  We show that the `dressing' approach, which describes physical charges as
gauge invariant composites of matter and clouds of gauge bosons, arises
naturally in gauge theories. We give perturbative examples of dressings for
both asymptotic charges and for states in which the fields are confined to a
compact volume as is required, for example, by causality in pair creation. In
QCD, we use dressed states to demonstrate explicitly how Gribov copies obstruct
the non-perturbative construction of colour charges.
