Cloth and The Native

… the king himself wore clothes no different from those of his peers, but 'the king is always seen
as the king'; at the annual ritual

of kingship, … a creature more powerful than ordinary man, in unique and awesome costume. Costume & Identity, Kuper
We discovered innumerable lands, we saw

innumerable people and different languages,
and all were naked.
Amerigo Vespucci, letter to Lorenzo di
Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, 1500
Page | 1
'[T]here is much to support the view that it is
clothes that wear us and not we them; we
may make them take the mould of arm or
breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains,
our tongues to their liking.'
Virginia Woolf
cloth and
the native
on naturism & nature,
on natives & nudism,
on cloths, clothes &
respectability
compiled by
amma birago
Tell me what sort of people they are,
and I will tell you what sort of dresses they wear.
The Art Journal, 1880
… Aboriginal elders "talk of a time before

trousers and after trousers" … Dress and
discipline were closely related; nakedness
figured a chaotic range of anxieties around
sin, immorality, desire, and resistance.
States of Undress,
Philippa Levine
Johannes Gottleib Christaller … the name

atadehyefo as “people in European dress,”
which shows how clothing becomes part of
one’s identity.
Stamping History
Allison Joan Martino
the blossoming of a fine civilization, … to learn to enjoy what we do not possess, … the man has to learn to look
at a woman's beauty and not desire to possess the joyous conquest. Havelock Ellis, Jul., 1909
… the king himself wore clothes no different from those of his peers, but 'the king is always seen as the king'; at the annual ritual
Page | 2
Clothes serve, therefore, to accent the

differences between people, socially and
sexually. Nakedness is the great leveler of
social distinctions for it reduces all persons Page | 3
to the common bodily or animal level on
which they came into this world.
In Defense of Modesty,
Alexander Lowen
the blossoming of a fine civilization, … to learn to enjoy

what we do not possess, … the man has to learn to look
at a woman's beauty and not desire to possess the joyous conquest.
The spectacle of nakedness,
Sexual Education and Nakedness,
Havelock Ellis, Jul., 1909
Most hunter-gatherer disguises demonstrated clear similarities to cases

of visual deception found in other species, …
Disguises and the Origins of Clothing

William Buckner
Thermoregulation is often thought to be a key motivating factor behind the origins of clothing. Less attention has
been given, however, to the production and use of clothing across traditional societies in contexts outside of
thermoregulatory needs.
… “a man who has at length found something to do will not

need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that
has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period.”
Walden, or Life in the Woods

Henry David Thoreau
“Kings and Queens who wear a suit but once . . .cannot know
the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. ... Every day our
garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the
impress of the wearer’s character.”
Clothes can be considered, therefore, as a mechanism of

genital arousal, and modesty promotes this aim, for by
hiding the prize, its allure is intensified.
In Defense of Modesty
Alexander Lowen
George Basden, a missionary and ethnographer who lived with the Igbo
people of Nigeria published two volumes of photographs in the 1920s and
1930s. The book described images of unclothed but elaborately decorated Igbo Page | 4
women as indicating their high status as eligible brides who would not have
thought of themselves as naked. Nudity, Wikipedia
Bare feet. They often go without shirts, thus, fully exposed, they usually paint their [upper] bodies with white
colouring, drawing all manner of figures on their necks, shoulders, arms, breasts and backs.”
A Danish Jew in West Africa: Wulff Joseph Wulff Biography and Letters, 1836–1842
“The Christened Mulatresses”:
Euro-African Families in a Slave-Trading Town
Pernille Ipsen
Births, marriages, the end of the mourning period, the

formation of a new association in the city, and a religious or
state festival are all occasions for lavishing resources on new
cloths, even by those who can little afford it. The close
association between cloth and power has gone, but cloth
remains an outward expression of friendship, respect, status
and prosperity.
Power, Cloth and Currency on the Loango Coast,
PM Martin
… one open-air school in Salford showed that despite a lack of

UV rays in winter a life spent wholly in the open air, even
with minimal skin exposure, was enough to cure rickets and
make children robust.
Naturism, Nature, The Senses, Early 20th Century Britain
NJ Morris
Describing his experiences of naked cross-country running, for example, he enthused; the sensation of virile and
primitive manhood becomes even stronger if one achieves the will and the fortitude to expose one’s body to storm
and wild weather. [There is an] unspeakable feeling of well-being and unimagined joy of living animate the body in
rain and strong wind.
Naked In Nature: Naturism, Nature And
The Senses In Early Twentieth Century Britain
Nina J Morris
It was our aim to harden ourselves by [running] in all weathers as often as at all
possible. […] over and under–often through boggy ground where the earth
shook around us and soft mud and water squelched between the toes. We had no
fear and went hullooing over everything that came in our way; our motto was
‘Through’!
Page | 5
Civilisation leads the unwary downward to disease, neglect,
and repulsive squalor [. . .] Self-acquired strength of body and
soul brings deepest joy and delight; the sense of being ruler
over civilization. This is true culture!”
Man and Sunlight
Hans Surén
When Fernandes comes to the Bullom and Temne

of Sierra Leone, he distinguishes between 'men of
good standing' who wear 'cotton shirts and breeches',
and 'poor men' who have to make do with scanty
pieces of bark-cloth.
Slaves and Society, Western Africa, 1445-c. 1700
J. D. Fage
The slave is distinguished from the others by his nakedness,

while the peasant and fisherman wear loincloths; ... a dignitary
clothed in several strips of European linen.
The Beschryvinghe Pieter de Marees (1602)
and Regula Iselin
The earliest (eleventh-century) reference to woven strips of

cotton (chigguiya) used as currency comes from Takrur, north
of Senegal, a region of extensive nomadism and early cotton
cultivation.
Judaic Threads in the West African Tapestry
Labelle Prussin
“The skin of the civilized man, is an atrophied organ” …

“it is no less [unreasonable] to expect the delicate skin of
man to keep its health in perpetual darkness”
1933, Nudism in England
Rev. Norwood
Many early nudist authors strike this evangelical tenor and

reveal a near-religious pursuit of a placeless promised land. …
Suren asserted, “There is a purity—a sacredness in our natural
5
nakedness.
Page
Utopian Bodies and Anti-fashion Futures: The Dress

Theories and Practices of English Interwar Nudists
Annebella Pollen
The Function of Clothing and of Bodily Adornment

The American Journal of Psychology, Jan., 1927, Page | 6
Herbert C. Sanborn
In case of most savage tribes clothing is not assumed until the beginning of puberty; and then a distinction is made
in the dress of the sexes, prescribed strictly by custom. With the advance of civilization, however, and the advent of
marriage this stage comes to be considered of less importance, the emphasis being then laid on the distinction
through dress of the married single female members of the given group. According Schurtz, this fact throws a flood
of light on the psychological significance of clothing, which in many cases is plainly seen to a symbol of the married
state. With some races the expression, "he gave her a dress" means that a man has married a maiden and not a
widow,'
Access to cloth remained an essential attribute of power throughout

the precolonial history of the Loango Coast, perhaps more so than
access to the firearms that were once thought to be the key to
understanding the changing basis of power
within and between African societies.
Power, Cloth and Currency on the Loango Coast
Phyllis M. Martin
Stamping History: Stories of Social Change in Ghana’s

Adinkra Cloth Allison Joan Martino
Johannes Gottleib Christaller included the following Twi expressions: He first
said that hye fura conveys “to put on, to wear (of clothes fitting to the body or
parts of the body)”. … to put on, or to wear clothes (cf. fura tama)”, which he
identified as “to wear a negro dress”. He contrasted this expression to wearing
“European dress,” atadee. … the name atadehyefo as “people in European
dress,” which shows how clothing becomes part of one’s identity.
Funerals are still times of enormous expense as even the poorest families struggle to give the deceased an honorable
burial, but most people are now buried in a wooden coffin and the consumption of cloth on such occasions has
declined. Yet cloth still changes hands on important occasions, for example, at the conclusion of a marriage contract.
Births, marriages, the end of the mourning period, the formation of a new association in the city, and a religious or
state festival are all occasions for lavishing resources on new cloths, even by those who can little afford it. The close
association between cloth and power has gone, but cloth remains an outward expression of friendship, respect, status
and prosperity.
Power, Cloth and Currency on the Loango Coast,
PM Martin
Judaic Threads in the West African Tapestry: No More Foreever?

