North American Clothing- 1700s
By the 1700s, clothing styles had changed more. There were not so many deer on the East Coast anymore, and most people gave up wearing deerskin and started to wear wool and linen clothing. Because Christian settlers on the East Coast thought it was wrong to show your skin or hair, Iroquois and Cherokee women on the East Coast started to wear clothes more of the time, and to cover their hair with scarves, and to wear their skirts longer, down to their ankles. Men who wanted to seem stylish began to dress more like European men. Over their linen shirts, they wore wool breeches (shorts) and linen stockings (knee socks), and wool jackets or waistcoats.
In the very end of the 1700s, in 1793, Eli Whitney invented a new kind of cotton gin that let people grow a lot more cotton much cheaper than before, and quickly both Native American people and settlers began to wear cotton clothing instead of the more expensive linen.
Click here for the styles of the 1800s
Click here to find out more about fabrics and weaving and spinning clothes
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North American
clothing before 1500 AD
North American Economy
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