Well, some people think underwear is required by God (it's in the Bible) but in any event, whatever is worn next to your skin is your underwear. It becomes confusing if that's all you're wearing, of course. Can you call a sock "underwear?" Do you wear leather shoes without socks, which is sort of fashionable in the preppy circles. Loafers, anyway (the shoes, not preppies).
At one time a shirt was considered an undergarment but I think that had already been mentioned. A shirt was not considered a garment for wearing by itself in some places. Mind you, the weather in a lot of places makes it a moot point about wearing a shirt as an outer garment. In any case, hard information about what people wore, if anything, five hundred, a thousand, two, three or four thousand years ago is actually hard to come by and even where there is a lot of documentary and photographic evidence that such and such was so, even that is open to wide interpretation.
I think underwear may be required more by Mother Nature than by God (any god, for our purposes). Only when the temperatures become temperate or sub-tropical, like where I live, can we start dispensing with our clothing. Then we can start worrying about the tattoos, the hair, the piercing, the missing parts, the spots, the weight and so on.
It occurs to me that often we think of clothing as protection as much as for modesty or vanity. Protection from the elements and protection on the job. Yet ironically, when working, if we are actually laboring, we often start removing garments, particularly upper garments. There is some sort of large scale cable laying project going on in the little industrial park where I spend most of my life and it seems to require a lot of men digging those narrow ditches. I noticed only yesterday a number of men wearing only t-shirts (and pants) digging with picks when the temperature was in the 40's. When working at home, where I have an on-going drywall project in the kitchen (I only work on it weekends), I try to follow through to the logical ultimate conclusion of removing unnecessary clothing and end up wearing none at all, except for my boots. Quite comfortable and entirely practical, even though the skin may sometimes feel cool to the touch. So for most purposes and in most places very little clothing is really necessary for protection and even modesty. This is provided you still have blood flowing through your veins. When that slows down you are in trouble.
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