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THE CLOTHED BODY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
17-19 January 2002

Ariane Marcar
British School at Athens

Reconstructing Aegean BA Fashions

This paper focuses on the problems of reconstructing garments known only from stylised representations found on different media.

Its aim is to draw attention to the methodological problems related to reconstructing the history of Aegean BA dress from the pictorial record alone. It is argued here that we must resolve these before we attempt to assign precise social, or ceremonial functions to specific garments, or attempt to create replicas of garment types found in Aegean art.

Having briefly looked at the present state of Aegean BA costume research and highlighted the interpretative limitations imposed by our incomplete understanding of Aegean artistic conventions, I will:

1) Present the evidence I have gathered regarding garment construction. I will emphasise that in order to propose replicas, one not only needs to have established a firm garment typology, one that has examined garment variability, origin and distribution in detail, but one needs a sound understanding of the intricacies of tailoring.

2) Leading on from this, I will propose a basic set of principles for replication.