A Time For Fashion: Ephemeral Modernities, Neoclassical Politics, and Pompeian Women

For writers from Charles Baudelaire to Giles Lipovetsky, notions of ephemerality, of an ever-increasing pace of change, have linked the concept of fashion with that of modernity. Fashion is doubly temporal, defined equally by fleeting shifts in visual and material manifestations and by its constitution of a momentary now. Such a focus begs a question: when does fashion start? In the absence of printing presses and mechanized processes, can the term fashion apply?

By means of explorations of the media through which early fashion theorists encountered ancient Mediterranean dress practices, this paper advocates a paradigmatic shift, one that acknowledges the artificiality of temporal borders in order to reframe the terminologies applied to dress practices in the ancient Mediterranean. Using Room 5 of the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii as a lens, the paper explores the ways in which the material record of Pompeii deviates from Hegelian expectations, presenting the range of styles and materials available to and worn by women in late first century BCE Italy. The paper contextualizes the depicted dress in Pompeii through reference to contemporary Latin texts, suggesting that viewers more familiar with shifts in shape that partially characterized fashions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may overlook distinctions in color and material at the heart of shifting Roman styles. The paper concludes by interrogating terminologies, both ancient and modern, applied to Roman dress, proposing that ancient fashion is not only possible, but present.