Labelle Prussin
Another major medium of currency in Africa was cloth. While the use of gold (and silver) currencies in both Europe
and the Muslim world depended on the minting and handling of money, African cloth currencies involved silk,
indigo, and strip-weaving traditions in cotton and wool all intimately linked to the nomadic presence, the trans-
Saharan trade, and the virtual Jewish trade monopoly over silk and spices (which subsumed indigo) in North Africa,
the Mediterranean Basin, and beyond.
European merchants initially used the guinée as a means of exchange for Page | 7
African commodities such as slaves and gum arabic in West Africa.
… France built the industry to manufacture guinée cloth in Pondicherry, which
was required by the Moors as a means of exchange for gum arabic and presented
that the ‘West African consumer taste for quality textiles shaped a pattern of
global trade’ (Kobayashi 2019, 203).
Colonialism and imperialism as agents of globalization

Toyomu Masaki
While a commodity that functions as money should have certain conditions

that someone always wants to accept, the commodity does not need to be
a quality product. Otherwise, people would have preferred to keep the money
rather than spend it, and the guinée would not have circulated extensively
through West Africa.
Colonialism and imperialism as agents of globalization
Toyomu Masaki
When Fernandes comes to the Bullom and Temne of Sierra Leone, he

distinguishes between 'men of good standing' who wear 'cotton shirts and
breeches', and 'poor men' who have to make do with scanty pieces of bark-cloth.
(Much later, in the 1660s, Villault de Bellefond was to stress this sort of
distinction all along the Upper Guinea coast.)
The various kinds of cloth woven from raphia fibre in the Congo-Angola region
were equally marks of social distinction. The best cloth, said to resemble velvet,
was the prerogative of kings and nobles.
Slaves and Society in Western Africa, c. 1445 - c. 1700
J. D. Fage
For everyday affairs the king himself wore clothes no different from those of his
peers, but 'the king is always seen as the king'; 'he is bathed with potions of
kingship'; 'he has the shadow (personality) of kingship'. At the climax of the
annual ritual of kingship, he appears as Silo, a creature more powerful than
ordinary man, in unique and awesome costume. …
Costume and Identity

Hilda Kuper
Clothing is a bundle of cultural symbols that has been dealt with somewhat eclectically and indiscriminately in the
anthropological wash. Some writers have speculated on the origins of clothing, stressing such qualities in human
nature as modesty and vanity; others, more materially oriented, have emphasized utility; others again have listed
separate garments, the materials of which they were made, and the techniques employed; and some have paid
attention to broader historical and sociological dimensions.
George Basden, a missionary and ethnographer who lived with the Igbo Page | 8
1930s. The book described images of unclothed but elaborately decorated Igbo
Bare feet. They often go without shirts, thus, fully exposed, they usually paint
their [upper] bodies with white colouring, drawing all manner of figures on their
necks, shoulders, arms, breasts and backs.”
In a letter accompanying the watercolor, Wulff described Malm’s dress in detail: “The part drawn in ink shows gold
[ornaments] or doubloons; marks on the face are painted on with chalk or white colouring. . . . I have seen Mulatinder
[Mulatresses] wearing gold to a value of 100 lod [c. 15 grams]. Bare feet. They often go without shirts, thus, fully
exposed, they usually paint their [upper] bodies with white colouring, drawing all manner of figures on their necks,
shoulders, arms, breasts and backs.”
English translation in Selena Axelrod Winsnes,
Pernille Ipsen

The American Journal of Psychology, Jan., 1927,
Herbert C. Sanborn
Clothing proper is first sight seem to indicate absolute nudity, … view that clothing originates in a desire to protect
body from cold will not hold for races living beneath the tropics and those who wear the articles in question at
present do usually regard them as protection. Moreover, we have drawings in the caves of Perigord which show that
man was not forced even by the cold of the Diluvial Period to put on warm clothing. While a report of Von den
Steinen seems to show the garments in question may have served secondarily as a protection against the bushes in
roaming through the thickets against the attacks of insects, the theories which take these primary functions are
refuted by the fact that the articles themselves are quite unsuitable for the purposes alleged. In parts of Africa in the
temperate zone the factor of climate may, however, have led to an increase in the amount of clothing worn.
The Function of Clothing and of Bodily
Adornment, 1927,
Herbert C. Sanborn
The close relationship between clothing and sex is revealed most distinctly through the fact that all important events
sex life go regularly hand in hand with change in dress. In case of most savage tribes clothing is not assumed until
the beginning of puberty; and then a distinction is made in the dress of the sexes, prescribed strictly by custom. With
the advance of civilization, however, and the advent of marriage this stage comes to be considered of less
importance, the emphasis being then laid on the distinction through dress of the married single female members of
the given group. According Schurtz, this fact throws a flood of light on the psychological significance of clothing,
which in many cases is plainly seen to a symbol of the married state. With some races the expression, "he gave her a
dress" means that a man has married a maiden and not a widow,' while on the island of Tahiti the chief ceremony in
the marriage rite consists in the groom throwing the bride a piece of cloth.
Page | 9
(Re)Fashioning Masculinity
Ben Barry
Fashion and appearance are often framed in opposition to hegemonic masculinity - the most exalted configuration of
gender practice that legitimates patriarchy (Connell 1995; Kaiser 2012). … however, fashion and appearance are
principal means by which men’s visible gender identities are established as not only different from women but also
from other men (Edwards 1997). Multiple masculinities result from men’s various social identities. Masculinities are
marginalized by race or class and subordinated by sexuality.
… that men across identities and contexts use dress to secure social domination and support an unequal gender
system. Despite different constellations of privilege, all of the participants enacted practices which shored up
hegemonic masculinity when they adopted or rejected dominant masculine dress ideals because doing so would
personally and/ or professionally benefit them by securing their gender privilege. As such, scholars should be
cautious not to overstate the significance of men in feminine clothes.
Clothing proper is first sight seem to indicate absolute nudity, …

… a symbol of the married state. With some races the expression, "he gave her
a dress" means that a man has married a maiden and not a widow,' while on the
island of Tahiti the chief ceremony in the marriage rite consists in the groom
throwing the bride a piece of cloth.
Herbert C. Sanborn
their [upper] bodies with white colouring, drawing all manner of figures on their
Pernille Ipsen
Dressing Africans in European clothes to cover their nakedness was part of converting them to Christianity. [48] In the
19th century, photographs of naked Indigenous peoples began circulating in Europe without a clear distinction
between those created as commercial curiosities (or erotica) and those claiming to be scientific, or ethnographic
images. Given the state of photography, it is unclear which images were posed, rather than being representative of
everyday attire. Nudity, Wikipedia
Page | 10
Many early nudist authors strike this evangelical tenor and reveal a near-religious pursuit
of a placeless promised land. For these authors, nudism is not only a social cause that
offers a tangible resolution to all that is wrong in the modern world but also a way of
delivering heaven on earth. Perhaps the first to establish this zealous approach was Suren
in Man and Sunlight, a comprehensive “manual of life reform”18 to be achieved through
a rigorous regime of outdoor nudism and exercise. Suren asserted, “There is a purity—a
sacredness in our natural nakedness.
Annebella Pollen
Rethinking the Italian Renaissance Nude

Jill Burke
African slaves were common in southern Italy, especially Naples and Sicily from early in the century, and were
frequent in the northern courts of Ferrara and Mantua by the 1440s. They are documented in Florence from 1461,
but were probably present before this. …
African slaves were both clothed and baptized by their European owners, and so could be understood as having been
saved both from their errant paganism and ‘beastly’ way of life.
Jill Burke
It is likely that this account (and, potentially, similar news from other travellers) would have been available at this
time, due to the Florentines’ keen financial interest in the Portuguese voyages. Florentines had a key role as
investors in Portuguese expeditions to the Atlantic coast of Africa. There had long been a Florentine presence in
Lisbon – the Bardi family were given a licence to trade there as early as 1338 – and by 1500, Florentines were the
most important and numerous group of foreign merchants in the Portuguese capital, dealing in goods such as sugar,
leather, dyes and silks as well as Guinean slaves.
Four of them came to us in two of the aforementioned little Portuguese language well, so
that we could understand one another. … wondrously immodest running around together
like wild beasts: some cover only their privaties, pitch black like those whom in our
country we call Moors.
The Earliest German Sources For West African History (1504-1509)
Adam Jones
Balthasar Sprenger (1509)

On the seventh day of April [1505] we sailed further into [sic] country and cast our anchors at three miles by a
market which the king of the Moors resides. The people have hollow trees for navigation, fish. Four of them came to
us in two of the aforementioned little Portuguese language well, so that we could understand one another. In this
kingdom and these islands we also saw wondrously immodest running around together like wild beasts: some cover
only their privaties, pitch black like those whom in our country we call Moors.
... Between Bissegitz and Cape de Moors, ... the inhabitants of these … cover their privities with up [lit.: "above
themselves"]. Otherwise grant herbs; and it is so full of leather underneath them, almost clothes made of animal
skins draped mantles. Many of them also have of courtesy and adornment …
The Earliest German Sources For West African History (1504-1509)
Adam Jones
Page | 11
Nakedness and Other Peoples:
Jill Burke
… travellers’ accounts of naked natives encountered on European voyages of exploration, particularly those to sub-
Saharan Africa, influenced the creation of what has been called a ‘Renaissance anthropology’ – debates about the
nature of mankind. This provided a new conceptual filter through which the nude figure was seen – and in some
cases, these accounts may have directly affected the iconography of otherwise puzzling images.
Florentine links with the Portuguese voyages to Africa, and descriptions of battling tribesmen, as a means of
interpreting Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s Battle of Naked Men, a seminal work in the development of the nude form.
… on the Algarve in August 1444, a group of around 250 captive black Africans
‘virtually or completely naked, and in chains’ screaming and crying as their
families were split up.

