Inuit Clothing: Old, high-tech and unbeaten
We like to think of ourselves as pretty high-tech in the modern world. We’ve got iPhones, Bitcoin and global warming and whatever. However, there are some high-tech things that have been around for much longer. And we’ve never been able to beat them. The animal skin clothing made by Inuit tribes is better and more efficient than even the most expensive modern snow gear. It was highly engineered from animal furs of many different species to endure the harsh arctic climate. It’s an incredible human achievement. Let’s dive in, to Inuit clothing.
The Inuit: An introduction
The Inuit are a group of indigenous peoples who live in the arctic regions of Greenland, Canada and Alaska. Most of the different Inuit tribes are reasonably recent arrivals, having only inhabited the arctic around 1,000 years ago. This is significantly after the pyramids were built in Egypt and Christianity came into existence. There are many different tribes, they include the Labradormiut (Labrador), Nunavimmiut (Ungava), Baffin Island, Iglulingmuit (Iglulik), Kivallirmiut (Caribou), Netsilingmiut (Netsilik), Inuinnait (Copper) and Inuvialuit or Western Arctic Inuit.
The place the Inuit live is one of the most difficult places to survive on Earth. In large parts of the Inuit territory, the warmest it gets is in the spring about 10 °C. However, much of the time, it is – 40°C. In the winter, the sun will not come up for months. It is also extraordinarily windy, with gale-force winds are common. During the wet season, it is constantly damp, which can soak into clothes, freeze and become deadly.
To survive in this extreme environment, Inuit clothing needs to solve four different problems:
- keep people warm – the garment needs to provide thermal insulation;
- be waterproof – the arctic environment is incredibly damp;
- control humidity – despite being cold, when engaging in intense activity like hunting, people will sweat. This is deadly in the arctic, as this can over time make a garment damp and lead it to freezing;
- be durable and practical – rips and tears can be deadly; and
- be beautiful – like all human garments, they were a form of art expressing group and personal identity.
Before diving in, the Inuit had many other amazing technologies. They invented specific tools for boring through ice to do ice fishing. Their igloos and huts are amazing works of engineering that can keep room temperate inside, which the outside is subzero degrees. However, it’s their clothing that is most impressive.
Inuit Clothing: An introduction
Inuit clothing is made entirely out of animal skins. Plants don’t really grow in the arctic, so fabrics like cotton could not be woven and turned into cloth – all clothes were made from animal hide and furs.
The basic outfit consists of five separate pieces of clothing. The first is a parka (with a hood) that goes over the top of everything else. Then there is a pair of pants worn directly against the skin. Then mittens, inner footwear and outer boots. This structure was pretty consistent across all the different Inuit tribes. All of these garments were made out of a combination of animal skins, such as caribou, seals, seabirds, wolverine. Despite being very warm, the clothing is very lightweight, an entire outfit only weighs 3 to 4 kilos, much lighter than woven plant outfit alternatives.
The garments worked by trapping a warm layer of air between the wearer’s body and the garment. Then having another garment forming an outer protective layer over the top. This layer of air was able to circulate throughout the garment, meaning that moisture from sweat didn’t accumulate in particular places and then freeze and undermine the clothe’s effectiveness. This is why many of the garments were so loose-fitting – loose enough to let the wearer take their arms out of their sleaves and put them inside their jacket.
Different skins were used in different places to aid in design. For instance, the bulk of the garments were made from caribou, a very strong and water-resistant animal skin. The ruffs on the outside were often made from the long resilient furs of wolves, foxes and dogs. Tougher and more resistant furs from an animal’s legs would used for outer layers, like mittens and boots. More flexible skin from an animal’s shoulder would be used for a jacket shoulder. Pants, which had the most skin contact, were generally made of a marine mammal’s hide, to allow sweat to evaporate through. The thread to sew it all together was made by shredding the tendons’ animals and stringing them together.
The garments were all designed to minimize openings to the outside world. There was normally not even an opening at the front for the jackets, just a hole for the face to peer out of. The cuffs and the hood would be surrounded by a ruff to break the wind. There were no pockets, everything was carried in bags or pouches, but the parka would often have toggles that you could hang satchels from.
