glove, covering for the hand with separate sections for the fingers and thumb, sometimes extending over the wrist or part of the arm. Fingerless gloves, called mitts in colonial America, have five holes through which the fingers and thumb extend.
Well-formed linen gloves with a drawstring closure at the wrist were found in the tomb of the Egyptian king Tutankhamen (14th century bc). Ancient Greek and Latin literature contain many allusions to gloves. Medieval European nobles, patricians, and prelates wore gloves made of fabric or leather, often richly jeweled and embroidered. By the 14th century, gloves were worn generally by upper-class men; but not until the 16th century did Catherine de Médicis, queen consort of Henry II of France, set the fashion for women. At the turn of the 17th century, women’s gloves of soft kidskin were introduced.
The ancient art of glove making became an industry in 1834, when Xavier Jouvin of Grenoble, France, invented the cutting die that made possible a glove of precise fit. The kid glove has retained supremacy as the aristocrat of gloves, but other kinds of leather are also utilized in modern glove manufacture, including capeskin, cabretta, pigskin, buckskin, reindeer skin, and lambskin, also called doeskin.
There are usually eight components of a leather glove: palm and back (one piece), thumb, three fourchettes (slender pieces of leather that form the sides of the fingers), and three quirks, or diamond-shaped pieces inserted at the bottom between the fingers. In cutting gloves, a single trank, or rectangular piece of leather the size of the glove, may be cut by hand to a desired pattern with shears; or a number of tranks may be cut simultaneously by a weighted, sharp steel die. The glove is closed by stitching up along the outside to the tip of the little finger; then the thumbs, quirks, and fourchettes are set in and sewed with great care. Although some sewing is done by hand, most is by machine and closely resembles hand stitching. The completed glove is dampened, tailored on an electrically heated metal model hand, and buffed.
Fabric gloves of antiquity were made of woven material, but modern fabric gloves are knit. Silk was the favoured material before World War II, but the glove industry now relies on cotton and man-made fibres such as rayon and nylon. Glove-sized squares of finished fabric are arranged face-to-face so that the left and right hands are cut out together by the knife-sharp glove die, which is forced through the built-up layers of fabric. Gores, triangular pieces of fabric, are cut separately and attached between the fingers when the cutout glove is folded over and stitched together. Thumbs are also cut separately and attached. The fingers are given a tubular shape by seaming. Fabric gloves are tailored on electrically heated metal hands, as are leather gloves.
Gloves of wool, synthetic fibres, and cotton yarns can be knit by machine with or without seams; and their colours, designs, patterns, and stitch variations rival those of gloves knit by hand. Seamed, or wrought, gloves are first machine knit as flat selvage pieces of fabric, folded so that complementing parts fall together, and then stitched. Seamless gloves also may be knit entirely on such a flat machine, or the cuff and palm may be knit on a circular machine and then the stitches carefully transferred to a flat fingering machine.
Protective gloves have been developed for special uses. Thin rubber or latex gloves are used by medical and laboratory personnel. Heavy rubber gloves are used by electrical workers. Asbestos gloves protect against burns, as do gloves of heavy, twisted loop pile similar to terry cloth. Canton flannel gloves treated with polyvinyl provide plastic-coated work gloves that are heat resistant, impermeable to most fluids, and proof against acids, alkalies, industrial oils, greases, and other chemicals. Lead-impregnated gloves may be used in order to shield the hands from X-rays.
Participants in many sports wear gloves for protection or to improve grip. In baseball, players in the field wear one large padded leather glove, or mitt, to protect the fielder’s hand and to facilitate catching the ball via a pocket woven between the glove’s thumb and index finger. Hockey players and cricket batsmen wear oversized padded gloves on both hands to cushion them from the hard, fast-moving projectiles used in these sports. Thin gloves made of leather or synthetic material are used in a variety of sports, such as gridiron football, golf, and cycling, to enhance the wearer’s grip.
