I know it would depend on the culture and time period, but I’ve often wondered how an ancient civilization would consider our modern, western style of clothing.
It came up when I was telling my wife about how Minoan statues had women dressed very distinctively; layered dress, cinched waist, and in particular, bare breasts. I jokingly mentioned to my wife that I, as a modern western man, found that style of dress very provocative and sexy for obvious reasons My wife joked back maybe they emphasize their boobs so much to make up for having unattractive facial features
I know the Minoan civilization is thousands of years old, and there’s no way to know for sure if women there wore these dresses with their boobs hanging out (vs it just being the attire of their snake goddess, or hell maybe it was just as provocative to then as it was to us “Cyrix, the boob lady finding 2 snakes statutes are selling well, make more!”
Based on our reaction to the attire of ancients, it’s fun to think about what their perceptions of us might be. Fabrics with mysterious texture and origin (synthetics), dyes they’ve never seen before, body parts frumpily covered/ shamefully UNcovered, etc.
I suppose the ancients would be surprised that we wear highly decorative utilitarian clothes, but I’m sure humans used feathers, fringes, beading, and all sorts of other decorative techniques in their clothing when they could afford it.
Heinlein’s take:
[QUOTE=Time For The Stars]
Take female style, for example — look, I’m no Puritan, but they didn’t dress, if you want to call it that, this way when I was a kid. Girls running around without a thing on their head, not even on top … head bare-naked, like an animal.
It was a good thing that Dad hadn’t lived to see it. He never let our sisters come to the table without a hat, even it Pat and I were the only unmarried males present.
[/QUOTE]
One interesting question could be what form of modern dress would be the least shocking or unusual to ancients. Obviously, you’d also have to consider which ancients we are talking about, since the Greeks might have had some fashions that Persia or Egypt might have considered odd.
They were. Probably until well into modern times, you carried your money (all coins, of course) in a coin purse that, judging from fifteenth and sixteenth century paintings, you kept tied to your belt line. You might carry a dagger or sword, but that had its own scabbard, also hanging from your waist. And what more did you need than your coin purse and sword?
Okay, there are exceptions, surely, to just about any general rule. Still, the general rule is, historically, that pants are not worn by civilized people at all, and much more rarely by women. If I erred in making too broad a generalization, you err also in making too broad a dismissal. “Not true” should, instead, have been “Only partly true.”
There are also some civilizations that wear (or wore) pretty nigh to nothing at all, and those people wouldn’t be amazed by modern swimwear.
(The Hawaiians of 1750 would be amazed at how much clothing women wear at the beach!)
You could also, if you were a woman, wear that purse/belt inside your clothing and in front; there would be slits on the sides of the skirt, covered by its folds, which let you reach the purse without taking it out. Think of them as pre-nylon fannypacks. I’ve long been curious as to whether the invention of pockets was a matter of thinking “hmmm… I could just put a sort of bag sewn to those slits…” or the first pockets were in a different kind of clothing.
As the ancient joke goes:
Guard: “you wore the money in a bag inside your skirts and you never noticed the thief’s actions?”
Woman: “Oh, I did, but I thought he was just being friendly!”
My wife joked back maybe they emphasize their boobs so much to make up for having unattractive facial features 