Some of the garments specialized for women were the most high-tech. There were often custom-engineered pouches in female garments for carrying infants. These pouches would allow the infant to have skin-to-skin contact with its mother, while still being covered by external flaps on the garments to keep warm and not allow cold air in. The garment could even allow a child to be moved to the front and breastfeed while inside the jacket.
The clothing also had an aesthetic function. Different tribes would sew the furs in different patterns, and have different patterned beading. In certain tribes, the style of a garment could indicate whether a person was married, how old they were and which family they came from. There was a correspondingly complex language system for describing these garments (i.e. ‘Akuitoq: man’s parka with a slit down the front, worn traditionally in the Keewatin and Baffin Island areas’; ‘Atigainaq: teenage girl’s parka from the Keewatin region’; ‘Hurohirkhiut: boy’s parka with slit down the front’; ‘Qolitsaq: man’s parka from Baffin Island’ (Strickler and Alookee 1988, 175).
All combined together, this clothing was clearly an incredible engineering feat. One particular set of clothes could easily have skins from 20+ individual animals from 5 different species. The skills to make this clothing to survive was passed down from women to their daughters over a process of years. We are losing a lot of this knowledge, as the tribes dwindle in number.
Inuit Clothing: So how good is it?
You could read up to this point and think – okay, the Inuit made really cool clothing. But it was much more than that. By almost any objective performance metric, these clothes perform better than the best modern snow gear made anywhere else in the world.
There have been numerous scientific studies comparing the performance of modern and traditional snow garments. Generally, the studies involve wiring up a subject with heat sensors, and sending them into a freezer room, with a fan in it to generate some wind. They then record the change in temperature over time, to see how well the garment performs at keeping the person warm. They then repeat this with a variety of garments, often comparing modern military snow equipment or other expedition gear.
One of the most rigorous was done by Oakes et al in 1995. They had 100 test subjects, 50 male and 50 female of a variety of ages, weights, heights and experience with cold sit at room temperature for 20°C minutes in a T-shirt. Then, they moved the subjects to a cold room at -28°C degrees with a 20 mile per hour wind with each individual wearing a traditional caribou Inuit garment, a military or other expedition snowsuit. They measured the temperature of each individual’s check, chest, thigh, toe and core body temperatures every five minutes.
On almost every metric tested, the Inuit clothing is better. The more exposed the body part, the less it mattered, but for the face, chest, thighs and toes the heat loss was significantly faster in the military and expedition gear than the caribou.
Of particular interest, is the ruffs on Inuit clothing. Most modern snow clothing takes the approach of trying to completely enclose the face leaving as little open as possible, often using something like a draw string or elastic. However, many Inuit parkas had large dramatic “sun ruffs”, which instead leave the face inline with the end of the garment, and use large furs to direct the wind away. Recent studies have shown this technique is dramatically superior to other modern garments at keeping a head warm. The Inuit were breathtaking engineering masters.
What can we learn?
We have a deep bias for the modern over the old. In the West, we consider science, metal, shiny, regular, geometric and artificial to be best. Think of the ingredients we use to advertise cosmetics? Or shampoo? Think of the aesthetic. Clean, streamlined and modern. There has been some pushback in recent years – a reclaiming of a natural, no artificial colors and flavors approach. But for the most part, we like our medicine to be syringes and pills, presented by cleanshaven people in white lab coats.
There is a good reason for a lot of this. The scientific method as applied to medicine and technology has brought us a deep understanding of the world. But not all knowledge and wisdom comes from scientists. Or the west. Or the modern world at all.
Indigenous cultures have real wisdom about how to solve many difficult problems. They’ve often created remarkable technologies and more environmentally friendly ways of living than modern humans. Indigenous Australians managed the landscape by conducting natural bush-burning techniques, in a way that was likely significantly more effective than modern firefighters. The indigenous peoples of the Amazon had a variety of medicinal plants, many of which have been subsequently turned into highly effective drugs by pharmaceutical companies. The efficacy of many of these technologies is often easy to prove when we decide to honestly evaluate them and give them a chance.
It’s becoming apparent that the modern way of living in the Western, with mass manufacturing of disposable consumer goods is doing great damage to the environment. We have a lot we could learn from the careful, deliberate and traditional technologies of the Inuit.
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