The Greeks did not cut their clothes.
This is the single most important fact about the Greek dress tradition and the fact whose implications the contemporary reception of Greek clothing most consistently underestimates. The chiton and the himation and the peplos were not garments in the sense that a modern garment is a garment: a piece of fabric cut to a shape and sewn into a three-dimensional form whose dimensions were determined in advance of the wearing and whose silhouette was fixed before the garment was put on. They were rectangles of woven cloth whose form was produced entirely by the act of draping and pinning and belting that the wearer performed each time the garment was worn.
The same piece of cloth could be worn differently by different wearers. The same piece of cloth could be worn differently by the same wearer on different occasions. The form that the garment took in any particular instance of wearing was the product of the interaction between the cloth’s weight and weave, the proportions of the wearer’s body, and the choices the wearer made in the act of draping: how much cloth to leave free at the top, where to pin the shoulder, how tightly to belt the waist, how to arrange the folds that fell from the belt to the hem.
This is the character of the draping tradition that makes the Greek dress tradition a philosophical subject rather than simply a historical one: the garment was not a fixed object that the wearer put on. It was a performance that the wearer performed with the cloth as instrument. The form that the performance produced was the visible expression of the body in the act of wearing the cloth in the way that the occasion required.
The sculptors understood this. The achievement of the wet drapery technique, in which the fabric appears to cling to the body beneath it while simultaneously falling under gravity and moving in the wind, is the achievement of the sculptor who understood that the garment was not a covering of the body but an extension of the body, a continuation of the body’s three-dimensional form into the space around it. The Apollo Buddha article in this collection develops the transmission of this technique from the Greek sculptural tradition through the Gandharan school to the Buddhist sculptural tradition of Central and East Asia: the sanghati, the Buddhist monk’s robe, rendered in the Gandharan workshops with the wet drapery vocabulary that the Greek sculptors had developed as the formal language of the divine body’s presence in the world.
The Chiton and the Grammar of the Draped Body
The chiton was the foundational garment of the Greek dress tradition: the rectangle of linen or wool whose draping produced the garment that both men and women wore as the primary layer of the clothed body.
The Doric chiton was the simpler and the older form: a heavy rectangle of wool, typically undyed in the natural colors of the fleece, folded in half vertically and pinned at the shoulders with the fibulae whose form was the fastening technology of the Doric dress tradition. The fold produced the front and back panels of the garment simultaneously. The pins at the shoulders held the fold in place. The belt, worn at the waist or just below the breasts, gathered the excess cloth into the folds that the Doric chiton’s characteristic heaviness made possible: folds whose weight and depth were the visual vocabulary of the restrained, serious, deliberately unornamented aesthetic that the Doric regional tradition expressed in its architectural character as surely as it expressed it in its dress character.
The Ionic chiton was lighter and more elaborate: a finer linen, sewn at the sides but open at the shoulders where it was fastened not with the large pins of the Doric tradition but with a series of small fasteners, buttons or ties, along the entire length of the upper arm and the shoulder, producing the gathered sleeve whose visual character was the visual character of the Ionic aesthetic: more movement, more complexity, more of the fabric engaged in the active production of the draped form rather than hanging in the severe vertical folds of the Doric chiton’s undivided cloth.
The distinction between the Doric and the Ionic chiton was not simply a distinction of regional preference or fashion. It was the expression in the dress tradition of the aesthetic difference between the Doric and the Ionic orders that the architectural tradition expressed in the difference between the plain Doric capital and the voluted Ionic capital, between the unornamented Doric frieze and the continuously decorated Ionic frieze. The same fundamental architectural vision that produced the Parthenon and the Erechtheion in different registers of the same tradition produced the Doric and the Ionic chiton in different registers of the same draping tradition.
The Peplos and the Body of the Goddess
The peplos was the garment most specifically associated in the ancient tradition with the divine feminine: the garment whose form and ritual significance connected it to the goddess tradition in the most direct available way.
The peplos was heavier than the chiton: a large rectangle of thick wool whose draping produced the garment whose upper portion, the apoptygma, was folded down over the belt to create the overfold whose visual weight gave the peplos its characteristic appearance of monumental solidity. The peplos did not move in the wind the way that the Ionic chiton moved. It hung with the gravity of the heavy wool garment whose folds were the deep, slow folds of cloth whose weight resisted the air’s movement.
The most famous peplos in the ancient Greek world was the peplos offered to Athena at the Panathenaic festival: the woven garment whose production occupied the designated weavers of Athens for the period between one Panathenaia and the next, whose design depicted the scenes of the Gigantomachy whose content was the mythological record of Athena’s participation in the defense of the organized divine world against the forces of the primordial chaos.
The offering of the peplos to Athena was the act whose ritual content was the act of clothing the goddess in the garment that the community of her worshippers had made for her: not a simple gift but the performance of the relationship between the goddess and the community whose civic identity was organized around her divine authority. The goddess who had given the olive tree to the city received from the city the garment that displayed the city’s acknowledgment of her divine achievement, woven into the cloth by the hands of the Athenian women whose role in the Panathenaic tradition was the role of the community’s weavers in relation to the goddess who was the goddess of craft.
