Wednesday, August 10, 2011

The Old African Clothing

Africa is a large continent with several countries. It is not surprising if there are a lot of ways of clothing in each area.  This page covers a lot of time of African fashion style from the stone age to themiddle ages. You can see the differences of African clothing by the time. People who live in Africa have started wearing clothes around 180.000 years ago. African people probably started because there was an ice age that time. First clothing of Africans was made from animal skins, fur or leather as their shawl and loinclothes.
After thousands of years, people in Africa began to make lighter, less sweaty kinds of clothes. Perhaps the first kind of cloth that Africans made was pounded bark fibers. The African peel the bark of some trees and pound them with a stone until they get the soft fibers and the hard part breaks off. Those small pieces of cloth can be pounded or sewn together . In Central Africa especially in Uganda, people usually used the bark of fig trees. People also pounded cloth from raffia palm.
Peopl in Africa dyed the bark cloth to create the trends of patterns. The most famous and important dye was indigo, which is the dye we may see today to make a blue jeans . African usually wore tie dyeing to make patterns on their cloth. In some areas in Africa, women did the fabric work, and the other areas, men did most of fabric work. By 200 BC, some of African people started wearing clothes instead of pounding them because there were so many people now that was not enough bark for everyone. Although there were just a few people started to wear clothes, but soon, a lot of North African people made the clothes as an experts and professionals.

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