A dog walk invented Velcro
In 1941 a Swiss engineer named George de Mestral came home from a walk in the mountains covered in burdock burrs, with more of them tangled into his dog. Rather than picking them off and forgetting about it, he put one under a microscope and found that the burr was covered in thousands of tiny hooks, each one waiting to catch a loop of fur or wool.
It took him roughly a decade to get a machine to make the same thing in nylon. Every pair of BOOTS or SHOES a four-year-old can fasten unaided now works on a principle stolen from a weed, and the name is two French words stuck together: velours and crochet, velvet and hook.
Buttons, buttonholes, and the side they sit on
Buttons turn up in the Indus Valley around five thousand years ago, carved from shell — and they were decoration. They were sewn on to be looked at, and the clothes underneath were fastened with pins, belts and knots, or simply draped and wrapped.
The buttonhole only reached Europe in about the thirteenth century, and it changed what clothing could be. A garment that fastens can be cut to follow the body, so the fitted SHIRT, JACKET and DRESS all descend from a small slit in a piece of cloth. Before that, everything was essentially a blanket with ambitions.
On most men's clothing the buttons sit on the right-hand side; on most women's they sit on the left. This has been true for a couple of centuries and is still true of a HOODIE bought today.
The explanations are all guesswork. Wealthy women were dressed by a servant standing opposite them. Men needed to draw a sword without catching the fabric. Women rode side-saddle and wanted the wind kept out. Each story is repeated confidently and none has evidence behind it — a useful thing to point out to a child who has noticed something odd and been handed a tidy answer.
A coat is mostly trapped air
Wool and fleece do very little insulating by themselves. What keeps a child warm is the still air held in the gaps, which is poor at carrying heat away — so a thick SWEATER under a thin COAT beats one heavy layer, and a windy day defeats both by blowing the trapped air out.
Extremities lose heat fastest because they have a lot of surface for very little volume, so GLOVES, a SCARF and a HAT do more per gram than anything else in the wardrobe. Wool has the extra trick of still insulating when damp, which cotton stops doing the moment it gets wet.
Mind the transatlantic traps
The grid dresses you from the top down: HAT or CAP, then a SHIRT, DRESS, SWEATER, HOODIE, JACKET or VEST, then PANTS, JEANS, SHORTS, a SKIRT or TIGHTS, and finally SHOES, SOCKS and BOOTS, with a COAT, SCARF, GLOVES and BELT for the weather.
Two of those words will start an argument depending on which side of the Atlantic you are standing. PANTS are trousers in America and underwear in Britain. A VEST is a waistcoat in America and the thing under your shirt in Britain. Both meanings are correct, which is not much comfort to anyone packing a suitcase.