The Parthenon frieze, whose survival through the centuries of the Parthenon’s subsequent history and whose controversy in the contemporary reception of the Elgin Marbles the Greek architecture article in this collection touches, depicted the Panathenaic procession: the civic event whose culmination was the offering of the peplos to the goddess whose statue stood inside the building whose exterior surface carried the frieze’s record of the offering. The Panathenaic peplos and the Parthenon frieze were the two objects whose relationship to each other was the relationship of the offering to the building that received it, of the garment to the goddess whose form in the Pheidian tradition was the form of the draped body whose drapery was the aesthetic achievement of the sculptural tradition that the peplos tradition made possible.
The Himation and the Philosophy of the Outer Garment
The himation was the outer garment: the rectangle of heavier wool whose draping over the chiton or the peplos produced the additional layer whose social significations were the most complex and the most carefully developed in the Greek dress tradition.
The himation was not a coat in the sense of a garment designed to provide warmth by enclosing the body in a closed form. It was a rectangle of cloth draped over the body in the way that the wearer’s status and the occasion’s requirements determined. The draping of the himation was the visible expression of the social identity that the wearer was performing in the public space where the draping occurred.
The philosopher’s himation was the himation whose draping was the aesthetic of the person who had deliberately chosen the most austere available form of the public garment: the himation worn without the chiton underneath, draped over the bare body, the choice of the person whose philosophical position regarding the relationship between the body and the mind, between the material and the intellectual, between the comfort of the clothed body and the discipline of the mind that did not attend to the body’s comfort, was expressed in the form of the garment rather than in the verbal statement of the philosophical position.
Diogenes wore his himation this way. The Diogenes article in this collection develops the philosophical content of the Cynic position: the reduction of the human requirements to the minimum necessary for the human life, the rejection of the social conventions whose observance produced the social identities that the conventional dress tradition maintained. The philosopher’s himation was the Cynic’s most visible daily performance of the Cynic’s most fundamental philosophical claim: the organized social world and its dress conventions were the constraints whose rejection was the condition of the freedom that the philosophical life required.
The orator’s himation was draped differently: the arrangement that allowed the gestures of the public speaker, the arm extended for emphasis, the hand brought to the chest for sincerity, to be performed within the structure of the draped cloth without the cloth losing its arrangement or the speaker losing the authority of the garment whose arrangement was the visual evidence of the public status whose performance the oration required.
The himation as worn by different people in different contexts was the visible vocabulary of the social identities that the Greek public world organized around the visible performances of its participants. The same rectangle of cloth draped differently was the Cynic philosopher’s rejection of social convention and the orator’s display of civic authority and the woman’s modest covering of theally female body in theally public space where theally female body required theally complete covering that theally domestic space did not require.
The Arachne Article and What the Weaving Tradition Was
The Arachne article in this collection develops the theological argument about the mortal weaver whose work told the truth that the divine authority could not permit: the tapestry Athena could find no flaw in and destroyed, the spider whose weaving preserves the capacity while removing the representational content.
The connection between the Arachne tradition and the Greek dress tradition is the connection between the technology of weaving and the social function that the products of weaving served in the organized Greek world.
Weaving in ancient Greece was not a craft in the sense of a specialized skill performed by designated craftspeople in designated workshops for the production of designated commercial products. It was the domestic labor whose performance was the condition of the household’s clothed existence: every member of every household wore cloth, and the production of that cloth was the work whose performance by the women of the household was the expression of the household’s self-sufficient domestic capacity.
The Odyssey’s Penelope weaving and unweaving the funeral shroud of Laertes is the narrative whose use of the weaving tradition as the instrument of the resistance to the social pressure the collection’s Arachne article develops as the opposite of Arachne’s weaving: where Arachne wove the truth that challenged the divine authority, Penelope wove the deferral that resisted the human pressure of the suitors’ demands. Both weavers used the loom as the instrument of their resistance. The form of the resistance was different. The technology was the same.
The Linear B tablets from the Mycenaean palaces whose content the olive tree article in this collection develops as the evidence of the Mycenaean palatial economy include the records of the quantities of the textile materials that the palatial workshops maintained: the accounting of the wool and the flax and the finished textiles that the palatial administration tracked as the economic resources whose production and distribution the palatial economy organized.
The textile tradition was not simply the domestic activity of individual households. It was the industrial tradition whose products were the traded commodities of the Bronze Age Mediterranean economy: the stirrup jars of perfumed olive oil and the bolts of dyed wool traveled the same trade routes because both were the luxury products of the palatial workshops whose production capacity the Linear B tablets recorded.
The Fibula and the Color of Status
the fastening of the draped garment was the fibula: the pin whose form was the technology that held the folds of the cloth in the arrangement that the draping required.
