The World Of Roman Costume

Thirteen scholarly and well-illustrated essays survey, document and elucidate over a thousand years of Roman garments and accessories, including Etruscan influences, Near Eastern fashions and the transition towards early Christian garb.

A detailed, finely researched and profusely illustrated history of clothing and fashion in the Roman Empire.

Roman Dress and the Fabrics of Roman Culture investigates the social symbolism and cultural poetics of dress in the ancient Roman world in the period from 200 BCE-400 CE. Editors Jonathan Edmondson and Alison Keith and the contributors to this volume explore the diffusion of Roman dress protocols at Rome and in the Roman imperial context by looking at Rome's North African provinces in particular, a focus that previous studies have overlooked or dealt with only in passing. Another unique aspect of this collection is that it goes beyond the male elite to address a wider spectrum of Roman society. Chapters deal with such topics as masculine attire, strategies for self-expression for Roman women within a dress code prescribed by a patriarchal culture, and the complex dynamics of dress in imperial Roman culture, both literary and artistic. This volume further investigates the literary, legal, and iconographic evidence to provide anthropologically-informed readings of Roman clothing. This collection of original essays employs a range of methodological approaches - historical, literary critical, philological, art historical, sociological and anthropological - to offer a thorough discussion of one of the most central issues in Roman culture.

How did the ancient Greeks make blusher from seaweed? Just how does one wear a toga? This work presents an alphabetized compendium of styles and accessories that form the classical image. The entries cover individual aspects of dress alongside surveys of topics and socio-cultural analysis, drawn from ancient art, literature and archaeology.

In Masculinity and Dress in Roman Antiquity, Olson argues that clothing functioned as part of the process of communication by which elite male influence, masculinity, and sexuality were made known and acknowledged, and furthermore that these concepts interconnected in socially significant ways. This volume also sets out the details of masculine dress from literary and artistic evidence and the connection of clothing to rank, status, and ritual. This is the first monograph in English to draw together the myriad evidence for male dress in the Roman world, and examine it as evidence for men’s self-presentation, status, and social convention.

Provides more than seven hundred illustrations that depict authentic clothing from ancient Greece and Rome.

Outlines the geography and history of ancient Rome and describes, in text and illustrations, the materials and methods used to make clothing and the typical styles of the era.