Dr. Mary Harlow: Female Dress at Rome: Getting it Right

The primary sources for dress in ancient Rome are documentary, literary and visual. These are complemented with archaeological findings which, although often fragmentary, give real context to the images produced by the written and visual sources. As with many aspects of women’s lives in antiquity, we lack a female voice in the question of clothing and fashion, but we have a surfeit of male opinions about what women should and could wear. Roman moral codes are often framed around the dressed and undressed image of women, and we have little idea of how far women might have bought into or rejected/played with these images. This lecture will examine the realities of wearing the Roman female wardrobe, and discuss how we might investigate a woman’s point of view when making clothing choices. This lecture is a part of our Digital Lecture Series on Dress, Adornment and Vestimentary Codes in the Ancient Mediterranean World. The aim of this series is to investigate vestimentary codes in ancient cultures, and to