A garment is an article of clothing used to cover a part of the human body. It is most often made of fabric but the materials used for its manufacture tend to diversify over the centuries. The purpose of a garment varies greatly according to the culture and the periods of history: practice (protection), symbolic (to signal a moral posture) or social (to display a status).                                                                                                      genitals, buttocks, female breast) often provokes a desire, an attraction; to hide these organs allows to see in the other a social being before seeing a potential sexual partner. This is the reason why the sexual organs must not be visible in many cultures where it is frowned upon to reveal one's body. The management of "primary" human reactions is therefore facilitated: erection and goosebumps are, for example, subtracted from the eye. The relationship between respect for modesty and the development of clothing remains complex and difficult to date historically. Sexual gorillas of almost naked ethnic groups, such as Oceanian penises or loincloths, might suggest that modesty preceded clothes. On the other hand, one can also wonder about whether modesty would not result rather from the masking of the body, making the vision of the body unseemly even when time allows to discover it - see for example the municipal decree Deauville from 1996 banning the naked torso outside the beach, or the testimonies of practitioners of nudism (the emotion is created by lack).

Once again, the work of Marc-Alain Descamps brings us an excellent synthesis of this aspect: "In fact, sexuality is much more important for accounting for clothing, the first and last of the clothes being always the sex-cache. Modesty inclined men (and even more women) to hide their reproductive organs so as not to excite envy. Then, by proximity of the organs of elimination, there is added shame. So our body is cut in two: the noble or demonstrable parts and the "shameful parts". But modesty is not a stable reality, for there is nothing more erotic than modesty. Also its location varies according to the times and places. The role of the clothes is finally to hide to give price by exciting the desire, and afterwards, to reveal the hidden in an endless striptease. Thus we hide the neckline by a modesty, which is then made of lace and we wear a miniskirt but being careful to put under a tights that hide what we have just revealed