A wardrobe made of rectangles
A Greek garment began as a rectangle woven on a loom. Clothing was usually homemade, and the same piece of homespun fabric could become a garment, a blanket or a shroud. A rectangle went round the body and was held in place with pins, brooches and a belt, so the shape of an outfit depended on how you folded, fastened and tied it. A good comparison is a large beach towel worn as a dress: the cloth is always the same, and the result depends on the pins.
With that one principle the Greeks built a whole wardrobe of three main pieces, a tunic of one kind or another and a cloak.
Peplos and chiton: wool or linen?
The peplos was a large rectangle of heavy fabric, usually wool. Its upper edge was folded over, so that the flap, the apoptygma (overfold), reached the waist. The cloth was wrapped round the body and fastened at the shoulders with a pin or brooch, with an opening left for each arm; the open side could be left open, pinned or sewn. A belt was optional.
The chiton was a much lighter garment, usually of imported linen: a very long and very wide rectangle sewn up at the sides and pinned or sewn at the shoulders. It was usually girded at the waist and was often wide enough to fall over the arms as sleeves, held along the upper arm with pins or buttons. Both were floor-length for women, and long enough to be pulled up over the belt into a pouch, the kolpos. Under either one a woman might wear a soft band round the body, the strophion.
So what did a woman look like dressed in both? The Peplos Kore, a marble girl from the Acropolis of about 530 BCE, wears a peplos belted at the waist and fastened on the shoulders with bronze pins (the small holes for them are still there), and under it a longer chiton whose fine folds cover her legs.
What men wore
Men wore a chiton too, cut the same way but knee-length or shorter. For exercise, riding or hard labour there was the exomis, a short chiton fastened on the left shoulder only, which left the right arm and shoulder free. Young men often wore a short cloak for riding, the chlamys, and occasionally a broad-brimmed hat, the petasos. On the feet, both men and women wore sandals, slippers, soft shoes or boots, though at home they usually went barefoot.
Over everything, women and men alike wore the himation, a rectangle of heavy wool or linen draped diagonally over one shoulder or symmetrically over both, like a stole. Women sometimes added a shawl, the epiblema.
White marble, coloured clothes
Why do we imagine the Greeks in white? Because the statues lost their paint. Vase paintings and the traces of colour on sculpture show fabrics that were brightly coloured and generally decorated with elaborate designs. The Peplos Kore is the clearest case. Spectrographic analysis found that her belt was blue and green and her chiton blue with a green band at the neck. Her peplos was white, but its middle was decorated with rows of small animals, birds and riders on red squares, framed by bands of rosettes on a green ground, and its borders carried spirals, palmettes and lotus flowers. Seen today in bare marble, she is a reminder of how much colour has gone from painted statues.
Vase painters show patterned textiles too, and among the most common designs in ancient art is the Greek key, the right-angled meander that still signals “ancient Greece” to anyone who sees it on a dress.
Did Athenian women switch dress because of a murder?
Herodotus tells a strange story. After a disastrous Athenian expedition against Aegina, only one man came home. The wives of the dead gathered round him and stabbed him to death with the pins of their dresses, each asking where her husband was. The Athenians, horrified, punished the women by changing their dress: until then they had worn Dorian dress, very like the Corinthian, and from then on they had to wear the linen tunic of the Ionian fashion, so that they would have no pins to use.
Is it true? Probably not as told. Herodotus himself adds, in the next breath, that the “Ionian” dress was in origin Carian, and that in ancient times all Greek women had worn the Dorian one, so the anecdote explains a change of fashion that may well be older. What the story does preserve is real: two kinds of tunic, the pinned woollen peplos and the sewn linen chiton, and a memory that Athenian women moved from the first to the second.
Made at home
Most of this cloth was made by women, at home. A small oil flask painted by the Amasis Painter around 550-530 BCE shows women spinning wool on hand-held spindles while two smaller figures work a loom; textile historians have used the scene to reconstruct Greek weaving. A peplos, then, began as raw wool spun by hand and ended as a rectangle folded over a woman’s shoulders.
Where to see it
The Peplos Kore and the other korai of the Acropolis, with their painted borders, are in the Archaic Acropolis Gallery of the Acropolis Museum in Athens. The Metropolitan Museum in New York has the Amasis Painter’s lekythoi and many vases with clothed figures in its Greek galleries. Check opening times on the museums’ websites before you go.
Sources
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Department of Greek and Roman Art, “Ancient Greek Dress”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (2003).
- H. Koda, “The Greek Key and Divine Attributes in Modern Dress”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2003).
- Acropolis Museum, Athens, “Statue of a Kore. The Peplos Kore” (Acr. 679).
- Herodotus, Histories 5.87-88 (Perseus Digital Library).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection records 31.11.10 and 75.2.11.
