The Human Construct Of Clothing (Part One)

There are social constructs that are purely illusory ideas--if it is unjust to kill someone for being poor or disabled, then any culture that normalizes this would be operating on a mistaken notion no matter how its people feel or if they ever question this.  Racial stereotypes are an example of a social construct that is logically false.  There are social constructs that might not be morally obligatory/evil and yet are still purely arbitrary, trivial customs established by communities, such as having precise mealtimes every day.  Aesthetic trends in architecture are social constructs, meaningless on their own, and physical currency is a social construct.  Though the materials used to form it might already be present in nature, money does not exist apart from communities because the monetary dimension would not have been added to something like cattle or salt, and there would be no dollars or pesos.

Clothing is a similar thing (though a single person living in isolation could make primitive clothing for non-societal reasons).  Materials like the wool, flax, and cotton used to make clothing fabric might be out in the external world already, ready to be found, but this does not mean clothing is already there.  These materials have to be gathered and utilized in a specific way before adornments for the human body have been created.  The human body does not enter the world clothed.  People are born naked, as Job 1:21 and Ecclesiastes 5:15 acknowledge, and they can end their lives in the same state.  Clothes with all of their potential designs, colors, and markers of status or role are nothing more than another thing that humans create, yet people can become so accustomed to it that they think it--or perhaps the cultural attire of their specific region and subjective tastes--is the only legitimate way to live.

There are different motivations or functionalities for clothing.  People could wear clothing to avoid sun damage or cold temperatures.  They could wear it for protection from thorns or insect bites.  They could wear it out of insecurity about their appearance.  They could wear it merely because they like a particular style, or because they think they look better with it.  Like crowns, purple robes have been associated with royalty, such as with Cyrus the Great of Persia.  In this kind of context, though there is no inherent conceptual link between any color and a royal position, purple clothing would have signified governmental authority or wealth.  This is probably not what a typical person who puts on a purple shirt is thinking of today.  They likely just happen to select a purple shirt or like how it looks on their body.  There is no single motivation for buying or wearing clothing.

Some people (mostly non-rationalists, naturally) are so used to the conventions of wearing anything at all or of encountering a given aesthetic that they might not ever be struck by the way that clothing is a construct.  A lone person could make protective garments for himself or herself from natural resources, yes, so it is not that clothing can only be a social rather than human construct, but that a great deal of clothing is worn because of social norms.  The variance of styles across geography or historical records hinges on the preceding logical fact that clothing is a cultural construct as opposed to materials and the human body.  The togas of ancient Roman politicians, Scottish kilts, and the jeans or jackets of contemporary America are very distinct, and this would only be a small handful out of many examples.

All of these people would still have exited their mother's womb without any of this outer covering.  On an individual and cultural basis, there is still the possibility of not wearing any clothing at all, which should prompt people to realize that clothing is only a human construct.  It is not the body it covers.  It must be created and worn.  Not that examples are needed for this logical fact to be true or discovered, but groups like the Zo'e' people of the Amazon wear little to nothing, which many Westerners have been conditioned to perceive as sexual even when it is only platonically sensual or not even that.  People like the Zo'e' exemplify how there is nothing about wearing clothing that makes it the default physical state of humankind.  The opposite is true.  Clothing, as pragmatically useful and subjectively desirable as it can be, is a construct.