Cinema Fashion Police

My roommate has been showing me the DVDs of Spartacus: Blood and Sand this week. Blood and eye candy is more like it. But I digress.

I am mildly interested in the history of fashion, and as mildly interested in cinema fashion. I have observed that in costume dramas, the men's costumes will often read slightly more "authentic" (with the exception of the men's hairstyles; who knew gladiators favored buzz cuts or gel?) while women's costumes follow current fashion trends more closely. (Liz in Cleopatra--need I say more?)

So, after watching Roman matrons in what appeared to be underwired bodices and plebians in what were clearly no bodices at all, it got me to wondering about the authenticity of the costuming. What background I have is in art history, and for what that's worth, neither look seemed terribly authentic to me. I have seen the breast bands shown on some of the slaves in old art, but were the garments of the average Roman provincial gal really so thin and unstructured? Seems to me the textiles would be coarser than that.

I know the Greeks used wool, not cotton, so they wouldn't have had garments that flimsy (sculptural conventions not withstanding) but the Romans I don't know enough about. Anyone know?

Textiles in Europe up through the Middle Ages were typically made of either wool or linen. Silk imported from the East was an option if you were rich. I don't know how much cotton would have been available.

Don't be too quick to assume that fabric made of wool is always dense and heavy -- the weight and drape of a fabric depends on how it's made, not just on the type of fiber. Linen tends to be somewhat stiff no matter what you do with it, but a wool fabric made with fine threads and a loose weave can be wonderfully soft and drapey.

Roman women did seem to have some kind of breastband, but the bra proper was not invented until much, much later. Otherwise...yes, clothing for both men and women was fairly shapeless and unstructured.

(I'd give you some references, but I'm not coming up with any good links or titles at the moment -- you might try looking at living history/reenactment sites which focus on the Roman period, however, often you can find good information there.)

I'm always amused at the makeupand hairstyles, too. So dating. Just compare Claudette Colbert as Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor in the same role.

The HBO series Rome seems to have put a great deal of effort into getting it right. If you rent it with the version showing explanations of things such as hairstyles, clothing, bathing, housing, etc., they seem to have really tried.

It's one of the reasons historical movies don't age too well. No matter how hard we try, we can't keep our contemporary hairstyles off the screen. I was looking for illustrations, and came across this blog post: http://peplums.blogspot.com/2011/01/peplum-anachronism-hair.html

Yes, anachronisms. It's one of the things that makes art forgeries easier to spot the longer it's been since the forgery was painted; as you move away from the time and place in which it was done, subtle anachronisms start to catch the eye.

I can often date a costume movie simply by the fashion anachronisms. One of my favorites is Barbra Streisand's hair in Funny Girl. For a lot of movies made in the 30s and 40s, I can't even tell what era it's supposed to be set in, because the costumes are so 30s and 40s.

Yes, wool can be very soft and fine, but not as fine and transparent as Greek statuary would suggest. What we accept as what Greek clothing looked like (flimsy) is an artistic convention.

Hasn't changed much - here's a 1847 Cleopatra:

http://www.davidclaudon.com/Cleo3/Glyn.GIF

To be fair, Shakespeare probably envisioned someone who looked like an Elizabethan lady in the role; his Roman senators wear hats and have watches.

Deliberate anachronism sometimes works - Kenneth Branagh's Love's Labors Lost is set in the 1930s, his Hamlet in the 1860s; Michael Hoffman's Midsummer Night's Dream is in the 1890s, and Richard Loncraine's Richard III was set in the 1930s. All of these worked pretty well.

7 > "1847 Cleopatra" She's scary looking.

There's no winning; I'm sure you can find anachronisms in Branagh and the others for their chosen time frames. The farther you get from when the movie was made, the easier they are to spot.

As another example, I was watching Yankee Doodle Dandy, the 1942 George M. Cohan bio pic not so long ago. It's hard to follow the timeline, visually; the costuming blurs distinctions between the turn of the century, the teens, twenties or thirties. They are all seen through the haze of early '40s ideas of what clothes need to look like to look right.

But I stray far afield from ancient history. Although (to pay homage to a scene at the end of Yankee Doodle Dandy) the previous century is certainly ancient history to those young 'uns ...

Yah, and it's starting to feel like ancient history to me, too. Or maybe I'm just beginning to feel ancient myself. :-O

So I shouldn't wear those tight white flairs anymore?

Guido, Yes, you wear the flairs and I'll wear my red plaid bell bottoms with my platform oxford shoes. Oh, hold on, those fit when I had a 28" waist and its so much wider now. Rats.

