ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Dress history

Okay, so dress history is all about the clothes people have worn throughout history and how they have changed over time. Imagine you have a big box of dress-up clothes with lots of different outfits in it. Just like how you can pick out different things to wear, throughout history people have had outfits that were popular and different styles that changed over time.

For example, a long, fancy dress with a lot of layers might have been popular for ladies a long time ago, but now people wear more simple dresses that are easier to move in. And boys used to wear big, poofy pants called "breeches" that went all the way up to their waist, but now they mostly wear pants that go down to their ankles.

It's really interesting to learn about how people used to dress and what it tells us about their culture and society at the time. Sometimes clothes had special meanings or were only worn by certain people, like kings or queens. So studying dress history helps us learn more about how people used to live and what was important to them.