Elsa Yvanez

Wearing clothes answers social imperatives, many more than bodily needs in fact. As humans, we of course need to protect our bodies from the environment and from view, but how we do it is what socially matters. This is why clothing is an ever-present subject in the political debate of every country, and why this apparently simple need sustains one of the biggest economic market worldwide. The way we present ourselves to others conveys our

Nubia and Sudan, thanks to their hyper-arid climatic conditions, are favourable to the preservation of organic materials. The two regions are therefore a very fertile ground for textile studies, offering vast corpuses of well-preserved textiles, archaeobotanical remains of fibres, many spinning and weaving tools, as well as a large iconographic repertoire of people in various costumes. Taken as a whole, these different sources offer the rare chance to follow textile production from its very beginning