I'm not a movie fan, but it seems to me that one of things costume design often gets wrong is having female stars wearing hair long and loose, when it should have been put up, or maybe covered. My dad's older sister told me that when she was a teenager in the thirties, a nice girl didn't even answer the door with her hair down--and I'm sure that such customs held during many historical periods. Any movie and fashion buffs out there, what do you think?

lol, remember "Catherine the Great" movie where the Russian infantry were carrying Mauser boltactions...sweet!

What? Really?

Maybe we could see Roman Legions armed with GPMGs and C7 infantry rifles, It would be neat to see a Roman parachute legion.

> 16

It would be neat to see a Roman parachute legion.

But how embarassing to have your tunic fly up when you jump!

> 17

That's what would make it so interesting!

"What if Cicero had a Piper Cub?"

Actually, I can visualize that legal eagle flying around. Maybe buzzing Antony's house.

>17 lilithcat: Is this why we don't have Higland regiments who parachute. (Spoken as one who has been a member of Highland Regiment as well has been a member of the Canadian Airborne regiment. (Airborne all the way!)

> 21

Is this why we don't have Highland regiments who parachute

I don't know, but it would certainly answer the age-old question of what Scotsmen wear (or don't wear) under their kilts.

Nothing is worn under the kilt. It's all in perfect working order.

16> There was a film version of Titus Andronicus that featured the Roman legions riding motorcycles and equipped with firearms; the intent was, I suppose, to show the timelessness of the issues involved. Haven't seen it; don't know if it worked or not. I imagine it depends on whether the director of a play or movie is trying to present an accurate historic reconstruction for the edification as well as entertainment of the audience, or whether they're doing an interpretation of the themes presented. As mentioned, this comes up all the time with Shakespeare plays; if you're doing a film of Julius Caesar, do you put your actors in Roman costume, or Elizabethan costume, or modern costume, or any other time? I've seen stage productions of The Taming of the Shrew set in 1650s England, 1880s Deadwood, South Dakota, and 1950s Miami Beach, Florida - they all worked and didn't work to some extent. The 1930s version of Richard III mentioned above was pretty successful, with Richard's rise to power paralleling Hitler's and his boar's head emblem appearing more and more often and in the same uses as the swastika. I saw a stage production of Richard III that showed Richard as sort of a Darth-Vader-like character, with more and more of his body being replaced by mechanical parts as the play progressed (this costuming was effective; the rest of the production was a little iffy).

The issue of costuming in historical movies should probably take second fiddle to some of the imposition of modern sensibilities, if you want to portray the spirit of the times. Regency and Victorian times might be the epitome of romance to modern novelists, but it would give the most avid fan of bodice-rippers a pause to consider contemporary sanitation, dentistry, birth control and infectious disease treatment. The best movie reminder of this I've seen is in Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility, where the Dashwood sisters have to tiptoe across a muddy street strewn with horseshit to make their way into a ball. I've yet to see a movie where a Regency or Victorian heroine has to get her teeth drilled without anesthetic and by a foot-treadle-powered hand drill. There is no way women of historical novels and movies have been as sexual active as they are shown in films in the absence of effective birth control and antibiotics for STDs (note there were plenty of women who were sexually active, but they don't make it as movie heroines - for an exception see Dangerous Beauty, about Renaissance courtesan/poet Victoria Franco). The men, as unfair as it is, were probably much more sexually active than portrayed - Queen Victoria had 56 illegitimate half-siblings. It just wouldn't do to show Mr. Darcy coming home to Elizabeth after a quick romp with his latest mistress, but he probably would have and she probably would have accepted it as perfectly normal.

Roughly ten years to me I remember watching the historical plays by Shakespere where the participants were clothed in modern British nbattle dress and at least to me it worked very well.

The Peacham illustration to Titus Andronicus from c1590s, although there is disagreement as to how accurately it represents an actual performance, suggests that Shakespeare's stage employed for Roman historical plays an odd hybrid of contemporary dress and what was perceived as ancient Roman dress. Here it is at Google Images: http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/thumbnail/205... or you can have your choice of reproductions by Google Image-ing Titus Andronicus Peacham.

In regard to the original question, I'd recommend The World of Roman Costume - nicely illustrated scholarly articles and some good photos of recreated costumes.

#27 > Gwernin, thanks, I will take a look at that.

#24-26 > My second husband was an actor, so I saw a lot of historical reinterpretations of Shakespeare. He starred in a production of Julius Caesar that toured parks and schools which was set in a mid-20th century banana republic. Worked pretty well, except for the part about Caesar's ghost. Much to his mortification, they had him come out in a union suit and a white pith helmet. Got a laugh every time.

He also did a production of Tartuffe set in the antebellum American South, which was more successful.

