Fashion in Ancient Rome: The History of the Clothes and Jewelry Worn by the Romans

More completely than almost any people before or since, the Romans turned clothing into a legal and political language. Far from being worn simply because they were warm, fine, or fashionable, clothes were a statement about where an individual stood in Rome’s rigid social hierarchy, and that hierarchy very much enforced itself through fashion, sometimes with codified laws. A boy wore one thing and a man another, and the day he changed clothes made him a citizen in the eyes of the state. A senator's shoes differed from a knight's, both differed from what an ordinary citizen put on his feet, and everyone could see the difference at a glance. A candidate for office whitened his toga so aggressively that the practice eventually lent its name to the office he sought. A general who triumphed wore a costume borrowed from a god, albeit for a single day, guarding against the suggestion that he might want to keep it. Even the color purple eventually became something a private person could be executed for wearing.

This was not an accident of taste, because Rome built a society obsessed with status and visible markers, and clothes represented the primary identification. The toga, in particular, carried a weight of meaning that no other garment in the ancient world approached – it was inconvenient, expensive, difficult to wear, and impossible to work in, yet the Romans clung to it for close to a thousand years precisely because its uselessness was the point. A man in a toga announced that he was a Roman citizen at leisure, engaged in the business of public life rather than in labor. Virgil gave the Romans the phrase gens togata, “the people of the toga,” and the poet was not describing what Romans wore around the house. He was very much describing what they thought they were.

Given the incredible expansion of the Roman Empire, it’s little surprise that ancient Roman artifacts of all kinds have survived to document the extent of Roman fashion.