Costumes of a civilization are studied as a means of understanding people, their thinking, tastes, and culture. However, the subjective ‘feel’ of costume due to their interaction with human body is an important personal aspect of costumes that has not been studied. We hypothesize that this aspect can explain the motivation behind features of costumes that change or remain immutable over time. We propose a novel numerical encoding of costumes based on the interaction of costumes with human anatomy. Using methods from machine classification on a set of costumes from ancient to contemporary periods, we show that costumes of different epochs and cultures are separable in the two dimensional principal component space. We use the Eigen costumes to analyze the immutable similarity in Indic costumes through the ages and the contrasting features between Indic and non-Indic. We further dwell into primary sources to demonstrate that these characteristic features of Indic costumes were very likely considered and deliberate choices motivated by yoga in order to induce beneficial effects on prāṇa. We hope that this work will be a small first step for an alternate way of deriving insights into sartorial trends in various archeological specimen using methods from life sciences and computation.

中文翻译：

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历代印度服饰：运用数学生物学洞察裁缝选择

研究文明的服装是了解人们、他们的思想、品味和文化的一种手段。然而，由于服装与人体相互作用而产生的主观“感觉”是服装的一个重要的个人方面，尚未得到研究。我们假设这方面可以解释服装特征随着时间的推移而改变或保持不变的动机。我们提出了一种基于服装与人体解剖结构相互作用的新型服装数字编码。使用机器分类方法对一组古今服饰进行分类，我们证明了不同时代和文化的服饰在二维主成分空间中是可分离的。我们使用本征服饰来分析历代印度服饰中不可改变的相似性以及印度与非印度之间的对比特征。我们进一步深入研究了主要来源，以证明印度服装的这些特征很可能被瑜伽所考虑和深思熟虑的选择，以便对身体产生有益的影响。呸。我们希望这项工作将成为使用生命科学和计算方法深入了解各种考古标本的裁缝趋势的替代方法的第一步。