Basic Trope: Time Travel doesn't allow material things to come with the time traveler, which may include clothing.
- Straight: Alice time-travels to the medieval era and discovers to her mortification that she's butt naked because her clothes didn't come with her.
- Exaggerated:
- In addition to her clothes, Alice's skin failed to come with her back in time.
- The time machine doesn't have miscarriage-inducing radiation or chemicals, but it still can't transport preborn children. Alice was pregnant when she travelled in time, but loses her baby and her clothes en route to the other time.
- Downplayed:
- Alice only loses her outer clothes when she time-travels; she still has underwear on.
- Alice arrives in the altogether, but her clothes appear in a pile beside her, and the first thing she does in the other time is dress herself.
- Alice's clothes are ratty and tattered after she travels back in time.
- A time traveller can keep one small, light garment or accessory on their journey through time. Alice uses this privilege to retain her glasses because she's Blind Without 'Em.
- A time traveller can't keep any accessories that are not literally physically attached to them. Alice loses her glasses, clothes, and watch, but her piercings stay where they are.
- Alice has Godiva Hair, so at least her sensitive bits are covered when she's naked in the other time.
- A mysterious force places Alice's arms or other things on her sensitive bits when she arrives naked in the other time.
- Justified:
- The method of time travel could only work on living beings, so anything the time traveler has on them that isn't alive (such as clothes) doesn't register.
- The inventor of the time machine didn't want history to be screwed up by time travelers showing up in anachronistic wardrobe, so they deliberately made it so that everyone who goes back in time will show up naked.
- The amount of power needed to send matter through time is massive, so the less Alice brings with her the more likely it is that the machine will work at all.
- Inverted:
- Alice time-travels in the nude and suddenly gains era-appropriate clothes once she arrives in the period she's visiting.
- Alice's clothes go back in time without her, leaving Alice naked in the present.
- Subverted: Alice's clothes stay on after she arrives in the past.
- Double Subverted: Alice's clothes make it to the past at first, but disintegrate shortly after the travel has completed.
- Parodied:
- Alice has time-traveled to a puritanical time and place, at which she is arrested for public indecency on the spot.
- Alice transports herself to the past and ends up naked in a 1990s elementary school, where she comes face to face with a younger version of herself, who screams and calls her a pervert. Adult Alice hastily transports herself back to the present and ends up transporting herself naked on stage during a live performance of Dancing with the Stars.
- Alice's clothes aren't actually removed, merely turned invisible. Regardless, anybody who looks at her in the other era would think she was nude.
- Alice goes to the future. Losing her clothes en route scares her so badly that she promptly goes back to her own time and doesn't stick around. It turns out the future is a Free-Love Future in which people go naked everywhere.
- Alice travels wearing several layers of thick clothing, all of which just vanish and leave her naked as soon as she arrives at her temporal destination.
- Alice has a Freak Out that is very much not because she's now naked.
- As soon as Alice brags that she beat the time machine's clothing-removal abilities, her clothes disappear, leaving her to have her Naked Freak-Out.
- After the people who have time-travelled naked complain, an adjacent industry springs up to figure out how to allow people to time-travel with their clothes on. By the time they figure that out, everybody else has forgotten why they complained and learn at least to live with it, and in a few cases, enjoy it.
- Alice travels back to the day she was born; she gets de-aged and eventually we figure out that to maintain a Stable Time Loop, she just had to be born again.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Time travel is shown to be unstable and unpredictable, with one of the varied outcomes being whether the time traveler will keep their clothes.
- Alice goes into the time machine wearing clothes, finds herself in her birthday suit while in the ether, then emerges in her target era with clothes on again (or vice versa).
- Men keep their clothes when they time-travel, while women get stripped nude (or vice versa).
- Averted:
- No one who time-travels ever loses their clothes in the process.
- No one who time-travels wears clothes in the first place.
- Enforced: A quick and easy way to include Fanservice in a story where the plot involves time travel.
