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The Origins of Fashion
Francesco d'Errico1,2, Solange Rigaud1
1CNRS, Univ. Bordeaux, UMR 5199 PACEA, Batiment B2, Créteil, France.
Evolutionary Anthropology
|July 1, 2026
Summary
Fashion is redefined as an ancient system of bodily communication, not just modern consumerism. This deep-time perspective reveals how appearance has long conveyed identity and social information.
Area of Science:
- Archaeology
- Anthropology
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Fashion is often viewed as a modern phenomenon tied to consumer societies.
- This perspective overlooks the deep historical roots of fashion as a form of communication.
Purpose of the Study:
- To reconceptualize fashion as a deep-time system of bodily communication.
- To identify archaeological markers for recognizing fashion in the past.
- To interpret the cultural evolution of fashion as a social technology.
Main Methods:
- Defining fashion as a socially transmitted system of bodily display with patterned variation.
- Identifying archaeological evidence of recurring forms of body modification and ornamentation.
- Analyzing the selection, combination, and arrangement of these forms within social contexts.
Main Results:
- Fashion emerged through the long-term culturalization of the human body, starting at least 400,000 years ago.
- Appearance became a key medium for communicating identity, affiliation, status, and relationships.
- Fashion evolved into regionally differentiated systems of bodily display across major prehistoric periods.
Conclusions:
- Fashion functioned as an externalized social memory system, embedding social information in material form.
- It served as a cultural technology enhancing the visibility and transmissibility of social information.
- Understanding fashion's deep history offers insights into human cultural evolution and social cognition.
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