How our ancestors invented clothing and transformed it into fashion

Venus figurines are most famous for their sexual features. These often-voluptuous carvings of female forms, made between around 30,000 and 20,000 years ago, have been interpreted as ritual fertility figures, mother goddesses and self-portraits. One thing they are generally not seen as is fashion plates. Yet some of them provide tantalising glimpses of what the well-dressed Stone Age woman was wearing. One, from Kostenki in Russia, sports a wrap-style robe with straps. Others have string skirts. And the famous Venus of Willendorf wears just a woven hat – but a very fine one.

These statuettes are a far cry from our popular conception of prehistoric humans draped in animal furs. The lavish detail with which their garments are depicted indicates the importance of clothing to societies tens of thousands of years ago, according to archaeologist Olga Soffer, professor emerita at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Something that began as a necessity, to keep people warm, had by then morphed into a canvas for aesthetic expression and meaning. Now, the story of how that happened has taken a twist, thanks to some new discoveries.

Clothing is perishable, and the oldest remains are only around 10,000 years old. But, as the Venus figurines illustrate, we can follow trends back in time in other ways. These archaeological clues reveal the origins of both simple capes and complex tailoring to be remarkably ancient. Most…