Often saved and passed down from generation to generation, wedding dresses are a key means of understanding fashion traditions in different cultures across time and geographies.
Dress of the eighteenth century is not without anachronisms and exoticisms of its own, but that singular, changing, revolutionizing century has become an icon in the history of fashion.
In the absence of any surviving clothing, art and literature provide the only evidence of classical dress, opening a Pandora’s box of confusion and contradiction.
Although components of Hellenic attire have appeared throughout Western fashion’s 600-year history, it is only from the 1790s to the 1810s that classicized forms are embraced as the prevailing mode.
Greek vase painting and traces of paint on ancient sculptures indicate that fabrics were brightly colored and generally decorated with elaborate designs.
The richness and variety of the costumes represented in ancient Greek art are often the result of simple manipulations of the three basic garment types: the chiton, the peplos, and the himation.
