A Guide To Primitive Fashion
By understanding primitive fashion and how it came about, we can comprehend better why we dress the way we do and how that reflects what we hold dear to our hearts.
Fashion is ever-changing and differs significantly through different cultures and epochs of history. While today’s concept and understanding of fashion certainly differs from the times before, clothing has always been around, and with that, an element of how one looks.
Especially during initiation rites for young men, hunting dangerous animals is an often occurring trope. Running through a desert to fight a lion, climbing mountains to hunt a bear, or roaming woods to kill a wolf are equally disproportionate ways to acquire the raw materials necessary for a cool new coat, cape, or hat from today’s perspective. Still, primitive men precisely did this when they came of age.
Let’s examine in a guide to primitive fashion why people chose to put such efforts into acquiring new clothes, what motivated them, how it changed them, and how it is connected to an evolving religious, symbolic, and cultural cult around the way we dress that undoubtedly still influences our fashion choices to this day.
You gotta stay fit!
Biologically speaking, humans are subject to the process of evolution. Our ancient forefathers were the ones who managed to survive and multiply under very harsh conditions. Surviving necessitates that one is well adapted to the environment that one inhabits. For primitive people, their immediate surroundings provided a vast amount of difficulties. To survive, they had to cope with dangerous prey animals. Therefore, it was especially beneficial for our forefathers to become good at hunting themselves.
Hunting is dangerous, especially when you are only equipped with sticks and stones, but the rewards are gratifying. Not only do you collect high-quality and protein-rich food in the form of meat, but you also make the immediate surroundings of your settlement safer for yourself, your family, and your tribe.
Though some men might have been better hunters due to pure chance by winning the genetic lottery, learning access to better-developed skills and supreme knowledge would benefit the whole tribe and not just a few lucky ones. To lay such a knowledge base and form a tradition, certain individuals must make the experiences first so that others can benefit from their reporting and conducted behavior.
To stay fit in the context of evolution, our brave hunter and gatherer forefathers would have employed some techniques that enabled them to improve their hunting behavior.
What looks like a bear acts like a bear!
In my time at the university, I once found a funny scribble on the wall of a bathroom stall. It said:
“To catch a bus, you first have to think like a bus!”
It’s obviously true, well, kind of. For example, the chances of hunting down a bear improve when one can emphasize and anticipate its behavior. While this is true for all sorts of animals, you can see the same happening at the briefing before an important business meeting or when a coach tries to prepare his players right before a great sports match.
Now, how can a primitive hunter become better at hunting? The answer is out there for him. There are many successful and competent hunters in the animal world, such as lions, bears, and wolves. Additionally, they also differ in their approaches. A hunter can improve his skills by learning from them.
The first step would entail observing how these apex predators go about their day, what makes them aggressive, what makes them frightened, and how they hunt and fight. A second step would involve trying to act out what was learned. For this, one could imagine that some ritual might be organized to transform into, let’s say, a bear and pretend-play to be one for a while. Through this praxis, a hunter’s understanding would be deepened through building empathy.
As a final escalation, the hunter would confront the bear. Now he is well prepared, and his prior observations and embodying increase his chances of success. Somebody going through such a process will generally become a better hunter. An average hunter can become a supreme predator through observation and embodiment, thanks to his great teacher and role model, the bear.
To further the embodiment of the bear’s behavior, a hunter that has successfully confronted a bear will use its head to make a headdress and its fur to make a coat or cape. Returning home wearing his newly acquired attire, his peers will welcome him with great awe. Through observing and embodying a bear, as well as finally dressing like one, the hunter has become one, following the logic: What looks like a bear acts like a bear.
The bear is dead, long live the bear!
Fashion has a clear-cut connection to religious attitudes, as pointed out remarkably when looking at primitive fashion. The bear hat and cape of a successful hunter are more than mere trophies popular among the ladies or impressive among the men. When speaking of the behavioral changes such a hunter goes through, he doesn’t just disguise himself as a bear but becomes one in some sense.
His attire becomes a totem or a symbol of what it feels like to be as strong and successful a predator as a bear. As this has aesthetic and real-world implications, more men will start striving down the same path as the initial bear hunter.
Over time the observational skills of the broad hunter base in such a tribe, as well as the fidelity of their bear embodiments, would increase. An improved prowess in hunting itself will result. Hunts will continually lead to better outcomes, such as more high-quality meat for the tribe and fewer deaths. Ultimately, the bear will become a totem symbolizing everything that makes the tribe flourish.
It is easy to understand that more and more hunters want to follow the example of the initial bear killer. An initial fashion trend emerges when increasing numbers of men dress like bears, and women might want to join the fray with necklaces made of bear claws or teeth and warm fur coats. What happens here is nothing less than the parallel forming of an initial religious cult and a first fashion trend.
Still today, the connection between religiously informed attitudes, embodiment, and our fashion choices can be seen daily numerous times. For example, when people are wearing a T-Shirt of their favorite band at a rock concert, or when a kid begs his parents to buy them the jersey of their favorite sports player. But it goes even further. The idea of participation is crucial in fashion. Ask yourself: Why do you follow some particular influencers on Instagram or YouTube concerning fashion questions? Because you want to participate in the competence, charisma, and coolness that those people bring to the table. The same also holds true for stylistic role models from other domains, like actors, musicians, or athletes.
Through clothes, we try to step into communion with the things we hold dear to our hearts. In some sense, nothing has changed from our primitive hunter-gatherer forefathers to today’s contemporary fast and high fashion over the last couple of tens of thousands of years.
Sources
[1] Eliade, Mircea: The Sacred and the Profane(1957)
[2] Freud, Sigmund: Totem and Taboo(1913)
[3] Harari, Yuvel Noah: Sapiens (2011)
