Dr Bruce Winter explains the Bible’s teaching on fashion
Much of what she has said of the twenty-first century could also be said of the first century. Aspects of the world of women’s fashion were also seen by contemporaries to have ‘gone too far’.
See-through clothing had traditionally been the dress of many hetairai, the high-class prostitutes who entertained single and married men as dinner companions and later, in what was politely said to be ‘after dinners’, in that unholy trinity of eating, drinking and sexual intercourse.
Some married women were starting to wear similar provocative clothing and others were feeling the pressure to conform to this new trend.
“Never have you fancied the kind of dress that exposed no greater nakedness by being removed,” wrote Seneca, a contemporary of Paul, with his usual elegant turn of phrase to his mother in the 40s AD.
The modest married woman did not wear clothes that were transparent. Her dress consisted of many metres of material falling in folds from the shoulder. A mantle was wrapped around her dress. The top part of the mantle was draped on the top of her head for the first time on her wedding day. This was the marriage veil she subsequently always wore in public as a sign to others of her marital status.
Jewellery and hairstyles were also reflective of a woman’s virtue (or lack of it). In Greek, ‘dresses and gold’ was the standard phrase used of the accoutrements of a hetairai. Pliny recorded that ‘women spend more money on their ears with pearl earrings, than on any other part of their person’
Seneca also noted of his mother, “Jewels have not moved you, nor pearls. You have never defiled your face with paints and cosmetics.” Given the lead content in ancient cosmetics, it was a good thing she had not.
Juvenal commented on the incredibly lavish nature of first-century hairstyles:“So important is the business of beautification; so numerous are the tiers and storeys piled one upon another on her head!” The line between the appearance of the promiscuous woman and that of some wives was becoming increasingly blurred.
The result of some women having ‘gone too far’ with the latest fashion trends was that, in The Digest, Roman jurists laid down, “If anyone accosts … women [who] are dressed like prostitutes, and not as mothers of families … if a woman is not dressed as a matron and someone calls out to her or entices away her attendant, he will not be liable to action for injury.” To the outsider they were what they wore.
Dress wardens
In Greece public occasions and even pagan religious processions in honour of Demeter were supervised by officially elected women’s dress wardens called gunai-konomoi. They did not allow women dressed inappropriately to participate in these processions (especially if they were wearing transparent clothing). They had the power to destroy such items and monitor breaches of the modest dress code for wives.
Imperial icons
Imperial statues of female members of the emperor’s family were exported throughout the empire as images of modest women. They were deliberately designed to be the fashion-setters, and their modest dresses and hair styles were intended to counter new trends.
Juvenal asked, “What woman will not follow when an empress leads the way?” Certainly, those wishing to conform to the lifestyle of a modest woman imitated the imperial icons while others flaunted the dress code of the Roman matron.
Philosophical reactions
Stoic and Neo-Pythagorean philosophical schools reacted to this new brand of married woman who flaunted immodest values.
Stoic followers educated their daughters as well as their sons, the former being inculcated with the virtue which epitomised a woman: that of modesty. They demanded virtuous lives of their female adherents as well as their male counterparts.
Neo-Pythagorean documents encouraged older women to instruct the younger wives how to dress and adorn themselves so as not to follow the trends of their promiscuous-looking secular sisters. A not dissimilar concern to that in Titus 2:3-5.
The dress codes of 1 Timothy 2
1 Timothy 2:9-10 succinctly takes us to the very heart of a fashion world ‘gone too far’ in Paul’s day with a Christian reflection on dress codes. Lives adorned with modesty and good works and not a ‘come-on’ appearance were the order of the day.
The Rev Dr Bruce Winter is the director of the Institute of Early Christianity, warden of Tyndale House, and fellow, St Edmund’s College Cambridge. His book, Roman Wives, Roman Widows: The Appearance of New Women in the Pauline Communities taking up these and other themes, will be published by Eerdmans in October this year.
