Kim Bowes: observation

Transcript context

…What were your clothing options like then? Say you’re part of the empire, at or near its peak. What should you buy in terms of clothes? How would it be made? How would you get it? Who would ship it where? We used to think that everyone just made their own clothes, Little House on the Prairie style. Now we know that’s not true from some new archaeology. We can see standardized weaving. We can see people, even really poor people, getting clothes from actually quite a long distance away. You would probably get your clothes, if you lived in a rural village, from whoever the local weaver is. If you lived in Rome, I bet your clothes might even come from sheep in Gaul, which are then woven either in Gaul or somewhere in between and shipped to the capital. You’re probably not making your own clothes, which was a surprise to all of us, I think, and you’re wearing and keeping and having a lot more clothes than we ever thought. Since you asked before about Jewish households, we have some great Jewish evidence for what constitutes the absolute bare minimum of clothes that anyone needs to have. We used to think it was a tunic and that was it. It turns out to be at least two or three tunics, two or three cloaks, and a whole range of undergarments, and socks, and a whole bunch of other things, and they were colorful. Even poor people had clothes that were purple stripes and yellow stripes and all kinds of different patterns. I think we would be surprised, actually, at how colorful and well dressed and variegated people’s clothing were, and their shoes. They had the most extraordinarily elaborate shoes. Anyone of your listeners who has a trip to England planned, go to Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall up in the north and look at the collection of Roman shoes. Extraordinary different styles for men, women, and children. This is the frontier of the consuming society. In your view, parts of Europe, the wealthier parts, maybe did not reattain Roman standards of living until what, the mid-18th century?…

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