What a discovery! From an Ars Technica article written by Kiona Smith @KionaSmith07 on Twitter, here’s this bit of news about what looks to be the world’s oldest pants:
“With the help of an expert weaver, archaeologists have unraveled the design secrets behind the world’s oldest pants. The 3,000-year-old wool trousers belonged to a man buried between 1000 and 1200 BCE in Western China. To make them, ancient weavers combined four different techniques to create a garment specially engineered for fighting on horseback, with flexibility in some places and sturdiness in others.”
It became, to some extent, a materials-science problem. Where do you want something elastic, and where do you want something strong? And how do you make fabric that will accomplish both?….The answer was apparently to use different weaving techniques to produce fabric with specific properties in certain areas, despite weaving the whole garment out of the same spun wool fiber.”
The breadth of technique and design motifs in the garment suggest that the designer combined knowledge from cultures thousands of kilometers apart. What an insight into the complexity of mind and sophistication of skill to conceive and create such a performance garment!
The pants, and their shifting construction, appear to have been woven in one piece, with no cuts.
Strong in some places and flexible in others, the pants were designed for horseback riding.
Along with her colleagues, archaeologist Mayke Wagner of the German Archaeological Institute recently examined the 3,000-year-old trousers in detail. A modern weaver created a replica of the pants to better understand the techniques that produced this piece of fashion history.