African slaves were common in southern Italy, especially Naples and Sicily from early in the century, and were
frequent in the northern courts of Ferrara and Mantua by the 1440s. They are documented in Florence from 1461,
but were probably present before this. …
African slaves were both clothed and baptized by their European owners, and so could be understood as having been
saved both from their errant paganism and ‘beastly’ way of life.

Jill Burke
One Florentine buyer, Giovanni Guidetti, explained that he

needed extra money to buy clothes for his three young slave
girls in 1461 as they were naked when he bought them.
It is likely that this account (and, potentially, similar news from other travellers) would have been available at this
time, due to the Florentines’ keen financial interest in the Portuguese voyages. Florentines had a key role as
investors in Portuguese expeditions to the Atlantic coast of Africa. There had long been a Florentine presence in
Lisbon – the Bardi family were given a licence to trade there as early as 1338 – and by 1500, Florentines were the
most important and numerous group of foreign merchants in the Portuguese capital, dealing in goods such as sugar,
leather, dyes and silks as well as Guinean slaves.
When Fernandes comes to the Bullom and Temne of Sierra Leone, he

distinguishes between 'men of good standing' who wear 'cotton shirts
and breeches', and 'poor men' who have to make do with scanty pieces
of bark-cloth. (Much later, in the 1660s, Villault de Bellefond was to
stress this sort of distinction all along the Upper Guinea coast.)
The various kinds of cloth woven from raphia fibre in the Congo-
Angola region were equally marks of social distinction. The best cloth,
said to resemble velvet, was the prerogative of kings and nobles.
Slaves and Society in Western Africa, c. 1445-c. 1700
J. D. Fage
Page | 12
… Cadamosto’s stories of King Budomel, and his train of ‘two-

hundred blacks’, who gave an audience twice a day, ‘with much
ceremony and abasement’, and where ‘no man would be bold enough
to come before him to parley, unless he had stripped himself naked
save for the girdle of leather they wear’.
Jill Burke



William Buckner
These [Indians] were clothed in beasts skins, … and in their demeanor like to brute beastes, whom the King kept
after a time. Of the which upon two yeeres after, I saw two apparelled after the maner of Englishmen
in Westminster palace, which that time I could not discern from Englishmen, till I was learned what they were, but
as for speech, I heard none of them utter one word.
- Robert Fabian,
"Of the Savages which Cabot brought home presented into the King
in the foureteenth yere of his raigne,"
in Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations (1589)
cited by Gavin Hollis in Disguise and "the Naked Indian"
in Massinger's "The City Madam"
They also would wear "the English apparel" when meeting with the English, but "pull of[f] all, as soone as they
come againe into their owne Houses, and Company." It is important that Williams notes the difference in behavior
of the Narragansett in English homes and when they left English homes: while his observations suggest that the
Narragansett held English clothing in high esteem (their word for "Englishmen" literally translated as "Coat-men, or
clothed"), in a sense they also suggest that the Narragansett displayed a flair for performance and for dressing up.
This ability to dress up (rather than wear clothes) was especially significant in Virginia in 1622.
Furthermore, the play seems to rebuff claims that the Indians and the English
shared bodily similarities - that underneath it all they were all the same - by Page | 13
deracinating the Indian to reveal a dominant English presence beneath. Sir John
washes off his Indianness, and thus washes away the Indians; …
"He would not goe naked like the "Indians",

but cloathed just as one of our selves": Disguise and
"the Naked Indian" in Massinger's "The City Madam"
Gavin Hollis
Commentators and observers regularly compared Indian and English behavioral patterns and appearance, and they
used the Indian as a yardstick against which the civility (or lack therein) of their own countrymen and women could
be measured. The Indian was savage, but then so were the English; the Indian was heathen, but then so were many
English (either Catholic or Protestant, depending on the writer's denomination); like their English forebears, Indians
colored and darkened their skin; Indians were simple people, but in many ways this was preferable to the ostentation
of many English who wore outlandish clothing. We see these points of comparison at work in Massinger's The City
Madam, in which the fashion-crazed citizens of London are shown up by the Virginian visitors, who, although
conforming to stereotypes about devil-worshipping Indians, stand in relief to the sartorial excesses of their English
counterparts. Furthermore, the employment of alterity-as-disguise draws attention to the items of apparel by which
transformation is achieved, prostheses such as darkening cosmetics or masks and arm/chest pieces, hairpieces,
headdresses, and clothing.
"He would not goe naked like the "Indians",

but cloathed just as one of our selves": Disguise and
"the Naked Indian" in Massinger's "The City Madam"
Gavin Hollis
Sir John's taking off of his Indian disguise could thus be seen to parody the various beliefs about the possible
relationships between Indians and English (past, present, and future), which were enthusiastically floated by
prominent colonialists ... Furthermore, the play seems to rebuff claims that the Indians and the English shared bodily
similarities - that underneath it all they were all the same - by deracinating the Indian to reveal a dominant English
presence beneath. Sir John washes off his Indianness, and thus washes away the Indians; indeed, they were never
really there in the first place. By doing so he reclaims his rightful position, removing the Indians' threat from his
own small plantation and placing in their stead a rightful, white, and now appropriately attired master.
Colonialism's Clothing:
Africa, France, and the Deployment of Fashion
Victoria L. Rovine
"... our natives, adopting the manners and habits of Europeans, are beginning more and more, especially in important
urban centers, to dress in the European manner? in short, to follow our fashions" (from a pamphlet promoting the
French Syndicate of Artificial Textile Manufacturers, Exposition Coloniale Internationale, Paris, 1931).
Clothing has long been an important medium for negotiating differences across cultural divides. Garments provide a
means by which to absorb distant cultures into familiar frameworks, or to highlight cultural differences, often in
order to reinforce cultural identity through contrast with the "other."
The World in Dress:

Anthropological Perspectives on Clothing, Fashion, and Culture
Karen Tranberg Hansen
Comaroff & Comaroff (1997) view clothing as central to missionary conversion in the early nineteenth century in Page | 14
Bechuanaland, a frontier region between colonial Botswana and South Africa. The struggle for souls entailed
dressing African bodies in European clothes to cover their nudity and managing these bodies through new hygiene
regimes. European clothes were a popular prestige good preceding the arrival of missionaries; converts accepted the
clothes eagerly and wore them as they saw fit, expressing their personal desires in a new culture of consumption that
the missionaries could not fully control.
Martin (1994) offers urban vistas of vibrant and rapidly changing styles that the culturally diverse African
townspeople integrated into their dress in Brazzaville during the French colonial period. This colonial cosmopolis
was an historical crossroad of trade and exchange where ostentatious body display accentuated long-held cultural
ideas that connected dress and social status. Because of the contingent meanings of the dressed body, clothing
readily becomes a contested issue (Allman 2004a).
The World in Dress:
Unlike Africans in other countries in which traditional rulers had

converted to Christianity and their subjects had become nominal
'clothed' Christians, Swazi rulers maintained the traditional ancestral
religion and the associated costumes at the same time as they tolerated
missionaries and did not interfere with the conversion of subjects
publicized in clothing.
Hilda Kuper
The attitude of whites towards Swazi wearing Western clothing was ambivalent. On the one hand traditional 'native
clothing' was denigrated, on the other there was a reluctance to have Africans appear in the more fashionable of
Western clothing. Whites who were not prepared to see blacks as equals used clothing as a symbol maintaining
inequality." The reaction of Swazi to Western styles of clothing was complex, depending in part on the situation and
in part on various status components, more particularly pedigree and education. Unlike Africans in other countries in
which traditional rulers had converted to Christianity and their subjects had become nominal 'clothed' Christians,
Swazi rulers maintained the traditional ancestral religion and the associated costumes at the same time as they
tolerated missionaries and did not interfere with the conversion of subjects publicized in clothing. What can be
regarded as the present Swazi national policy in matters of religion, education, and clothing developed through
deliberate actions by previous rulers.

