Handwork and Handicrafts - Waldorf Research Institute

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It is a complete lack of an imaginative sense for dress. We should not see
anything of an ideal nature in this tendency, but rather a lack of fantasy, of
any sense of beauty. For clothing is actually meant to make the human being
beautiful, and to see beauty only in the naked body would mean that the
instinct of our age is a materialistic one. 13
The Art of Clothing in the Past and in the Future
Plate 10
Let us consider the development of the art of clothing from yet another point of
view. If we study the clothing in the centuries before and after Christ, taking note of the
purely formal element constituted by the lines—that is to say, with special reference to the
horizontal and vertical, and to symmetry and asymmetry—we can be struck by the fact
that the clothing of preChristian times displays no marked symmetry in relation to the
central vertical line of the body, nor does it place any special emphasis on a vertical line
in the dress. We do not mean by this an emphasizing of the vertical direction through an
expressive folding of the material itself—the plissé—which appears on ancient Babylonian
signet cylinders (Plate 10, fig. 6) from the time of the Ur Dynasty (about 2300 bc)—or
in single cases, such as the Attic female statuette in the Berlin Museum. Nor do we mean
the central vertical line determined by the closing of a garment, or by some other practical
consideration, as with the Ethiopians, whose garments are in any case too asymmetrical
towards the upper part. 14
For present purposes we are concerned with an emphasizing of the vertical by
means of some kind of decoration, for example ribbons sewn on, or embroidery; just as the
horizontal can be indicated by the sewing on of narrow ruffles, as we can see on the ancient
Babylonian signet cylinders (figs. 1, 3, 6) and in other early works of art (figs. 2, 4, 5, 7, 8,
9). It is interesting in this connection to observe how the forms in architecture and clothing
are related; for example, the step pyramids or step towers 15 and the flounced skirt. Compare
also the headgear of the Cretan figure (Plate 10, fig. 2) with the Tower of Samarra (fig. 2a),
which was built in the spirit of this ancient period. This Cretan figure also illustrates the
tendency among the ancient people to emphasize “roundness” in clothing in imitation of the
rounded forms of the human body.
Strict symmetry of right and left, from the neck down to the feet, appears in
antiquity only in individual cases; for example, in the above-mentioned Attic figure, or in
the “Hera of Aegion in Achaia.” Asymmetry is the general rule, as we also find it is in the
clothing of the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans.
Before we consider in more detail the garments of the Greeks and Romans, we should
like to quote a remark of Steiner’s concerning the fundamental difference between Greek and
Roman dress: