A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Clothing and Nakedness (24 quotes)
Clothing, as a technology, is a store of energy. It enables man to specialize.
“Cybernation and Culture” (1966), p 103
Year: 1966
In tribal societies they prize the integral power of the corporate far above the variations of the individual costume. In fact, when all members of the tribe wear the same costumes, they find the same psychic security that we do In living in uniform, mechanized environments. Since our environments are so drastically uniform we feel we can afford a wide play of private expression in behavior and costume. However, when we seek to rally the corporate energies for sharply defined objectives, we do not hesitate to impose uniforms. Both the military costume of the citizen as robot and the ceremonial costume of the elite at dignified functions are exact parallels to the tribal use of costume. It is somewhere In between the military uniform and the rigid fixity of formal attire that there falls the world of fashion.
War and Peace in the Global Village (1968), p 161
Year: 1968
Economists have estimated that an unclad society eats 40 percent more than one in Western attire. Clothing as an extension of our skin helps to store and to channel energy, so that if the Westerner needs less food, he may also demand more sex.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 119
Year: 1964
[To the Editor of Playboy] Nudity is not realism. Compared to the clad figure, nudity is sculptural. Clothing is an anti-environment, a kind of weaponry, providing an enclosed space that is pictorial rather than sculptural. Sculpture is a tactile form that is both abstract and mathematical. When photographed, every feature and effect of the sculptural human body is slanted toward the visual rather than the tactile. In fact, high-definition photograph [sic] is so intense and specialized as to paralyze ordinary perception, and, hence, is accepted as a welcome tranquilizer. Of course, basic human sex attraction is olfactory, not photo-factory, hence the playful harmlessness and neutral innocence of your pictures….The apparent suddenness of the acceptance of nudity in public media today has nothing to do with any change of mind. What is changed is our sensory life as a result of living in a new information environment of electric tactility and involvement. It is this new environment reshaping the perceptual life of the Western world that relates Twiggy and Bucky and mini-skirts and LSD.
Letter of January 12, 1968 to Jack Kessie, Managing Editor, Playboy Magazine (LAC)
Year: 1968
…costume is corporate putting on of a society itself.”
“Roles, Masks and Performances (1971) in McLuhan Unbound (2017), p 19
Year: 1971
To a person using the whole sensorium nudity is the richest possible expression of structural form. But to the highly visual and lopsided sensibility of industrial societies, the sudden confrontation with tactile flesh is heady music, indeed.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 122
Year: 1964
It was found that primitives could not acquire full literacy until they had costumed themselves in European (Western) clothing: these clothes literally “stored” the psychic energies necessary for the huge expenditures that such visual specialism demands. With the planted “clothed”, as it were, by the satellite, what sort of inclusive, global, corporate, non-specialist activity is feasible for the first time?
“Side Probe #4, On the Relationship Between Clothing and Perception,” in “Through the Vanishing Point: Reversal Through Speed-up,” Dew-Line Newsletter, Vol 1, Number 5, November, 1968, p 14
Year: 1968
Drawn to McLuhan #10
Clothes are not worn merely to keep us warm and to protect our bodies. They are also worn to ''speak, '' in the sense that theatrical costumes speak. All media, moreover, are weapons, as well as masks of power that are "put on," so to speak
“Technology and the Human Dimension: Conversation with Louis Forsdale” (1974) in MM: The Man and His Message (1989)
Year: 1974
Nudity is sculptural, not visual.
Counterblast (1969), p 61
Year: 1969
Chapter:
Sculpture, Sculptural
Clothing, as an extension of the skin, can be seen both as a heat-control mechanism and as a means of defining the self socially. I n these respects, clothing and housing are near twins , though clothing is both nearer and elder; for housing extends the inner heat-control mechanisms of our organism, while clothing is a more direct extension of the outer surface of the body. Today Europeans have begun to dress for the eye, American-style, just at the moment when Americans have begun to abandon their traditional visual style. The media analyst knows why these opposite styles
suddenly transfer their locations.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, pp 119-120
Year: 1964
Nudity could be naughty excitement only for a visual culture that had divorced itself from the audile-tactile values of less abstract societies.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 121
Year: 1964
Clothing is fragmentary. It’s a way of stepping up to high intensity one aspect only of sex. Any aspect of dress can be used by the wearer as a weapon. All through Finnegans Wake, clothing is handled as weaponry.