Hilda Kuper
For everyday affairs the king himself wore clothes no different from
those of his peers, but 'the king is always seen as the king'; 'he is bathed
with potions of kingship'; 'he has the shadow (personality) of kingship'.
At the climax of the annual ritual of kingship, he appears as Silo, a
creature more powerful than ordinary man, in unique and awesome
costume. …
For everyday affairs the king … a creature more powerful than ordinary man, in unique and awesome costume.
Again, while there was little obvious distinction between the essential outer clothing of all women, the skirts of the
queen mother and of two of the king's own wives were softened with fat from cattle of a sacred herd attributed with
supernatural power. When trade goods-particularly factory manufactured fabrics, and China beads - were
incorporated, the king and in some
Page | 15
Clothing is a bundle of cultural symbols that has been
dealt with somewhat eclectically and indiscriminately
in the anthropological wash.

Hilda Kuper
… Clothing can be described as part of the total structure of personal appearance which includes hairstyles,
ornaments, masks, decorations and mutilations. The different parts of the structure are consciously manipu- lated to
assert and demarcate differences in status, identity and commitment (support or protest) at the level of personal,
national and international relationships. The rules of that structure are assimilated over time together with other rules
of thought and behavior, and though they have received less analytical scrutiny, they are as 'real' as rules of kinship,
of land tenure, of spatial interaction, or any other rules of social communication.
From before puberty the genitals are conspicuously hidden. The girl's girdle is replaced by a longer skirt, reaching
from the hips to the thighs, with the top of the body exposed; and the boy is given a larger and more functional
lijobo. With puberty a boy dons an umncadvo, a penis box made from a hollowed-out hard-shelled fruit. The
clothing of the sexually mature imposes and symbolizes additional restraints and responsibilities. This is particularly
the case of the woman, whose distinctive garments are a heavy skirt of oxhide and a goatskin apron.


Henry David Thoreau

genital arousal, and modesty promotes this aim, for by hiding
the prize, its allure is intensified.
Alexander Lowen
One simple principle, I believe, explains the behavior of organisms - the search for excitement and pleasure.
Excitement is life. The lack of excitement is boredom and death. Since Adam and Eve, the excitement of life has
centered around the mystery of sex. Clothing intensifies this mystery. It cloaks the biological response with the aura
of personality (persona = mask) and adorns it with the unique characteristics of the individual ego. Sex is elevated
from a generic response to a personal one. This response is the basis of love; from it derives all romance, the elixir
that transforms mundane existence into enchantment and ecstasy. This transformation does not exist on the animal
level, where sex is a purely biological function. The specifically human quality that raises sex from its animal level
is the sense of awe that grows out of the awareness of the surrender of individuality and the fusion of the self with
the universal.
Page | 16
The close relationship between clothing and sex is revealed
most distinctly through the fact that all important events in sex life
go regularly hand in hand with change in dress. In case of most
savage tribes clothing is not assumed until the beginning of puberty;
and then a distinction is made in the dress of the sexes, prescribed
strictly by custom.

Herbert C. Sanborn
The close relationship between clothing and sex is revealed most distinctly through the fact that all important events
sex life go regularly hand in hand with change in dress. In case of most savage tribes clothing is not assumed until
the beginning of puberty; and then a distinction is made in the dress of the sexes, prescribed strictly by custom. With
the advance of civilization, however, and the advent of marriage this stage comes to be considered of less
importance, the emphasis being then laid on the distinction through dress of the married single female members of
the given group. According Schurtz, this fact throws a flood of light on the psychological significance of clothing,
which in many cases is plainly seen to a symbol of the married state. With some races the expression, "he gave her a
dress" means that a man has married a maiden and not a widow,' while on the island of Tahiti the chief ceremony in
the marriage rite consists in the groom throwing the bride a piece of cloth.
Man is conscious of his body, especially of its sexual nature, in a way the animal or the young child isn't. Man has
developed an ego which views the body as an object and is aware of its sexual function. The animal is fully
identified with its body and lacks this awareness and ego development.
Alexander Lowen
In human beings, the tendency to exhibit and display the body

is coupled with a feeling of modesty about it which derives
from an ego consciousness of the body.
In the Trobriand Islands, as reported by Malinowski, when a girl begins to have sexual relations, she puts on a fibre
skirt. The skirt, like the palm leaf or loincloth of the man, denotes a feeling of privacy about the genital organs. We
express a similar feeling about the genital organs when we speak of them as "the privates" or the "private parts."
Privacy is connected with personality, which masks an individual's innermost feelings and enables one to hide
certain bodily expressions that are considered personal not public. The genital organs are covered because their
reactions are least subject to voluntary control. While we can mask certain feelings or prevent them from showing in
our faces, we can be betrayed by a genital excitation that cannot be controlled. Pride informs a man that his sense of
privacy requires that his sexual feelings be kept hidden from public view.
(Re)Fashioning Masculinity
Ben Barry
Fashion and appearance are often framed in opposition to hegemonic masculinity - the most exalted configuration of
gender practice that legitimates patriarchy (Connell 1995; Kaiser 2012). … however, fashion and appearance are
principal means by which men’s visible gender identities are established as not only different from women but also
from other men (Edwards 1997). Multiple masculinities result from men’s various social identities. Masculinities are
marginalized by race or class and subordinated by sexuality. Page | 17
… that men across identities and contexts use dress to secure social domination and support an unequal gender
system. Despite different constellations of privilege, all of the participants enacted practices which shored up
hegemonic masculinity when they adopted or rejected dominant masculine dress ideals because doing so would
personally and/ or professionally benefit them by securing their gender privilege. As such, scholars should be
cautious not to overstate the significance of men in feminine clothes.

Herbert C. Sanborn
Moreover, we are informed that far from the influence of Puritanism, near the region where Spartan youths without
moral jeopardy wrestled naked with naked Spartan girls and Greeks in general were lightly clad, the maid of Athens
has had the proper length of her skirt prescribed for her by some modern Draco. On the other hand, however, it is
perhaps not absolutely unworthy of mention in passing that other reformers in Europe, reacting against what they
call effete civilization, are seriously developing cults for the abolition of clothing altogether except for outdoor
clothing problem present article. The view that clothing as the ancient account which is paralleled a period when no
accounts seem to quired habit; but witness to the fact to wear clothes. recent times, attempts explanation for the fact.
Most hunter-gatherer disguises demonstrated clear similarities to cases of visual

deception found in other species, with the majority of examples fitting
categories of animal mimicry, masquerading as plants, disruptive coloration
(camouflage), or background matching (camouflage), while disguises unique to
humans involved the impersonation of culture-specific “spirit-beings.”
William Buckner
Alexander Lowen
People ordinarily assume that clothes are worn as a means of protection against the elements of nature. Though such
protection is obviously needed in arctic climates, it does not explain the use of clothes in tropic regions or heated
homes. Clothes serve two other important functions, they draw attention to a person's individuality at the same time
that they hide the secret core of his personality. To understand the complex role that clothes play in our lives we
need to study the antithetical tendencies of bodily display on the one hand and bodily modesty on the other.
The desire to draw attention to the body and to display its charms reflects an exhibitionistic impulse that is found in
all people. Among primitives there is an almost universal tendency to decorate the body with such devices as paints,
ornaments, garlands, etc. This feeling for displaying the body is common to many animals and man. … Among
human beings, display is a more conscious activity which employs many external agents to enhance the appeal of
the individual. Psychologists and anthropologists generally agree that the primary function of clothes is to serve this
display function. Display emphasizes the uniqueness and superiority of the individual over the rest of the group. It
often takes the form of physical exhibition as in the display of dancing ability or athletic prowess but in daily life the
main reliance is upon decorative devices or clothes. In all primitive societies, the ruler or tribal leader is more
elaborately decorated than his subjects or followers. In civilized societies, organized on a class basis, status and rank
are expressed by the costliness and elaboration of dress. The king's royal robes and the courtiers' ornate costumes
distinguished them from the common man. These distinctions of dress tend to disappear in democratic societies,
where they are displaced by fashion, which serves as a status symbol.
In Defense of Modesty Page | 18

