There is a long historical tradition of research on Inuit clothing across many fields. Since Europeans first made contact with the Inuit in the 16th century, documentation and research on Inuit clothing has included artistic depictions, academic writing, studies of effectiveness, and museum collections. Historically, European images of Inuit were sourced from the clothing worn by Inuit who travelled to Europe (whether voluntarily or as captives), clothing brought to museums by explorers, and from written accounts of travels to the Arctic.
From the 18th century until the mid-20th century, explorers, missionaries, and academic researchers described the Inuit clothing system in numerous memoirs and dissertations. After a decline in the 1940s, serious scholarship of Inuit clothing did not pick up again until the 1980s, at which time the focus shifted to in-depth studies of the clothing of specific Inuit and Arctic groups, as well as academic collaborations with Inuit and their communities. Scientific analysis of Inuit garments have often focused on the effectiveness of Inuit skin clothing as cold-weather clothing. Many museums, particularly in Canada, Denmark, the United Kingdom, and the United States, have extensive collections of historical Inuit garments, often acquired during Arctic explorations undertaken in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Painting, printing, and photography
Inuit skin clothing has long been of interest to artists and academics of all kinds. Europeans interested in the Inuit and their culture began to create artistic depictions of Inuit clothing as early as the 16th century. These images were typically sourced from the clothing worn by Inuit who travelled to Europe (whether voluntarily or as captives), clothing brought to museums by explorers, and from written accounts of travels to the Arctic. The earliest of these was a series of illustrated broadsides printed after an Inuk mother and child from Labrador were brought to the European Low Countries in 1566. In 1577, the privateer Martin Frobisher brought three Inuit – Kalicho, Arnaq and Nutaaq – to England as captives, and the painter John White produced detailed watercolor portraits of them. A 1654 painting by Salomon von Hauen, commissioned at Bergen, Norway, is the oldest known portrait depicting the traditional clothing of the Kalaallit people of Greenland. It depicts a group of four Kalaallit who were kidnapped by a Danish trade ship, each wearing traditional skin clothing. Numerous other paintings and engravings of Inuit and their clothing were created in Europe over the following centuries.
When modern techniques such as lithography and photography became available in the mid-19th century, it allowed for an even wider dissemination of images of Inuit clothing, especially in illustrated magazines. Around 1860, a series of Danish publications about Inuit culture and clothing from Greenland included lithographs created by Inuit artists. Both the Canadian Arctic Expedition (1913–1916), and the Fifth Thule Expedition (1922–1924) brought cameras and photographers to the Arctic, recording numerous photographs of Inuit and their clothing. These groups did their best to integrate with the Inuit in a respectful way, but not every photographer of that time had a similar attitude. Many photographs of Inuit from the early 20th century do not identify their subjects by name, and many Inuit in those photographs appear visibly uncomfortable having their photograph taken.
Academic writing and studies
One of the oldest major works describing Inuit clothing in detail is the 1741 book ("The Old Greenland's New Perlustration or Natural History") by Danish missionary Hans Egede. The book contained detailed drawings and descriptions of women's clothing from observations made during his fifteen years living in Greenland. Starting in the 18th century, the diaries and other writings of Arctic explorers and traders, and to a lesser extent, academics, provided further detail about daily Inuit clothing. As contact between outsiders and Inuit increased, so did the level of detail in their writing. The clothing of the Caribou Inuit and Copper Inuit during this time is particularly well-documented in such writing.
Anthropological study of Inuit culture and clothing by Danish, American, and Canadian scholars was common in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These sources focused on the physical aspects of Inuit clothing that enabled survival in the extreme Arctic environment, as well as the technical aspects involved in garment production. Ethnographers such as John Murdoch published descriptions of Inuit clothing with detailed illustrations as early as 1892, based on fieldwork in northwest Alaska. Canadian explorers Diamond Jenness and Vilhjalmur Stefansson lived with the Inuit during the Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913–1916, adopting Inuit clothing and making in-depth studies of its construction. Jenness also accumulated a number of garments for the Canadian Museum of Civilization.
Danish archaeologist Gudmund Hatt wrote a dissertation on his theory of Inuit origins, published in 1914, which was based on his in-depth study of Inuit clothing in museums across Europe. Later scholarship disputed his migration theory, but his studies of Inuit clothing, with their elaborate images drawn by his wife Emilie Demant Hatt, have been described as "groundbreaking in their meticulousness and scope". By approximately 1940, serious scholarship of Arctic clothing had tapered off.
