listen to me. the first hairless hominin was homo erectus, about 1.6mya. naked. anatomically modern humans like us evolved 350-270,000 years ago. also naked. when do we first have solid evidence for consistent human use of clothing (bc it's when the clothing lice genome evolves to diverge from the head lice genome lol)? only 170,000-83,000 years ago. before that? BUCKASS NAKED. and even when we did start using clothing? well, as we know from excellent textile archeologists such as elizabeth wayland barber, a LOT of early human clothing was likely more decorative than functional – i.e. the string skirts that you see on some of the 'venus figures' from the upper paleolithic, which were solely decorative but would NOT do anything for warmth.

now consider eridians, whose bodies are functionally impenetrable unless they're actively eating (which is a private activity anyhow), who are carnivores (thus having no need to cultivate plants – aka the source of most textiles – like humans do), who live on a planet with no sun exposure (so probably nothing like earth plants anyways) and no fucking seasons (no need for rain/snow protection!), who evolved to exist ONLY in very specific & stable temperature ranges (like most life on erid, per andy weir), who have five fucking hands to hold things, are famously so good at multitasking that doing just one activity sucks for them, and CANNOT FUCKING SEE!!!

so where the FUCK is eridians' evolutionary or social impetus to develop ANYTHING akin to clothing supposedly coming from? N O W H E R E. you heard me.

decoration like the celebration jewelry, absolutely – though notice that was clearly designed for its auditory qualities and ability to show up on sonar, not anything approaching the level of coverage that human clothing has. rocky's engineering lederhosen (leather! bc again, carnivores!) as a (evolutionarily speaking) modern development to help hold tools, yeah, totally. carapace carvings, 100%.

i think the lack of plantlike life on erid, and the fact that eridians are carnivores (so presumably not practising any form of settled agriculture except for animal husbandry and/or herding) would still make it relatively unlikely that they'd develop anything akin to textile cloth that they'd have a desire to apply to their bodies, even decoratively, especially early on in their evolutionary history. i also doubt that there would be MUCH of a dampening effect from textile cloth on carapaces given that eridians can direct their sonar in ways that let them "see" through many materials (walls, spaceship hulls, etc), which would make a desire to cover up your carapace with cloth for modesty unlikely.

now, something like "clothing" for the purely decorative and audible-textural enjoyment of it all, i COULD see developing later on in eridian history (especially once they had more specialisation in labour and overall food surpluses), though i imagine it would be considered of the same category of "thing" as rocky's celebration jewellery – which we'l note that rocky / grace's translation program DOES gloss as "special clothing" in the film. and the existence of rocky's functional (i.e. non-decorative) engineering lederhosen getup shows that obviously eridians have been tanning hides and using animal poducts to make things like pockets/bags/straps for their bodies (take note, grocky scholars) for a while now. so leather decorative "clothing" for some occasions doesn't seem like a huge stretch – i.e. maybe eridian clusters in cultures/regions that are more organised around animal husbandry are more likely to have "special clothing for celebration" made out of leather, while an engineer/metalworker like rocky would default to xenonite/metal for his party fits. actually, even metal cloth-like materials for decoration would be plausible, given how weaver-y rocky's xenonite work often is!