The history of nudity refers to social attitudes to nudity in different cultures in history.
The wearing of clothing is exclusively a human characteristic and is a feature of most human societies. It is not known when humans began wearing clothes. Anthropologists believe that animal skins and vegetation were adapted into coverings as protection from cold, heat and rain, especially as humans migrated to new climates; alternatively, covering may have been invented first for other purposes, such as magic, decoration, cult, or prestige, and later found to be practical as well.
However, many cultures have at times been relaxed dispensing with clothing, at least for some purposes and in some situations, or even full time.
Read more about History Of Nudity: Paleolithic History, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Japan, Traditional Cultures, Recent History
Famous quotes containing the words history of, history and/or nudity:
“Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“They threw off their clothes, and he gathered her to him, and found her, found the pure lambent reality of her for ever invisible flesh. Quenched, inhuman, his fingers upon her unrevealed nudity were the fingers of silence upon silence, the body of mysterious night upon the body of mysterious night, the night masculine and feminine, never to be seen with the eye, or known with the mind, only known as a palpable revelation of living otherness.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)