Aliens, clothes and nudity

[Formless]

Without that, very simple technology is not reachable. How will you secure stone tools to wood or bone (and whatever local equivalents exist?). How will you make carrying items? You are not without clothing, you are just stuck with bad clothing materials.

Glue, for one thing. In fact, glue is just as important in making stone age arrows. Pine tar, saps, and other things are all just as important as chording, actually. Heck, in India instead of peening or screwing sword blades to their hilts they used tar to glue them together. Seriously. And that not only works, you can find antiques that are still glued together perfectly fine several centuries after they were manufactured.

Also, ax heads are often attached using only wood. If you know what you are doing, you can put a hole into a stone ax head and then attach it much the same way that metal ax heads are put together. And of course, that is assuming that they use hafted tools similar to human equivalents. A longer armed species might not see the point.

And if you can make rope, you can make some sort of textile or use it to make overlapping layers of something.

Yeah, but like I said, that doesn't mean they will necessarily make the leap from using it to make rope and bags to wearing the stuff over their junk. The idea may not even make sense to them.

Protection against hazards be they artificial or natural is essential. The natural reaction of almost every animal to a storm is to seek shelter from it, so the wind and rain doesn't radically cool your body temperature. Imagine if you could move rather than be stuck somewhere. Bam, advantage.

True, but there are other ways of accomplishing that. For instance, there is a tribe in Africa (and I apologize that I don't know their name) who have a very different solution than westerners to the environmental hazards of their environment. Instead of wearing cloth, they cover themselves in caked mud. This might sound odd or even disgusting to a westerner, but it actually makes a lot of sense. The mud helps keep them cool (especially when applying it) which in that climate is much more important than providing warmth, its hygenic (believe it or not), and it helps protect them from mosquito bites. They may also wear loinclothes; I don't remember exactly. But the point is, one solution is not necessarily superior to another. Its just different, that's all.

But say that elements and temperature are not a problem. Then there is utility such as pockets.

Middle Age and Renaissance clothing didn't have pockets. In fact, most societies throughout history carried items and personal effects in bags, belts, purses and other methods. Romans wore togas, the Japanese wore Kimonos, the Egyptians wore less than either of them, and so on. Just as before, you are biased by your place in time and space. A bag or belt can be worn without any being attached to any other covering.

As for spacers, when people talk about naked aliens I think what probably comes to mind is the classic gray alien and other creatures from abduction stories. However, if you read a lot of abduction stories I think you will be surprised by some of the details that get lost by pop-culture. For instance, people often report that at first they think the creatures are naked only to realize that they are actually wearing very skintight jumpsuits that match the color of their flesh or something like that. Of course other times the abductee doesn't report this. Then again, the actual diversity of aliens seen in abduction stories and UFO sightings is actually much greater and more interesting than what Hollywood puts out: Bogleech.com has this article about an old Japanese product featuring aliens from a wide sample of both pop-culture and real life stories. You might notice that actually, at least half of them are indeed clothed, while half of the remaining half would find clothes inconvenient at best or are mechanical beings that don't need them. In fact, perhaps the weirdest alien on the list in context are the Nordics, because they are completely identical to humans. And no joke, they are a genuine part of UFO lore.

[Simon_Jester]

You guys missed the point, and in an all too predictable way at that. Having access to plant fibers is unimportant; on Earth, harvesting plant fibers for clothing came later. Have you ever considered why? People didn't always wear cotton, because cotton requires more processing. Also, not all plant fibers are useful for making clothes. Hemp, for instance, can be used in clothes, but is far more often used in rope. And there is insulation to consider-- plant fibers aren't generally adapted to keep plants warm like furs are. Hell, harvesting animal fur came after harvesting and processing the skins of animals themselves (and we still harvest leather for some kinds of clothing, like shoes, jackets, and other outerwear). An idea with no predicate you can observe in nature is an idea that is unlikely to emerge in a primitive society. Its simply more difficult to think about things you have no experience with. Humans likely wear textiles because we saw that other animals had fur, and realized that co-opting that fur to keep ourselves warm was a good idea. If no animal in the alien ecosystem has that particular adaptation (even if they have alternative adaptations like feathers or similar structures-- and no, Zor, it doesn't matter how complicated those structures are), then its an unlikely idea to emerge even if they realize that plant fibers are potentially useful technology in rope and other applications. LOTS of primitive technologies have a biological source for their inspiration (heck, lots of modern tech still takes inspiration from nature). It takes a lot of technological development before you get to more complex, inorganic or non-naturalistic tech. This is like thinking that just because nylon will necessarily be possible for them to create (because its an inorganic chemical structure) they will wear clothes made of nylon. That belies that you are thinking about this in a far too anthropocentric manner.

Eh.

It's not anthropocentric to say that an alien species will adopt some form of clothing or padding or something with intent to keep warm and comfortable if that is a biological need of theirs. Their solution might or might not specifically involve textiles, but textiles are a very likely candidate to play a role in some form. Unless the aliens have no means whatsoever of making threadlike and ropelike materials easily, of course... in which case that will cause other problems for their technological development because ropes and nets and cloth and so on are useful for a lot of toolmaking applications.

Textiles aren't a certainty, but they're a likely candidate. I wouldn't be surprised to see utterly unhuman aliens who have nonetheless mastered the art of weaving, in other words.

