Send to a Friend

Berserker's avatar

How come aliens barely ever wear clothing?

Asked by Berserker (33548points) December 7th, 2012

Looking up old questions, and something about Stephen King kinda made me wonder this, although I could have sworn it was something someone asked on here…can’t find it.

This question deals with fictional aliens from stories and movies, but it most certainly doesn’t exclude aliens from anything else. Beliefs, myths, whatever.
Now before anyone beats me to it; I’m aware that some alien portrayals have them wearing clothing, or usually, some type of gear that’s sometimes something like armor, space suits or utility belts or…stuff. But very often they are shown nude.
Maybe it’s because they’re so evolved that they no longer need to worry about petty things like the weather, or maybe on their planet they don’t wear clothes, so they come over here flashin’ it. Or another thing that I notice is that aliens are often very monster like, when they’re not designed as humanoid in shape. We all know monsters never wear clothes, of course. I was thinking then, that when aliens are introduced in entertainment, we’re supposed to get a feeling from the beings that they’re not from here, of course. So they don’t need clothes, or they make them look like monsters…on that subject, it always seems weird to me to see something that looks like a mix between an army of zombie slugs and seven different types of dragons…something that just drools, can’t speak but has technology that rivals anything we can even imagine.

But then, aliens are super smart usually, and so our normal means of communication and living is probably pretty redneck and non evolved to them. Most of them also seem to be psychic, and can use telepathy and stuff. In fact, they’re probably so smart that them trying to communicate with us is like if I tried to have a conversation with a moth.

But where do the clothing fit in, man? Klingons wear clothes. Some races in Star Wars probably wears clothes. Is it because unless the alien portrayed is humanoid, it’s too hard designing clothes for them? But then how come most grays are all naked and stuff? Is there a reason for this? Some kind of…science or observation that has been conducted, and the deduction is, people like naked aliens in their movies and stories? Is it to show us how different and creepy they can be? By taking away anything from them that we might relate back to us? (like, clothes for example, or sunglasses for those big, buggy eyes)

So some of that is what I thought of, but doesn’t feel that it’s exactly right. How come aliens never wear clothing, jelli-os? I realize I’m talking about a lot of different kind of aliens here; a xenomorph isn’t a gray. A xenomorph has no reason to wear clothes and is more like an animal, and our animals don’t wear clothes…predators only wear stuff that is necessity. But grays don’t wear anything, and they’re a super popular type of alien, and many were fashioned after those. Many that came BEFORE grays are humanoid too; naked ones. Is there a reason behind this?
Don’t limit yourself to sexless grays…think naked aliens. All types of aliens.

Using Fluther

or

Using Email

Separate multiple emails with commas.
We’ll only use these emails for this message.