- Lampshaded: "If I had known my clothes wouldn't come with me, I'd have had the foresight to time travel to the prehistoric era. At least there, no one would give a damn that I'm in the buff."
- Invoked: Time machines are deliberately designed to disintegrate the clothing of whoever uses them when in use.
- Exploited:
- Alice, a Shameless Fanservice Girl at heart, takes the opportunity to live as a nudist after time-traveling to an era where the nudity taboo had yet to be formed (or had been dismissed as a relic of a more primitive time).
- Alice travels in time to get a Clingy Costume off herself.
- Carol wants Alice's clothes, so she tricks her into travelling through time and gets those clothes out of the time machine when it's inactive.
- Defied:
- Alice avoids the issue by stripping before using the time machine, being nude while running her errands in the future or past, and getting dressed again after returning to the present.
- Time machines are designed so that time travelers arrive in different eras with their clothing intact.
- Time machines may strip a user naked, but there is a switch that allows each user to decide whether they'd rather be naked.
- Time travel is banned when the creators/owners of the time machine fail or refuse to fix the glitch that leaves users naked.
- Discussed: "It's like the guys who invented time travel are a bunch of perverts!"
- Conversed: "This is the most ridiculous excuse for nudity in a sci-fi story I've seen. A ray gun that disintegrates fabric would make a lot more sense than some mumbo-jumbo about it being impossible for clothing to time-travel."
- Played for Drama:
- Alice is transported in a freezing tundra and must transport herself forward in time before she freezes to death.
- Alice is transported to a place of climate change-afflicted deathly heat, whether there's a major fire or just an intense heat wave, and even being nude doesn't do much to help with it. She must transport herself back in time before she gets ill or killed due to smoke inhalation, heatstroke, or runs the risk of developing skin cancer.
- Alice is transported back to a time when humans were primitive or even unknown and different large animals ruled the roost in this part of the world. With her luck, she winds up right in the range of several overlapping predators, and of course, she is even more vulnerable because she's naked.
- Alice is transported forward into a Robot War, and several of them spot her right away; of course, she is even more vulnerable because she's naked.
- Alice isn't transported to a time when she would be in mortal peril, but rather with literally no other human, animal, or robot life, or anything with which to clothe herself, which drives her insane.
- Alice had a life in her own time, being in a happy relationship and a good job, and the focus of the story is her angst about how to get back home — and her nudity doesn't help.
- Even though all other conditions are favourable, Alice promptly gets her period while naked in the other era, which embarrasses her.
- Played for Horror: A caveman sees the nude Alice, abducts her, and keeps her as his Sex Slave.
- Played for Laughs: Naked People Are Funny, even in the distant future.
- Plotted a Good Waste: Alice's entire body gets left behind, meaning only her soul gets transported back. She spends the rest of the story haunting and interacting with the other, living characters.
- Deconstructed:
- As in Parodied 1, Alice is arrested for indecency in the other era and nobody believes that she travelled in time.
- "Can't take anything" is so literal that this extends to the time machine itself. It avoids the potential pitfalls of Giving Radio to the Romans, yes, but it leaves time-travellers stuck somewhere else without even the clothes on their backs.
- Reconstructed:
- To Deconstructed 1:
- Alice went to one of the settings described in Exploited 1, and after she gets over the issues that come with being a Fish out of Temporal Water, she lives a happy naked life, living with the partner of her dreams and doing good work.
- Alice gets dressed quickly enough to avoid being called indecent.
- To Deconstructed 2:
- For this reason, time travel is used only as a punishment for unrepentant and harmful criminals.
- People travel in time via natural space-time wormholes, not constructed devices, so they can go back to their own time and their clothes if they can get to such a wormhole.
- To Deconstructed 1:
- Implied:
- All parts of Alice's time-travelling adventure happened offscreen, but she mentions that this happened to her.
- We see only Alice's departure to the period she's visiting, at which point she is clothed, and then her return, at which point she is nude.
Take the time machine back to the era Can't Take Anything with You occurred, but don't be so shocked if you arrive missing your clothes.