Alexander Lowen
To be dressed in the height of fashion is some indication of social superiority for it often requires more money and
time than the average working person can afford to devote to clothes. Clothes serve, therefore, to accent the
differences between people, socially and sexually. Nakedness is the great leveler of social distinctions for it reduces
all persons to the common bodily or animal level on which they came into this world. Nudity strips the individual of
his ego pretensions and, sometimes, of his ego defenses. Punishment has frequently taken the form of the public
exposure of the naked body. People who are paraded nude through the streets before the gaze of others who are
dressed experience a deep humiliation. When, however, everyone is undressed, the feelings of shame and
embarrassment tend to disappear and one often experiences a sense of release and freedom in nudity. The need to
maintain an appearance or support an ego image is a restraint that inhibits the joy and spontaneity of the body. In the
privacy of our homes, we all welcome the opportunity to relieve ourselves of this ego burden by removing some of
our clothing. In human beings, the tendency to exhibit and display the body is coupled with a feeling of modesty
about it which derives from an ego consciousness of the body. Man is conscious of his body, especially of its sexual
nature, in a way the animal or the young child isn't.
Man has developed an ego which views the body as an object and is aware of its sexual function. The animal is fully
identified with its body and lacks this awareness and ego development. Man, as opposed to the animal and the young
child, has become self-conscious. Modesty is an expression of this self-awareness, a mark of personality, and a sign
of individuality. Covering part of the body, particularly the genital area, reflects a sense of privacy which is the basis
of modesty.
Alexander Lowen


William Buckner
… The employment of disguises - defined as altering one’s appearance for purposes of deceiving conspecifics or
other animals - is noted for eight of the 10 societies, with their use occurring in contexts of hunting, religious or cult
practices, and war or interpersonal violence. Most hunter-gatherer disguises demonstrated clear similarities to cases
of visual deception found in other species, with the majority of examples fitting categories of animal mimicry,
masquerading as plants, disruptive coloration (camouflage), or background matching (camouflage), while disguises
unique to humans involved the impersonation of culture-specific “spirit-beings.
These [Indians] were clothed in beasts skins, … and in their demeanor

like to brute beastes, whom the King kept after a time. Of the which
upon two yeeres after, I saw two apparelled after the maner of Englishmen
in Westminster palace, which that time I could not discern from Englishmen,
till I was learned what they were, but as for speech,
I heard none of them utter one word.
- Robert Fabian,
"Of the Savages which Cabot brought home presented into the King
in the foureteenth yere of his raigne,"
in Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations (1589)
cited by Gavin Hollis in Disguise and "the Naked Indian" Page | 19
in Massinger's "The City Madam"
They also would wear "the English apparel" when meeting with the English, but
"pull of[f] all, as soone as they come againe into their owne Houses, and
Company." It is important that Williams notes the difference in behavior of the
Narragansett in English homes and when they left English homes: while his
observations suggest that the Narragansett held English clothing in high esteem
(their word for "Englishmen" literally translated as "Coat-men, or clothed"), in a
sense they also suggest that the Narragansett displayed a flair for performance
and for dressing up. This ability to dress up (rather than wear clothes) was
especially significant in Virginia in 1622.
Clothes can be considered, therefore, as a mechanism of genital arousal, and

modesty promotes this aim, for by hiding the prize, its allure is intensified.
Alexander Lowen
These distinctions of dress tend to disappear in democratic societies, where they are displaced by fashion, which
serves as a status symbol. To be dressed in the height of fashion is some indication of social superiority for it often
requires more money and time than the average working person can afford to devote to clothes. Clothes serve,
therefore, to accent the differences between people, socially and sexually.
Nakedness is the great leveler of social distinctions for it reduces all persons to the common bodily or animal level
on which they came into this world. Nudity strips the individual of his ego pretensions and, sometimes, of his ego
defenses.
Alexander Lowen
In the Trobriand Islands, as reported by Malinowski, when a girl begins to have sexual relations, she puts on a fibre
skirt. The skirt, like the palm leaf or loincloth of the man, denotes a feeling of privacy about the genital organs. We
express a similar feeling about the genital organs when we speak of them as "the privates" or the "private parts."
Privacy is connected with personality, which masks an individual's innermost feelings and enables one to hide
certain bodily expressions that are considered personal not public. The genital organs are covered because their
reactions are least subject to voluntary control. While we can mask certain feelings or prevent them from showing in
our faces, we can be betrayed by a genital excitation that cannot be controlled. Pride informs a man that his sense of
privacy requires that his sexual feelings be kept hidden from public view.
Pride, privacy, and adult genitality go hand in hand. At the other end of this scale is infantile or childhood behavior
in which there is neither pride, privacy, nor, of course, genital satisfaction. Natural pride is an expression of the
degree of one's self-feeling or self-respect. It denotes the ability of an individual to contain his feelings and
represents, therefore, the ability of a person to hold a strong sexual charge. The lack of pride is an indication of a
lack of self-esteem, self-containment, and strong feeling. Correspondingly, the individual without pride is unable to
hold a strong sexual charge and his release will fail to yield the pleasure or satisfaction it should provide. Pride
cannot be divorced from a sense of privacy or a feeling of modesty. Nudity removes all privacy and reduces all
pride. Contrary to popular imagination, social nudity has a restricting effect upon sexual feeling.
Alexander Lowen
Page | 20
The Psychology of Clothes,

J. C. Flugel
"Nakedness tends to diminish 'sexuality' (i.e. the more directly genital impulses of sexuality). The by now extensive
experience of the Friends of Nature [a nudist organization] would seem to show that this contention is correct, the
chief reason probably being that the increased pleasure of exhibitionism and of skin and muscle erotism have
drained off a certain quantity of sexual energy that might otherwise have found a purely genital channel."
Many early nudist authors strike this evangelical tenor and reveal a near-religious pursuit of a placeless promised
land. For these authors, nudism is not only a social cause that offers a tangible resolution to all that is wrong in the
modern world but also a way of delivering heaven on earth. Perhaps the first to establish this zealous approach was
Suren in Man and Sunlight, a comprehensive “manual of life reform”18 to be achieved through a rigorous regime of
outdoor nudism and exercise. Suren asserted, “There is a purity—a sacredness in our natural nakedness.
Annebella Pollen
A modest person is not afraid of exposure; he can choose when or where to

express his feelings and he will expose them in appropriate situations. The
person who is ashamed cannot express his feelings even in appropriate
situations. He is afraid to expose himself even when the situation calls for such
exposure. In therapy we deal with people who are ashamed of their feelings.
They cannot express them even in the privacy and intimacy of the therapeutic
situation. Shame is patllo- logical whereas modesty is normal. Prudery may be
defined as the shame of the body.
Alexander Lowen
One simple principle, I believe, explains the behavior of organisms -the search for excitement and pleasure.
Excitement is life. The lack of excitement is boredom and death. Since Adam and Eve, the excitement of life has
centered around the mystery of sex. Clothing intensifies this mystery. It cloaks the biological response with the aura
of personality (persona = mask) and adorns it with the unique characteristics of the individual ego. Sex is elevated
from a generic response to a personal one. This response is the basis of love; from it derives all romance, the elixir
that transforms mundane existence into enchantment and ecstasy. This transformation does not exist on the animal
level, where sex is a purely biological function. The specifically human quality that raises sex from its animal level
is the sense of awe that grows out of the awareness of the surrender of individuality and the fusion of the self with
the universal.
There is an excitement in nakedness. We derive an elementary pleasure in the exposure of the skin to sun, air, and
water. When conditions are right, we feel vibrantly alive in this exposure. We sense more keenly the biological roots
of our nature and we gain an identification with the body that is not possible when the body is fully clothed.
However, the pleasure of public nudity is achieved by regression to the level of the young child whose innocence
parallels that state of existence in the Garden of Eden before man became conscious of his individuality. Like every
regressive phenomenon it can have a place in mature living. It is possible to retain a sense of modesty in nude
gatherings when nudity is socially approved, as in the age-old custom of nude bathing in many countries. Divorced Page | 21
from a sense of modesty, however, public nudity reduces man to the level of a barnyard creature. Such a
development would lead to the loss of the mystery and romance of life and force people to adopt desperate measures
to seek some excitement in life.
Unlike Africans in other countries in which traditional rulers had

converted to Christianity and their subjects had become nominal
'clothed' Christians, Swazi rulers maintained the traditional ancestral
religion and the associated costumes at the same time as they tolerated
missionaries and did not interfere with the conversion of subjects
publicized in clothing.