And do note that I'm not even suggesting that they would go around naked. I'm just saying, it might be that textiles specifically aren't necessarily something all aliens will think of wearing, as opposed to skins, rubber, and other things we would consider "primitive" or just plain odd because of our peculiarities. We may also have a body type that is particularly convenient for draping clothes off of. Consider the difficulties presented by things such as tails, antlers, claws, bony plates, serpentine biology (lack of legs, in other words), and so forth. Perhaps you should look at more fantasy art-- it becomes obvious fast that these can present problems to an artist depicting fantasy races. In reality, we should expect the same problems could effect aliens, or even issues we can't imagine because of that lack of experience I talked about.

The organism's basic body plan may come into play, yes. That's a distinct point- although most possible anatomies can be combined with SOME form of protective padding.

Ghetto edit: if you prefer a science fiction example, think of Wookies: because they have fur, they don't need clothing. Obviously, that example goes in the opposite direction of my previous argument, but it shows just how anthropocentric your assumptions are and how important it is to remember the evolutionary side of the equation. Humans evolved to sweat and remove heat; aliens could have any number of alternative adaptations to the climate of their evolutionary environment.

Yes; this ties into my speculation that aliens which have better temperature regulation systems than ours might have less need of clothing. Maybe not none, but less.

Yet another possibility is that they might have evolved on a world with lower seasonal variation than Earth, although in that case you'd expect them to have narrow temperature tolerance.

But say that elements and temperature are not a problem. Then there is utility such as pockets. Even if the species has eight hands and natural pouches, more pockets and carrying capacity than natural is always better. Not to mention storage of liquids or powders. Even if temperature and elements are not an issue, these are. Even Chewbacca wore and utility belt.

Right- but such accessories are not, in the normal sense of the word, clothing.

[I will also note that species with natural pouches are highly unlikely to want to put much of anything in them, because the pouches are inside their body and probably rather sensitive]

I also do not buy climate-controlled environments. We already have those and people wear clothes there to. It has not occurred to people to be naked just because the air conditioning is just right. The main reason to be naked in such an environment is the desire to be naked.

This is in large part because we have a nudity taboo. It is also because humans originated in a warmer climate than in most of the places humans now live in developed societies. It would be more energy-intensive for us to keep our homes heated to the temperatures we'd be comfortable at naked. Moreover, our idea of "room temperature" is aligned to the assumption that we spend most of our time wearing clothes, which in turn means we'd be uncomfortably cold sitting around naked in our own homes.

A different society of humans, let alone a society of aliens, might do things quite differently.

Spacers may be naked not because they can be but maybe because they already spend far too much time in spacesuits.

That's a distinct possibility. Also, a spacecraft's environment is so controlled that it either has effectively NO environmental hazards (nothing in the artificial environment which is hostile to comfort and life), or far, far too much (in which no normal clothing will protect you from exposure to vacuum). About the only issue is wanting to protect yourself from getting scraped and bruised when you bump into things.

One reason to wear clothing in a climate-controlled environment: People still perspire sometimes-- I know I'll have sweat running down my armpits sometimes even indoors if I don't wear clothes, the fabric absorbs the sweat. The climate control is never perfect for everybody. Naked asses on furniture is kinda gross in a shared space. Nudity taboos, which do make sense sometimes-- a hot co-worker could be quite distracting walking by without clothes on.

Some of these issues apply to humans, specifically. Aliens might have different idiosyncratic issues demanding clothing... or they might have none whatsoever.

In an alien species, I can conceive of various reasons. Sexual pheromone masking, perhaps-- that causes a bit of havoc with Turtledove's Race when it turns out that the Earth spice cinnamon causes a powerful sexual response among them, so if a species responds similarly to pheromones or other stimuli, camouflaging/covering it up would be a useful function of clothing.

Clothing isn't really a good way to conceal a scent, though.

I'm sure there are any number of other reasons that could apply. Simple hygiene is one.

It is, but I can imagine species (again) who either don't have those problems so much, don't care about those problems, or find totally different ways of resolving them.

[Broomstick]

We're used to thinking of clothing and textiles as synonymous, but they aren't. Some actual examples from our world:

- Native Americans where rubber trees were native sometimes poured the liquid sap over their feet and let it dry, creating "boots" of a sort for foot protection that could be peeled off later when no longer needed.

- There have been several cultures that utilized animal sinew as thread when sewing leather and for other purposes needing rope or cords or threads. This was especially popular among circumpolar people with no suitable plant fibers for such purposes in their environment. Plants are not needed to make clothing.

- Leather hides can be turned into lacing. This is still used for many forms of modern leatherworking.

- Use of gourds as a covering in Papua New Guinea I believe has already been mentioned, so basically purpose-growing vegetable matter other than fiber for such uses.

So consider some of those alternatives.

For high tech aliens, maybe they have some sort of projected image/holographic clothing instead of material clothing, which serves social/signaling functions but does not provide protection (assume an environment where protection is not needed).

[Zor]

I would like to mention that the Meso-American (Aztecs, Maya, Olmecs) civilizations developed textiles without having an animal to harvest wool from. They also did so in an environment that never saw a single goddamn snowflake.

As for the emergence of Textiles, one also must consider woven artifacts such as wicker baskets. Certain weaves can get you certain properties, some more rigid some more soft.

Also one must consider that flax had been domesticated for around ten thousand years in the fertile crescent. Before this...

...got bred into this...


Zor