost everything an early computer would need can be done with the magic we’ve seen in this series, some six centuries before it “should” exist. That doesn’t mean our magical realm has computers, or will get them anytime soon, but it’s definitely one of those strange paths you might want to look down. In this new year, I’ll try and find more of them for us to explore.

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