Men would have never gotten away with quite that much excess in their appearance. Every basically middle-class, well-off woman in Imperial Rome had at least four slaves who were trained just to work on her hairstyles. The women of Rome, Imperial Rome, exploited all of the easy slave labor that they had around.

And then once Rome becomes the world power under imperial Rome in particular, women again assumed the kind of leading role in being leaders of fashion. These very simple draped tunics, very unstructured. In Greece, at least in Republican Greece, there’s a fair amount of equality between the sexes in terms of the simplicity of garb.

And so all of that kind of flourish and fanciful self-adornment was really much more associated in Crete with women. They also wore high-heeled shoes for the first time. They wore kind of hoop skirts which we would see later in the courts of Europe in the 16th, 17th, 18th Centuries. So, the women of Crete wore the first skirts, and in fact their skirts were very structured. And it’s fascinating there were all kinds of firsts. That was a civilization that flourished in the 2nd Millennium B.C., and the really notable clothing there was the clothing that women wore. For instance, some of the earliest documented costumes in most costumes histories were those that were worn in Crete. And that introduced us to what we now know as fashion with these constant cyclical transformations of what we expect to see worn.Ĭaroline Weber: Women have been pretty much been in the forefront of what we could talk about as costume. So it was really in the 12th Century that the nobles in this very refined and elegant court started trying to distinguish themselves by constantly changing the shapes and silhouettes and styles of their clothing. Before that period, for instance, in the classical era in Crete, ancient Greece and in ancient Rome, the basic shapes of the garments that the people wore didn’t change from century to century.

But it was also a way of showcasing their taste and this was related to a rediscovery of Aristotle and conceptions of beauty that Thomas Aquinas reformulated for the Middle Ages.

So women would have different kinds of gems covering their bodices and their gowns, different sorts of head gear, hair styles, make-up. That was really the first place where, with any remarkability, the nobles who lived at that court started changing their costumes very frequently in order to show off their prestige and their wealth. That concept really began in the 12th Century at the Burgundian Court of Philippe Labelle. Fashion in our modern sense really can be understood most simply as, changing modes of clothing, meaning that there is something that is in fashion and something that is out of fashion. Caroline Weber: Well, to talk about the history of fashion, it’s actually helpful to define what fashion is first.

Queen of Fashion by Caroline Weber