Other friends appeared in a Kabuki versions of Macbeth and Medea. Which lead one buddy of ours, who appeared as Duncan in Kabuki Macbeth, to do a skit in a midnight show as Kabuki Darth Vader. Worked pretty well :-)

All of these, of course, are deliberate anachronisms or revisionings of the text. I'm more curious about howlers that creep in, especially the ones that become more jarring as the years go by.

I have a book: The Roman Toga, by Lillian M. Wilson, Ph.D., published in 1924 by The Johns Hopkins Press in Baltimore, which goes into considerable detail about the Toga, as it evolved over the centuries.

Wilson writes, p. 34: "Literary references to the material of the toga are scanty, but as wool was the usual material for outer garments, there can be no doubt that the toga (in the Republican period) was a woolen garment. Its texture, as we shall see, varied.

On account of the nature and size of the toga, the fabric must always have been relatively light and flexible. Perhaps at no time during the period represented by the existing monuments (statues), was the material heavier than the lightest homespun flannel of our ancestors of two or three generations ago, while the extremely large togas were much lighter and thinner in texture."

Toga design changed over the years ... just as clothing design changes today. The "Imperial Toga" appears on statues of emperors of the century and a half following the reign of Augustus.

According to Suetonius, Augustus himself was not an extremist in dress, his togas being neither close nor full. However, the statue of Augustus in the Museo delle Terme shows him wearing an elaborate and massive garment with one end trailing on the ground between his feet, which was probably worn only on ceremonial occasions.

Wilson continues ... "The impression given by the toga is of a soft fine clinging fabric having none of the wiriness characteristic of so much of our modern textiles.

Very fine, thin and even transparent fabric became popular with foppish dressers but was condemned by the more conservative Romans and by commentators of Roman customs. Diodorus after contrasting the simplicity of early Roman life with the luxury which followed says, that in accordance with this decadence, the younger generation wore in the market place, garments which were remarkable for their softness, and which were transparent, and in their delicacy resembled womens garments."

The author completes her book by suggesting modern fabrics (c. 1924) which might be used to reproduce the toga.

"The Romans, for the most part, used wool for their togas. In order to produce effective drapery, the material used must be exceedingly pliable, and while not heavy, it must be of such texture that it will, by its own weight, fall naturally into graceful curving folds. The surface must be soft and have a moderate nap, so that the folds will tend to cling together. Fabrics having a smooth, napless surface should never be used for the toga. The Romans themselves could not have used it, since the folds in such fabric will slip out of place with the slightest movement of the body.

"Of modern textiles,soft, pliable flannel or cloth of similar texture, most nearly satisfies the requirements. The most satisfactory substitutes that the writer has been able to find are very inexpensive. One is a cheap grade of outing flannel which is more loosely woven than the better grades. it should be washed and rubbed until the loose lint on its surface is removed, and then put through a laundry mangle. The other substitute is a cheap, soft, loosely woven unbleached, or partly bleached muslin -- not the stiff heavy quality. It should also be sent to the laundry and put through the mangle. It then resembles a thin flannel and is very effective for the large togas, where the drapery should fall in many small folds. For the smaller togas, all togas draped with the heavy folded bands and for the toga of the consular diptychs, the outing flannel is more suitable. It has the extreme whiteness which, at certain periods, was very popular at Rome."

That's really interesting! You know, I always wondered how they kept the damned things from falling off.

Rood, yes, very helpful -- thanks!

Thanks, Rood! Does anyone have any information on what a philosopher's tribon looked like?

I've searched in vain for examples and good descriptions of the tribon. However, they seem to have resembled the Klamys (or chlamys), the typical "cloak" worn by Greek soldiers. Except most Greeks considered the tribon a poor-man's garb.

Nevertheless, both Socrates and Hypatia are said to have worn the tribon on occasion.

Spartan soldiers had but one item of clothing ... the tribon ... which they kept and wore until it fell to pieces. Not only did they wear them on occasion (Spartans were usually naked), but it was the only covering they had to ward off the cold of the night. The Spartan tribon is said to have been made of heavy, worn, wool. Some accounts say they were short, while other sources suggest they were fairly large in size. Perhaps it was a seasonal thing.

Google "chlamys" for examples.

N.B. By the way, I have a chlamys of my own, patterned after the version worn by Athenian soldiers. It's about one meter in width and two meters long. Like the typical chlamys it's coloured a dull red.

Thanks, Rood! I have some books that show the chlamys and will do some more research on the tribon. Care to post a picture of your chlamys?

Alas, no photo.

If you ever do find an illustration or a reliable description of the tribon ... please let us know. You have me curious, at least.

Perhaps the dearth of descriptions have to do with the Greek view that the tribon was low-class garb, and the fact that so little remains to remind us of Spartan culture, where the tribon was a common form of dress.

What do we know about Sparta that wasn't penned by someone else? Plutarch. Xenophon.