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Clothes serve the basic function of protecting the naked body from the elements while preserving modesty by concealing those parts which society prefers to leave to the imagination. However, a quick glance down any high street shows that clothing, or more particularly fashion, also sends out clear social signals indicating such diversities as financial status, aspiration, occupation and even religious persuasion. The businesswoman, the student and the young mother may be wearing variants of the same shirt and skirt but differences in style and cut will be apparent to the most casual observer, while the individualistic punk dressed in torn plastic and bondage chains is wearing a uniform as indicative of group membership as the habit worn by the nun. Just as a modern Egyptian peasant woman can glean many accurate facts about a stranger by observing and analysing subtle variations in dress-style which pass unnoticed by the uninitiated western observer, so we can assume that the dress of the ancient Egyptian woman conveyed a wealth of information to her contemporaries. Unfortunately, without the cultural key necessary to decode the message we are unlikely to extract anything more than the most obvious inferences from any study of Egyptian fashion.
At first sight the Egyptians have provided us with a great deal of evidence for a study of their clothing.6 We have a little written information, a few surviving garments and numerous statues, engravings and paintings which combine to provide an illustrated catalogue which may be used to chronicle changing styles throughout the dynasties. However, there are certain problems inherent in relying on this representational type of evidence. By their very nature the illustrations tend to depict the upper echelons of society recorded under atypical conditions. Just as today people prefer to be photographed in their best clothes, we must assume that those affluent enough to be recorded for posterity would choose to display their most elaborate or formal costumes. Clothing shown in depictions of the Afterlife may have had an additional ritual significance which is now lost to us. Given the strict conventions of Egyptian art it is highly likely that the artist chose to depict traditional or stylized garments indicative of femininity rather than those actually worn, and in many cases the subtle nuances of female dress may simply not have been recognized by the male artist who would have painted the majority of his portraits from memory or from a pattern book rather than from a live model. In fact, basing a discussion of garments solely on the types of evidence described above may well be analogous to basing a discussion of contemporary western styles on a collection of formal wedding portraits and ultra-fashion haute couture photographs taken from the pages of Vogue. Nevertheless, and despite inaccuracies in depiction, the clear message which reaches across the centuries from the tomb walls is the sheer delight with which both women and men pose to display their finery. Certainly clothes were important to the Egyptians.
Linen was the material most often used in dressmaking. Cotton and silk were both unknown in Egypt before the Graeco-Roman period and, despite the farming of large flocks of sheep, woollen clothes were apparently rare in pre-Roman times. Herodotus, who was the first to mention this aversion to wool, supposed that it must have been a ritual avoidance as ‘nothing woollen is taken into their temples or buried with them as their religion forbids it’; his theory was echoed by Plutarch, who noted that ‘priests, because they revere sheep, abstain from using its wool as well as its flesh’. However, it seems far more likely that woollen garments were relatively uncommon because of a scarcity of good-quality wool; the rather bald Egyptian sheep which were bred principally for their milk and meat were evidently unsuitable for full-scale wool production. Archaeological evidence is now beginning to indicate that Herodotus may have been writing under a misapprehension, and that although people preferred to be illustrated in their traditional linen garments, woollen clothes might have been a great deal more common than has been supposed. There is certainly no contemporary evidence for a strict taboo against wearing wool and, while linen is certainly an appropriate material for clothing in a hot climate, being both lightweight and comfortable to the touch, the warmth of a woollen shawl or cloak would have been much appreciated on a chilly winter’s evening.
Although it is relatively easy to dye woollen cloth successfully, linen requires a specialized two-stage dyeing process to make the new colour permanent. For a long time it was thought that, despite their obvious skills at the loom, the Egyptians had never developed the technology necessary to dye their linen. The few women who were depicted wearing coloured frocks with bright blue, red and yellow patterning were therefore interpreted either as foreigners or as servant girls dressed in imported foreign clothes. Egyptologists are now beginning to question whether, just as the popularity of woollen garments may have been seriously understated, the availability of dyed cloth has also been underestimated; certainly several dolls with gaily painted dresses have been recovered from working-class graves, indicating that multi-coloured and cheerfully patterned frocks were far more common than has ever been supposed. Whether these were dyed linen dresses or dyed woollen dresses is now not clear. White or off-white always remained the standard colour for all formal clothing, and the garments illustrated in tomb paintings are invariably bright white.