Hilda Kuper
The attitude of whites towards Swazi wearing Western clothing was ambivalent. On the one hand traditional 'native
clothing' was denigrated, on the other there was a reluctance to have Africans appear in the more fashionable of
Western clothing. Whites who were not prepared to see blacks as equals used clothing as a symbol maintaining
inequality." The reaction of Swazi to Western styles of clothing was complex, depending in part on the situation and
in part on various status components, more particularly pedigree and education. Unlike Africans in other countries in
which traditional rulers had converted to Christianity and their subjects had become nominal 'clothed' Christians,
Swazi rulers maintained the traditional ancestral religion and the associated costumes at the same time as they
tolerated missionaries and did not interfere with the conversion of subjects publicized in clothing.

Hilda Kuper
Although operating from a different perspective, the South African press apparently did not overlook the fact that
these innovations in costume had symbolic and social implications. Given the critical importance of clothing as an
expression of an individual’s social identities, origins, commitments, and allegiances, it is no wonder that persons
should view their clothing almost as an extension of themselves. In sum, it now becomes intelligible why a person’s
relationship to his clothing is at once different from and more intimate than his relationship to all other material
objects.
The World in Dress:

Because clothes are so eminently malleable, we shape them to construct our appearance. There is an experiential
dimension to the power of clothing, both in its wearing and viewing (O'Connor 2005). Our lived experience with
clothes, how we feel about them, hinges on how others evaluate our crafted appearances, and this experience in turn
is influenced by the situation and the structure of the wider context (Woodward 2005). In this view, clothing, body,
and performance come together in dress as embodied practice. While clothes are among our most personal
possessions, they are also an important consumption good.
Comaroff & Comaroff (1997) view clothing as central to missionary conversion in the early nineteenth century in
Bechuanaland, a frontier region between colonial Botswana and South Africa. The struggle for souls entailed
dressing African bodies in European clothes to cover their nudity and managing these bodies through new hygiene
regimes. European clothes were a popular prestige good preceding the arrival of missionaries; converts accepted the Page | 22
clothes eagerly and wore them as they saw fit, expressing their personal desires in a new culture of consumption that
the missionaries could not fully control. Martin (1994) offers urban vistas of vibrant and rapidly changing styles that
the culturally diverse African townspeople integrated into their dress in Brazzaville during the French colonial
period. This colonial cosmopolis was an historical crossroad of trade and exchange where ostentatious body display
accentuated long-held cultural ideas that connected dress and social status. Because of the contingent meanings of
the dressed body, clothing readily becomes a contested issue (Allman 2004a). Recent works focus on dress to
examine struggles over class, gender, and generation (Byfield 2004, Fair 2004, Moorman 2004), investigating
attempts to create "national dress" before and after independence (Allman 2004b, De Jorio 2002).
The World in Dress:

A translation results so that even when they do not dress bodies, cloth and clothing contribute to new ways of
thinking and being. Some of these works describe the cultural and ritual significance of dressed bodies and their
adornment by gender and status/rank relations and the mutual vexations dress caused Europeans and Pacific
islanders in early encounters.
Clothing is a bundle of cultural symbols that has been dealt

with somewhat eclectically and indiscriminately in the
anthropological wash. …

Hilda Kuper
With the development of political movements for independence from colonial rule, traditional clothing assumed a
new significance. Cultural nationalism became one avenue for the expression of political nationalism, and modern
political parties expressed themselves in different cultural styles. Some leaders copied a British model, others were
more experimental, others emphasized the traditional cultural idiom. In countries like Swaziland where one African
group was numerically as well as politically dominant, it was possible for the traditional leaders to reinforce
traditional clothing as a symbol of national unity; in countries with competing ethnic groups, separate ethnic
costumes were symbolically divisive and a new national costume was designed.
Vol.:(0123456789

Henry David Thoreau
The nudists’ tactic to reduce culture to its barest flesh was

perhaps one of the most extreme visions for fashioning a new
age, but it is one that has resonated with philosophers of
utopia before and since.
Utopian Bodies and Anti-fashion Futures: The Dress Page | 23
Annebella Pollen
Fashion in Utopia, Utopia in Fashion

Mila Burcikova
In the famous account of his two-year experiment of a simple life away from the distractions of society, Walden, or
Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau wrote that “a man who has at length found something to do will not need to
get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period.” Since
its first publication in 1854, Walden has had as many critics as adherents, and until now, Thoreau’s attempt at a life
of self-sufficiency in harmony with nature has divided views. Despite this, the above quote embodies a dilemma that
is as salient in the current crisis of our unsustainable model of fashion consumption as it was in the nineteenth
century, when the stark contrast between the sweated labor of garment and textile workers in the industrializing
world and the extravagance of those who could indulge in fashion’s luxuries was first more widely recognized.

Civilisation leads the unwary downward to disease, neglect, and

repulsive squalor [. . .] Self-acquired strength of body and soul
brings deepest joy and delight; the sense of being ruler over
civilization. This is true culture!”
Man and Sunlight
Hans Surén
Mila Burcikova
Reducing fashion to its materiality, to fiber and cloth, without acknowledging and fully appreciating
its cultural significance “as an aesthetic medium for the expression of ideas, desires and beliefs circulating in
society” can only ever be but a fruitless distraction from the complexity that underlies fashion’s agency on
individual, social, and political levels.
their [upper] bodies with white colouring, drawing all manner of figures on their Page | 24
In a letter accompanying the watercolor, Wulff described Malm’s dress in detail: “The part drawn in ink shows gold
[ornaments] or doubloons; marks on the face are painted on with chalk or white colouring. . . . I have seen Mulatinder
[Mulatresses] wearing gold to a value of 100 lod [c. 15 grams]. Bare feet. They often go without shirts, thus, fully
exposed, they usually paint their [upper] bodies with white colouring, drawing all manner of figures on their necks,
shoulders, arms, breasts and backs.”
English translation in Selena Axelrod Winsnes,
Pernille Ipsen
Africans in European clothes to cover their nakedness was part of converting them to
Christianity.[48] In the 19th century, photographs of naked Indigenous peoples began circulating in
Europe without a clear distinction between those created as commercial curiosities (or erotica) and
those claiming to be scientific, or ethnographic images. Given the state of photography, it is
unclear which images were posed, rather than being representative of everyday attire. Nudity,
Wikipedia
Naked In Nature:
Naturism, Nature And The Senses In Early Twentieth Century Britain,
Nina J Morris
Advocates of naturist practice have long celebrated it as the authentic human-nature relationship, a way of re-
kindling our connections with the natural world, and a means of achieving and maintaining physical, mental and
spiritual health. … the importance of sensory perception to, and the embodied geographies of, naturism and the
particular ways in which early twentieth century naturists conceptualised, valued and attached meaning to the
relationship between the body and nature. … the ways in naturist practice reflected contemporary European-wide
debates on urbanism, nationhood, health, and nature, and highlights some of the connections between early naturist
philosophy and contemporary phenomenological theory.
Out of passion for sunshine springs the noble shrine of loftiest idealism.
Naturism occupies a paradoxical position in Western society. Advocates have celebrated it as the authentic human-
nature relationship, a way of re-kindling our connections with the natural world, and a means of achieving and
maintaining physical, mental and spiritual health.
The notion that Native peoples threatened the future of

Christian civilization was strengthened when male and female
settlers captured by Indians refused to return to their
settlements, preferring the Natives’ ways of life over the rigid

patriarchal hierarchy that controlled colonial life
“Sexual Savages:” Christian Stereotypes
and Violence Against North America’s Native Women
Alexandra Pierce
Page | 25
Utopian Visions and the Arguments against Clothing

