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health and household well humans had the ability to make basic natural

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cloth pretty early on but you know us Homo sapiens we just don't leave well [homosapien unfolding a cloth in a cave]

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enough alone almost as soon as the idea of cloth making had been figured out we

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started decorating and embellishing our clothes because who wants a wool coat [man embellishing a cloth table]

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when we could have a bedazzled wool coat right?

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yeah actually well please don't take the regular one too - all right well we started

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simple with things like dyeing and beading but because craft stores weren't [Man puts selections of items on a table]

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super popular back then nor did they even exist back then people had to find

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their dyes out in nature mineral spices berries flowers bark all of these were [woman picking dyes and a person painting]

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used to dye boring old cloth and make it boring old colored cloth you know what

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made boring old colored cloth less boring beading and beading was pretty

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easy really anything we could drill a hole through it could be beading.. shells [little girl beading cloth]

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seeds pretty rocks the skulls of our enemies any fun thing we can think of

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well we'd think after weeks of labor just to make the cloth they'd call it [man holding a t-shirt up]

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quits but these overachievers kept at it which

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okay we guess makes sense if someone spends weeks on something it had better

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be pretty some of these details became more than just bling instead they became [rocks and minerals alongside a bling dollar sign in a weighing scale]

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ways of making cloths fit people better yeah consider the lowly button well

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before they came along we bet people's robes were falling down left [man's robe falls down and towel covers him up]

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and right and coming open in but for those moments where it wasn't so great

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well the button was a lifesaver before we close the book on cloth and

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clothes we should talk about some of the bigger effects here like shaping gender [gender shapes changing]

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relations well for some reason the production of textiles became women's

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work women spun thread woven into cloth dyed it and then sewed it into clothing [woman holding a t-shirt on a hanger]

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in places where clothing became culturally or economically important

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that meant women might be devoting two thirds of their labor towards textiles [woman working on a sewing machine

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yikes! Clothing also expressed culture that means the more cloth fabric and

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decoration there was in the world the more it came to define a person's social

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status and the culture they came from poor people wore rough undyed [poor boy wearing rough clothing]

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fabrics while the rich had multiple outfits in exotic materials like silk

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velvet or linen people might also use clothing to express religious faith you [woman transforms into a nun]

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know like nuns they were in the habit or to display wealth like Elizabeth the

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first who proved that nothing said power like a poofy dress yeah well cloth was [Queen Elizabeth on the throne]

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also a big deal economically one of the most expensive commodities that traveled

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on the Silk Road was somewhat obviously oh no silk, yeah silk road

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alright peasants in Europe could even pay their taxes in fabric [man paying taxes in fabric]

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barter baby, hey that's a pretty nice tip next month we're going to pay our

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landlord in silk shirts what do you think he'll say

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