Enos describes the Lamanites as "wandering about in the wilderness with a short skin girdle about their loins" (Enos 1:20). According to Brant Gardner, this is surely descriptive of the earliest groups of Lamanites who would have stayed along the coastal regions of the Pacific Ocean in what is now Guatemala. We should remember, however, that this is a description based upon the early experience of the Nephites and Lamanties, and may have been a codified description of their dress. To the extent that we find larger Lamanite populations later in the Book of Mormon, and especially those among the highland inhabitants, we might assume that at least some of those urban Lamanties would have had the same taste for fine clothes as the Nephites of Jacob's time. [Brant Gardner, "Book of Mormon Commentary," [http://www.highfiber.com/] ~nahualli/LDStopics/Enos/Enos1.htm, pp. 17-18]
With respect to the Lamanites living in the coastal regions of Guatemala, John Sorenson says the following:
What can we tell about living conditions in the land of first inheritance? The coastal plain where the landing of Lehi would have occurred was uncomfortably hot and humid. That climate favored rapid crop growth, but the weather would [have been] unpleasant for colonizers. The Nephites soon fled up to the land of Nephi, where the elevation permitted living in greater comfort. As Nephi tells the story, the Lamanites down in the hot lowlands were nomadic hunters, bloodthirsty, near naked, and lazy (2 Nephi 5:24; Enos 1:20). The circumstances of life in that environment could account for some of those characteristics. Many centuries after the Spaniards spoke in like terms of natives in the same area. The Tomas Medel manuscript, dating about A.D. 1550, just a generation after the first Spaniards arrived in the area, reported that the Indian men on the Pacific coast of Guatemala "spent their entire lives as naked as when they were born." That practice may have seemed a sensible response to the oppressive climate. In the late seventeenth century, Catholic priest Fuentes y Guzman contrasted the "lassitude and laziness" of the same lowlanders with the energy of the highland inhabitants. As for getting a living, the tangle of forest and swamp along the coast itself may have been too hard for the Lamanite newcomers to farm effectively, since they wouldn't immediately get the knack of cultivation in that locale. . . . It may have been economically smart for them to hunt and gather the abundant natural food from the estuaries. [John L. Sorenson, An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon, p. 140]