Scholarship of Inuit clothing did not pick up again until the 1980s and 1990s, beginning with fieldwork conducted by Inuit clothing expert Bernadette Driscoll-Engelstad, and supported by accounts created by northern seamstresses. By then, the style of grand cross-cultural study pioneered by Hatt had fallen out of the mainstream, with modern scholars preferring to make in-depth studies of the clothing of specific Inuit and Arctic groups. From the 1970s to 1990s, University of Manitoba researchers Jill E. Oakes and Rick Riewe travelled throughout the Arctic documenting the traditional footwear of circumpolar peoples.
Around this time, academic collaborations with Inuit and their communities became a dominant form of scholarship on the topic; these collaborations have been important for the preservation of traditional knowledge. For example, the Igloolik Research Centre in Nunavut, Canada, archives interviews with Inuit elders to preserve their traditional knowledge, including information about traditional clothing production techniques. In the 1980s, Driscoll-Engelstad travelled to museums in Europe and Canada with Inuit seamstresses to study historical garments. Their work has been credited with having "triggered a renaissance in clothing manufacture in some Canadian communities." Around the same time, Arctic anthropologist Susan Kaplan began to work with North Greenland Inuit and Labrador Inuit at the Peary–MacMillan Arctic Museum on similar fieldwork. In 1992, Inuit seamstresses travelled to the Canadian Museum of Civilisation to study the composition of Copper Inuit garments held there. The documentary film Piqutingit: What Belongs to lnuit, released in 2006, documents the journey of a group of Inuit elders to museums in Toronto, Ottawa, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, where they studied Inuit items including clothing.
Increased access to travel and digital communication technologies like the internet have made it easier for museum curators to collaborate with Inuit communities. This can take the form of providing material to the community for cultural heritage programs, or arranging training so community members can make recordings of knowledge from the oral tradition. Many museums have created digital exhibits to provide greater access to their collections. Collaborative projects such as Skin Clothing Online, from the National Museum of Denmark, Greenland National Museum, and Museum of Cultural History, Oslo, have made thousands of high-resolution images and dozens of 3D scans of hundreds of pieces of skin clothing from various Arctic cultures freely accessible to researchers and the general public. Beginning in 2023, a group of Inuit artists and seamstresses called Agguaq began working with museums in order to study ancient garments with an eye to reviving and modernizing the designs.
Modern scientific research
Archaeology
Archaeology is a major source of knowledge about the history of Inuit clothing, primarily in the form of artifacts such as tools for skin preparation and sewing, as well as art objects. More rarely, scraps of frozen skin garments or even whole garments are found at archaeological sites. Some of these items come from the earlier Dorset culture era, but the majority are from the Thule culture era of approximately 1000 to 1600 CE. Research on historical garments shows evidence for the historical consistency of Inuit skin clothing.
One of the most notable archaeological finds related to skin clothing was the 1972 discovery of a group of eight well-preserved and fully dressed mummies at Qilakitsoq, an archaeological site on Nuussuaq Peninsula, Greenland. The outer garments were made from sealskin, and the inner parkas constructed from the skins of at least five different types of water birds. The mummies have been carbon-dated to , and analysis indicates that the skin garments they were found in were prepared and sewn in the same manner as modern skin clothing from the Kalaallit people of the region. Anatomical analysis of the mummies' teeth and biochemical analysis of the sealskin garments indicated that preparation methods have changed little over the past 500 years, including the use of teeth to soften skin for sewing.
Archaeological digs in Utqiaġvik, Alaska from 1981 to 1983 uncovered the earliest known samples of caribou and polar bear skin clothing of the Kakligmiut people, carbon-dated to c. 1510. The construction of these garments indicates that Kakligmiut garments underwent little change between approximately 1500–1850.
Analysis of garments
Despite extensive oral testimony on the effectiveness of skin garments from Inuit elders, as well as written records produced by Arctic explorers as early as the 18th century, little research was performed on Inuit clothing until the 1990s. Since then, several studies have investigated the effectiveness of Inuit skin clothing as protection against the weather, especially as compared to modern winter clothing made from synthetic materials. A study published in 1995 compared caribou-skin clothing to mass-produced military and expedition gear, and found that the Inuit garments were significantly warmer, and provided a greater degree of perceived comfort than the mass-produced items. Further studies have shown that the traditional Inuit hood, with its distinctive ruff of irregular fur, is the most efficient system for preventing heat transfer from the face in the cold, windy environment of the Arctic. A 2020 study used infrared thermal imaging to compare rates of heat loss between Inuit caribou-skin garments and two styles of mass-produced winter clothing. Under laboratory conditions, the Inuit outfit was found to be "similar to or slightly superior" to modern winter gear designed for extreme cold.