Outward Appearance versus Inward Significance
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- ISBN 9781614911272
- Weight: 1164g
- Dimensions: 178 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 18 Aug 2025
- Publisher: Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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This volume takes a multidisciplinary and comparative approach to dress studies in the ancient world. Spanning a wide geographic spectrum, from the Near East and North Africa to the Mediterranean world and the Americas, it explores the cultural, social, and political significance of attire. It engages the reader in a debate about the cross-culturally developed role of dress in construing and projecting various identities.
Clothes are often considered mundane, yet they play a crucial role in people's lives beyond mere bodily protection. The meaning of a piece of clothing changes the moment it is worn, as it becomes associated with its wearer. Because attire can demonstrate affiliation with a particular religious, ethnic, or political group, it serves as an important means of constructing self-identity and plays a vital role in social acculturation and assimilation. To understand what clothing reveals about the ethnicity, beliefs, social rank, profession, gender, or age of the wearer, one must examine its sociocultural context and the nonverbal language it conveys.
Essays by experts from a range of disciplines, including art history, anthropology, archaeology, classics, Near Eastern studies and conservation, approach the subject from different perspectives, apply varied methodologies, and draw on a diverse array of primary sources, including artifacts, iconography and texts, to offer a nuanced understanding of the clothed self in ancient societies. This book will be of interest not only to experts in dress studies but to everyone interested in the cultural anthropology of dress and fashion.
Aleksandra Hallmann is an assistant professor at the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw). Her research focuses on dress studies, ancient textiles and the art and archaeology of Egypt in the first millennium BCE.
