The Real and the Ideal in Pompeian Fashion

Abstract

The article focuses on female clothing depicted in wall paintings from Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae. A main point is to establish the semantics of costumes and colour: how do the aesthetic spaces of ‘real’ Pompeian garments worn by professional and working women in the first century intersect with ‘ideal’ garb represented in mythological and genre scenes? What do the colours chosen for clothing reveal about status and how did the ancient viewers negotiate the shifting meanings of a given hue according to context? I argue that the colours of both real and represented clothing were largely dictated by fabric, with pastel hues for silk and saturated primary hues for wool. The article proposes two interrelated colour domains, each with its particular connotations: saturated basic chromatics for everyday wear and a pastel palette for elite attire.