Richard Martin
Those who live without clothing have tended to be the most puritanical of communities, though their neighbors have
often associated the visibility of flesh and sexual organs with carnal desire. In this, nudism persists in the modern
misinterpretation of the regressus ad originem that it finds difficult to understand and to accept. Many studies have
indicated that, despite the conventions of comedy, nudist colonies are profoundly prudish about sexual behavior. In
fact, nudist colonies may still strike most of us as peculiar and vaguely silly. Do we dismiss the integrity of these
experiments as Utopian communities because we believe, above all, that society is founded intellectually and not
with the consent of the body, or do we simply fail to acknowledge the idealism of naturism and nudism because it is
an awkward, if bare, truth that human beings are born without clothing?
The Deceit of Dress:
Richard Martin
For Surén, the skin was a porous boundary between the internal and external
forces of nature and only when an individual became attuned to both would they
experience harmony in mind, body, and spirit.
Nina J Morris
Written during the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), Man and Sunlight is undoubtedly a
reflection of Surén’s views on the prevailing economic and socio-cultural context. The years prior to 1924, for
example, were a time of intense political wrangling and widespread economic depression within Germany. The
Treaty of Versailles had taken away rights to territory, colonial possessions and raw materials, and the French
occupation of the Ruhr region was the final straw for an economy gripped by catastrophic inflation. Wider
intellectual shifts also occurred during this period as demonstrated in the work of German philosophers Edmund
Husserl (1859-1938) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).
Husserlian phenomenology critiqued Western positivistic scientific attitude (or ‘natural attitude’) and the dualism of
subject and object. Providing a ‘descriptive philosophy of experience’, phenomenology was a metaphysical project
designed to disclose the world as it showed itself before scientific enquiry. Phenomenological approaches ‘stress[ed]
direct, bodily contact with, and experience of, landscape’ and aimed ‘to reveal how senses of self and landscape are
together made and communicated, in and through lived experience’. Both Husserl and Heidegger identified a crisis
in European society although it was the latter who provided the most powerful critique of Western modernity, his
main concern being that European culture was suffering from the dislocation of a ‘rationalistic’, ‘modernising’ and
‘nihilistic bourgeois civilization’ and was condemned therefore to perpetual spiritual decline.

Nina J Morris
Surén stated that Man and Sunlight arose from his desire to call attention to the fundamental facts of national
existence and development, and in this respect one might argue that he shared Heidegger’s iconoclastic outlook.
Surén believed that decay in the strength of the individual body, regardless of the highest achievements of the spirit
or most profound scientific knowledge, would eventually lead to national decline and death.
Surén was particularly concerned with the extent to which twentieth-century civilisation had become synonymous
with the urban and, throughout Man and Sunlight, he promoted a moral geography of landscape in which the Page | 26
contemporary city was considered to be an unsuitable environment for humans; ‘like slaves, they totter under the
heavy fetters of drudgery for their daily bread, far from sunlight, far from Nature (sic) in the dungeons of the town’.
Surén believed that city life restricted the variety of human experience and he lamented that the modern-day urban
population was tied not only by the ‘merciless conventions’ of a ‘short-sighted and pernicious morality’ and ‘morbid
prudery’ (which I discuss later), but also by a dulling of the senses similar to the ‘neurasthenia’ or ‘blasé attitude’
witnessed by German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858-1918). According to Simmel, the blasé attitude was a
metropolitan phenomenon which resulted from the ‘rapidly changing and closely compressed contrasting
stimulations of the nerves’ experienced by city dwellers. He believed that prolonged exposure to the urban milieu
agitated the metropolitan body’s nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a long time that eventually they ceased
to react at all rendering the body incapable of reacting to new sensations with the ‘appropriate’ energy.

Nina J Morris
[w]ith fiendish glee civilisation has thrown us a few scraps at which we eagerly
grasped (sic) so that in their glitter we might imagine ourselves lords of creation.
From time immemorial the curse of money has been to estrange us from
contentment and natural simplicity’.
Surén and his contemporaries found these qualities encapsulated in the sensory and embodied experience of
naturism. Surén promoted Man and Sunlight as an antidote for a misguided civilisation. In addition to making one
feel (and look) physically fit and radiant, he advocated that exposing the body to the natural environment would also
improve one’s character, spiritually and morally. To be naked in nature was an educational experience, important
not only to personal development but to the development of society. As a result of spending more time in close
contact with nature, individuals would become attuned to their instinctive bodily rhythms and would be better
equipped to form a more cohesive and less decadent and corrupt society.

Nina J Morris
The health-giving benefits of sunlight and fresh air were rapidly accepted in Britain from the late 1920s onwards and
the institutionalisation of these ideas can be seen in the development of sun-bathing facilities for inner-city
children66 and the proliferation of open-air schools in this period. Up until the mid-1930s it was widely believed
that the health-giving qualities of holiday seasons were best measured in terms of sunlight.68 This view required
modification, however, in the light of growing empirical evidence which suggested that a climate with distinct
seasonal changes was perhaps better suited to making the body hardy, resistant to disease and corruption, and to
acquire physical and mental health. Increasing emphasis began to be placed on ‘variety’ and the advantages to be
derived from sharp ‘bracing’ encounters with nature. For example, one open-air school in Salford showed that
despite a lack of UV rays in winter a life spent wholly in the open air, even with minimal skin exposure, was enough
to cure rickets and make children robust.
It was our aim to harden ourselves by [running] in all weathers as often as at all possible. […] over and under–often
through boggy ground where the earth shook around us and soft mud and water squelched between the toes. We had
no fear and went hullooing over everything that came in our way; our motto was ‘Through’!
The Senses In Early Twentieth Century Britain Page | 27
Nina J Morris

brings deepest joy and delight; the sense of being ruler over civilization. This is
true culture!”
Man and Sunlight
Hans Surén
The nudists’ tactic to reduce culture to its barest flesh was perhaps one of the
most extreme visions for fashioning a new age, but it is one that has resonated
with philosophers of utopia before and since.
Annebella Pollen
Poynter’s aim was for nothing less than “a new spirit, a new man, a new citizen
of a new world.
Early Nudism and Ambivalent Moderns

Ruth Barcan
Nudism promised a return to that which had been lost and a transfiguration of the commonplace. In the words of
another practitioner, as a result of nudism, ordinary men and women “become as the gods and goddesses of the
ancients, and take rank with the aristocracy of the human race.”
A brief survey of the titles of more than one hundred years of international publications held in the archives of
British Naturism confirms at a glance the undeniably utopian nature of the wider project; books and magazines with
names such as Eden, Arcadia, Elysium Fields, Paradise, and even Utopia abound. Yet whether early nudism in
England should be understood as utopian was less than fixed in its own time; its contested status was tackled head-
on in the first generation of literature.
For those early English practitioners who styled themselves as “gymnosophists”— from the combined Greek words
for nakedness and wisdom— nudism was understood as one part of a more comprehensive philosophy and a wider
project of social reform.
Ruth Barcan
Gymnos contributor Albert Ebor also detailed gymnosophy’s far-reaching physical, moral, and intellectual effects;
he asserted that it “stands for all-round regeneration, in that it changes the false for the true; bondage for freedom;
hypocrisy and cant for truth of purpose and resolve, and, above all, elevates the mind, and prompts the soul to strive
for heights far above the petty and mean things which are attached to civilisation, as we know it to-day.” He
continued, “Let us then dispense with clothes and with all attributes that are mean, vainglorious and untruthful, and
by so doing usher in the Golden Age.”
Utopian Bodies and Anti-fashion Futures:
The Dress Theories and Practices of English Interwar Nudists
Annebella Pollen Page | 28
Many early nudist authors strike this evangelical tenor and reveal a near-religious pursuit of a placeless promised
land. For these authors, nudism is not only a social cause that offers a tangible resolution to all that is wrong in the
modern world but also a way of delivering heaven on earth. Perhaps the first to establish this zealous approach was
Suren in Man and Sunlight, a comprehensive “manual of life reform”18 to be achieved through a rigorous regime of
outdoor nudism and exercise. Suren asserted, “There is a purity—a sacredness in our natural nakedness.

