The Deep History of Dress

Takes living processes as its point of departure for understanding fashion to provide a series of radically new perspectives on sustainable fashion grounded in biological, ecological and vitalist scholarship.

Four thousand years ago in Babylon, a teenage scribe named Iddin-Sin wrote an indignant letter to his mother: everyone else’s clothes get better every year, but his are getting worse. This brief complaint — our earliest known fashion grievance — becomes the starting point for a new history of dress.

In The Deep History of Dress, Otto von Busch reads Iddin-Sin’s letter line by line, against the backdrop of Mesopotamian cities, textile trade, law, and schooling, to suggest fashion runs deeper in Western culture than previously thought. Drawing on anthropology, sociology, and the life sciences, he argues that fashion is not a recent, shallow invention of capitalism but a deep human organ of social sensing—a way we feel hierarchy, belonging, desire, and love on the social skin of our bodies.

From the deep history of cuneiform tablets to today, fashion appears here not as artifice or vanity but as a vital force—a social form in motion, a cognitive dynamic, a membrane between body and world, and a living record of civilization’s pulse. Fashion is a symbiotic organ that has grown with us, shaped us, and dreamed alongside us since the dawn of history.