The fibula was not simply a practical object. It was the personal ornament whose material and form expressed the status of the wearer in the most concentrated available visible form. The bronze fibula of the ordinary Greek household and the gold fibula of the aristocratic household were both fibulae in the sense that both performed the function of fastening the draped cloth. They were as different in their social signification as any two objects that the Greek material culture produced.
The form of the fibula evolved across the centuries of the Greek dress tradition from the simple safety pin form of the earliest Iron Age examples to the elaborate zoomorphic and geometric forms of the developed archaic period: the fibula shaped as a horse, the fibula shaped as a boat, the fibula shaped as a griffin, all serving the practical function of the fastening pin while simultaneously serving the social function of the personal ornament whose form was the visible expression of the cultural and economic identity that the wearer was performing in the public context of the clothed body.
The color of the cloth itself was the social signal whose reading required the cultural literacy of the person who understood the associations of the dyes whose sourcing and production cost determined the social significance of the colored cloth.
The purple of the Phoenician murex dye was the color whose production cost, requiring the extraction of the substance from the mollussal shells in quantities whose rarity made the purple cloth the luxury object of the ancient Mediterranean world, made it the color of the social identity of the ruler: the purple border of the toga in Rome, the purple garments of the Byzantine emperors, the purple that the Vergina gold artifacts include in their decorative program whose connection to the Macedonian royal tradition the collection’s coverage of Alexander’s archaeological heritage develops.
The saffron yellow of the bridal garment was the color whose associations with the ritual occasion of the transition from the maiden to the wife made it the visible marker of the life transition that the wedding ceremony constituted: the bride in her saffron veil was the visible expression of the moment of the social transformation whose performance was the occasion of the garment’s wearing.
What the Draped Form Said About the Body
The Greek dress tradition’s aesthetic, the falling folds and the negative space and the fabric whose movement in the wind revealed the body’s form while simultaneously creating the secondary form of the cloth moving through the air, expressed a understanding of the relationship between the clothed body and the body’s dignity that the contemporary dress tradition does not share and has largely lost the vocabulary to describe.
The draped garment did not impose a fixed form on the body. It responded to the body’s form: the weight of the cloth falling from the points of the fastening producing the arrangement of folds whose visual character was determined by the proportions of the body beneath. Two wearers of the same piece of cloth in the same basic arrangement produced different visible forms because their bodies were different and the cloth’s response to their bodies’ proportions produced different draping.
This is the quality of the draped form that the Greek sculptors spent centuries learning to express in marble: the visible evidence that the cloth was responding to the body beneath it, that the folds were the product of the three-dimensional form of the body and the force of gravity acting on the weight of the cloth. The wet drapery technique was the sculptural solution to the problem of expressing this quality in the medium of stone: making the stone appear to have the properties of cloth responding to the body beneath it while stone has none of those properties and can only appear to have them through the application of the technical knowledge whose development took the Greek sculptural tradition three centuries to complete.
The philosophical content of the draped form’s aesthetic was the philosophical content of the understanding of the body that the draping tradition expressed: the body was not a shape to be hidden or a form to be displayed but the organizing principle around which the cloth arranged itself, the three-dimensional presence in relation to which the cloth’s form was produced. The clothed body in the Greek dress tradition was the body whose dignity was the dignity of the presence whose form the cloth acknowledged by responding to it: not the body displayed by tight-fitting garments that reproduce the body’s contours, not the body hidden by loose garments that replace the body’s form with the garment’s own form, but the body whose gravity and proportion and movement the cloth revealed by falling around it.
The Caryatids on the Erechtheion porch whose tresses the Greek architecture article in this collection names as the architectural achievement of the sculptor who understood drapery as the structural element of the figure: their chitons fall with the heaviness of stone rendered as cloth, the folds whose depth and direction carry the structural load of the entablature above their heads while simultaneously expressing the movement of the cloth in the moment of the figure’s posture. The draped body holding up the building. The cloth that falls and supports simultaneously. The achievement of the tradition that understood the draped form as both aesthetic and structural, as both the beautiful and the necessary simultaneously.
At Olympus Estate, Cultural Chronicles traces the practices and institutions that defined Greek civilization from the inside. The Greeks did not cut their clothes. The chiton and the himation and the peplos were rectangles of woven cloth whose form was produced entirely by the act of draping and pinning and belting that the wearer performed each time the garment was worn. The sculptor who understood this spent three centuries learning to express it in marble. The wet drapery technique was the solution to the problem of making stone appear to respond to the body beneath it the way cloth responds to the body beneath it. The Panathenaic peplos was woven by the designated weavers of Athens and depicted the Gigantomachy and was offered to Athena whose statue stood inside the building whose frieze recorded the offering. Diogenes wore his himation without the chiton underneath because the draping was the visible performance of the philosophical claim. The draped body was the body whose dignity was the dignity of the presence whose form the cloth acknowledged by responding to it.