Annebella Pollen
We find a marvellous revelation in the beauty and strength of the naked body, transfigured by godlike purity shining
from the free and open eye which mirrors the whole depth of a noble and questing soul. Placed in the bright frame of
exalted Nature, the human body finds its most ideal manifestation.”… It is a movement that makes for the complete
fulfilment of man as man and of woman as woman, for the building up of character, strength and courage.” For
Poynter and others of his ilk, what was being sloughed off with clothes was the worst of mechanized modernity,
with its manifold complexities and artificialities. Nudism offered not only a means of simplification but also the
potential for holistic unity
with what was natural and enduring.
Annebella Pollen

Ruth Barcan
Nudism promised a return to that which had been lost and a transfiguration of the commonplace. In the words of
another practitioner, as a result of nudism, ordinary men and women “become as the gods and
goddesses of the ancients, and take rank with the aristocracy of the human race.” The claims that were made of
nudity were clearly extraordinary, and the investments made in the project were deep; in consequence, expectations
ran high. Herman Soshinski, founder of the American Gymnosophical Association, declared that, through “nude
culture,” “the body shall become beautiful again, reappear as the ‘Image of God.’” He asserted that nudity would
enable “body, mind and soul” to join in harmony with “all vital forces of nature.” As a result, “man shall also
become good again.” The cumulative message of these proclamations—which are echoed again and again in the
hopes and dreams of early nudist writings—was that the utopian world was closer than had previously been thought.
Such spiritual riches could be unlocked by undressing.
For Poynter and others of his ilk, what was being sloughed off with clothes was the worst of mechanized modernity,
with its manifold complexities and artificialities. Nudism offered not only a means of simplification but also the
potential for holistic unity with what was natural and enduring. Poynter instructed, “Dig down to the hard rock of the
essential, cast off the tawdry accumulation of convention, and all the petty personal trash that the world has grafted
on the individual spirit.
Annebella Pollen
Page | 29
“Regaining what Mankind has Lost through Civilisation:”
Ruth Barcan
Nonetheless, the medical discourse within nudism was bound up in an aesthetic discourse that is, to the
contemporary ear, so historically sinister as to be compromised, whatever the politics of the writer. Health, beauty,
and the future of the race were themes that overlapped, and many writers lamented evidence of the decline of the
race, such as sallow skin, lack of discipline, loss of vigor, vitality, or beauty. The Reverend Norwood, for example,
argued that the Englishman’s under-exposed body was unpleasant: There certainly is something thoroughly
unpleasant about the exposure of large areas of sallow skin. But this is not the natural but the unhealthy state.
Consequently, the practising nudist soon acquires a healthy glow which does much to mitigate the formlessness of
his body.
Alexander Lowen
There is an excitement in nakedness. We derive an elementary pleasure in the exposure of the skin to sun, air, and
water. When conditions are right, we feel vibrantly alive in this exposure. We sense more keenly the biological roots
of our nature and we gain an identification with the body that is not possible when the body is fully clothed.
However, the pleasure of public nudity is achieved by regression to the level of the young child whose innocence
parallels that state of existence in the Garden of Eden before man became conscious of his individuality. Like every
regressive phenomenon it can have a place in mature living. It is possible to retain a sense of modesty in nude
gatherings when nudity is socially approved, as in the age-old custom of nude bathing in many countries. Divorced
from a sense of modesty, however, public nudity reduces man to the level of a barnyard creature. Such a
development would lead to the loss of the mystery and romance of life and force people to adopt desperate measures
to seek some excitement in life.

Mila Burcikova
Reducing fashion to its materiality, to fiber and cloth, without acknowledging and fully appreciating
its cultural significance “as an aesthetic medium for the expression of ideas, desires and beliefs circulating in
society” can only ever be but a fruitless distraction from the complexity that underlies fashion’s agency on
individual, social, and political levels.
Poynter’s aim was for nothing less than “a new spirit, a new man, a
new citizen of a new world.”

Ruth Barcan
Nudism promised a return to that which had been lost and a transfiguration of
the commonplace. In the words of another practitioner, as a result of nudism,
ordinary men and women “become as the gods and goddesses of the ancients,
and take rank with the aristocracy of the human race.”
Page | 30
The earliest (eleventh-century) reference to woven strips of cotton (chigguiya) used as currency
comes from Takrur, north of Senegal, a region of extensive nomadism and early cotton cultivation.
Judaic Threads in the West African Tapestry
Labelle Prussin
Like the belts, indigo dress also assumed a symbolic duality: initially a mark of denigration, it, too, was transformed
into a hallmark of distinction and dignity. The extensive indigo trade is indicated in early Islamic references to the
sub-Saharan preference for blue cloth and in the frequent observations of early European traders throughout the
African trading world … "indigo blues," "guinee cloth," or "guinee cotton" in the context of cloth as a trade
currency.
Judaic Threads in the West African Tapestry: No More Foreever?

Labelle Prussin
Another major medium of currency in Africa was cloth. … African cloth currencies involved silk, indigo, and strip-
weaving traditions in cotton and wool all intimately linked to the nomadic presence, the trans-Saharan trade, and the
virtual Jewish trade monopoly over silk and spices (which subsumed indigo) in North Africa, the Mediterranean
Basin, and beyond. Given similar restraints on the wearing of silk within the Malekite tradition and the intimate
relation between producer and merchant that characterized Jewish involvement elsewhere, what then was the
relation between weaving per se and the silk trade along both the trans-Saharan and coastal routes? In whose hands
did the trans-Saharan trade in indigo and silk reside, and what were its design implications for the sub-Saharan
cultural aesthetic? One might also ask: To what extent did literacy and its varied visual resources influence the
conceptualization of design formats by the practicing artisan?
Johannes Gottleib Christaller … the name atadehyefo

as “people in European dress,” which shows
how clothing becomes part of one’s identity.
Stamping History
… one open-air school in Salford showed that despite a lack of UV rays in

winter a life spent wholly in the open air, even with minimal skin exposure, was
enough to cure rickets and make children robust.
Nina J Morris
It was our aim to harden ourselves by [running] in all weathers as often as at all possible. […] over and under–often
through boggy ground where the earth shook around us and soft mud and water squelched between the toes. We had
no fear and went hullooing over everything that came in our way; our motto was ‘Through’!
Page | 31
Johannes Gottleib Christaller … the name atadehyefo
as “people in European dress,” which shows how
clothing becomes part of one’s identity.
Stamping History


Henry David Thoreau

genital arousal, and modesty promotes this aim, for by
hiding the prize, its allure is intensified.
Alexander Lowen


brings deepest joy and delight; the sense of being ruler over
civilization. This is true culture!”
Man and Sunlight
Hans Surén

Cloth and The Native

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… the king himself wore clothes no different from those of his peers, but 'the king is always seen

as the king'; at the annual ritual

We discovered innumerable lands, we saw

… Aboriginal elders "talk of a time before

Johannes Gottleib Christaller … the name

Clothes serve, therefore, to accent the

the blossoming of a fine civilization, … to learn to enjoy

Most hunter-gatherer disguises demonstrated clear similarities to cases

Disguises and the Origins of Clothing

… “a man who has at length found something to do will not

Walden, or Life in the Woods

Clothes can be considered, therefore, as a mechanism of

Births, marriages, the end of the mourning period, the

… one open-air school in Salford showed that despite a lack of

When Fernandes comes to the Bullom and Temne

The slave is distinguished from the others by his nakedness,

The earliest (eleventh-century) reference to woven strips of

“The skin of the civilized man, is an atrophied organ” …

Many early nudist authors strike this evangelical tenor and

Utopian Bodies and Anti-fashion Futures: The Dress

The Function of Clothing and of Bodily Adornment

Access to cloth remained an essential attribute of power throughout

Stamping History: Stories of Social Change in Ghana’s

Judaic Threads in the West African Tapestry: No More Foreever?

Colonialism and imperialism as agents of globalization

While a commodity that functions as money should have certain conditions

When Fernandes comes to the Bullom and Temne of Sierra Leone, he

Costume and Identity

The Function of Clothing and of Bodily Adornment

Clothing proper is first sight seem to indicate absolute nudity, …

Rethinking the Italian Renaissance Nude

Balthasar Sprenger (1509)

Nakedness and Other Peoples:

Rethinking the Italian Renaissance Nude

One Florentine buyer, Giovanni Guidetti, explained that he

When Fernandes comes to the Bullom and Temne of Sierra Leone, he

… Cadamosto’s stories of King Budomel, and his train of ‘two-

the blossoming of a fine civilization, … to learn to enjoy

Most hunter-gatherer disguises demonstrated clear similarities to cases

Disguises and the Origins of Clothing

"He would not goe naked like the "Indians",

"He would not goe naked like the "Indians",

The World in Dress:

Unlike Africans in other countries in which traditional rulers had

Costume and Identity

Costume and Identity

… “a man who has at length found something to do will not

Walden, or Life in the Woods

Clothes can be considered, therefore, as a mechanism of

The Function of Clothing and of Bodily Adornment

In human beings, the tendency to exhibit and display the body

The Function of Clothing and of Bodily Adornment

Most hunter-gatherer disguises demonstrated clear similarities to cases of visual

In Defense of Modesty Page | 18

Most hunter-gatherer disguises demonstrated clear similarities to cases

Disguises and the Origins of Clothing

These [Indians] were clothed in beasts skins, … and in their demeanor

I heard none of them utter one word.

Clothes can be considered, therefore, as a mechanism of genital arousal, and

The Psychology of Clothes,

A modest person is not afraid of exposure; he can choose when or where to

Unlike Africans in other countries in which traditional rulers had

Costume and Identity

Costume and Identity

The World in Dress:

The World in Dress: