North American Clothing Styles after 1700
(Click here to go back to the 1600's)
By the 1700's, 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 1700's, 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.