“Love,” Saturday Night, February, 1967, p 26
Year: 1967
Nudity and unabashed sexuality are growing in the electric age because as TV tattoos its message directly on our skins, it renders clothing obsolescent and a barrier, and the new tactility makes it natural for kids to constantly touch one another as reflected by the button sold in the psychedelic shops: IF IT MOVES, FONDLE IT.
Playboy Interview (1969), in The Essential McLuhan, (1995), p 252
Year: 1969
This is not to say that nudity is on its way out. On the contrary, it will most likely increase in the neo-tribal future.
“The Future of Sex” with George Leonard (1967), in On the Nature of Media, 2017, p 128
Year: 1967
Nudity is not nakedness, since the nudes expects to be seen whereas the naked person does not. In fact nakedness is the "put off" of all power and dignity and social being. This fact draws attention to clothing as equipment and technology and power.
“International Motley and Religious Costume” (1972), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 76
Year: 1972
Yes, the short ballet costume was the result of archeological studies made in the late nineteenth century by choreographers and designers. Daighilev, one of the founders of the Ballet Russe, was very primitive in his approach to the ballet. Isadora Duncan was entirely tribal. Daighilev was power; Jean Cocteau would come to him, on his knees, begging to do work for him.
“Miniskirt Tribalism,” interview in Rags (1970), p 23
Year: 1970
[Said of the mini skirt in 1968]
….a return to ancient tribal traditions…not mere fashion.”
Quoted in “Miniskirt Tribalism,” an interview in Rags, 1970
Year: 1970
Q: Is part of the reason for the continuance of the mini skirt its practicality, its ease for dancing for example.
A: No, not at all. The mini is simply worn as costume. A put on of tribal power.
“Miniskirt Tribalism,” interview in Rags (1970), p
Year: 1970
(of the miniskirt)
The kids couldn’t give you a single reason why they wear it. The mini skirt is a corporate costume; kids today, in putting on a mini skirt, are in roles… not their private selves. When you are in a role you put on your audience, like Mae West who put on the role of the female impersonator, like Tiny Tim…
“Miniskirt Tribalism,” interview in Rags, 1970, p 23
Year: 1970
The Emperor’s clothes are corporate social services whose character is concealed by their way of involving everybody, thus making themselves invisible. Such “corporate clothing” is familiar in phrases such as “the King’s highway,” “the King’s English,” “the King’s justice,” “the King’s pess,” etc. These corporate clothes, or social vestitutres, are vast environmental weaponry such as enlists the total social energy of a whole population.
“International Motley and Religious Costume” (1972), p 2
Year: 1972
Clothing is fragmentary. It’s a way of stepping up to high intensity any aspect only of sex. Any aspect of dress can be used by the wearer as a weapon. All through Finnegans Wake, clothing is handled as weaponry.
“Love” (1967), p 26
Year: 1967
Clothing, as a technology, is a store of energy. It enables man to socialize.
“Cybernation and Culture” (1966), p 103
Year: 1966
Clothing and housing, as extensions of skin and heat-control mechanisms, are media of communication, first of all, in the sense that they shape and rearrange the patterns of human association and community. Varied techniques of lighting and heating would seem only to give new flexibility and scope to what is the basic principle of these media of clothing and housing; namely, their extension of our bodily heat-control mechanisms in a way that enables us to attain some degree of equilibrium in a changing environment.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 127
Year: 1964
When Arab women first took off their purdahs, they felt 30 feet tall.
They couldn’t cross a street.
Clothes make the gal.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 308
Year: 1970