Ancient Dress History Vol 1.

They can be tiny, they can be big, they can be sophisticated, and they can be daring. Dresses have become such a huge part of our culture that we cannot imagine how we would feel like without them. You’d be interested to learn that most dress types had very humble beginnings, and you would be surprised at where it all started from.

Officially, the very first dress that was ever recorded is the Tarkhan Dress that was worn in the region of Egypt. However, there is some information about those magnificent pieces having been worn in the very beginning of humanity as people were forming tribes and developing their hunting instincts. This is not really confirmed by history though because, and to no surprise, there was no “history” as we know it back in the day, so nothing was really documented.

Mesopotamia

The next place where the dress appeared was Mesopotamia. Mostly, the garments were made of wool, mixed together with sheepskin, as those used to be the preferred materials that the ancient people could spare to make clothing off of. Interestingly enough, the Mesopotamian people were the first ones to introduce embroidery to dresses. They were quite innovative indeed!

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Ancient Egypt

Because of the hot climate, Egyptian dresses weren’t the most elaborate, As you can imagine, every additional bead can get heated and make it incredibly hard for you to survive the summer days, especially so when you have 60 of them touching your skin at all times. Garments were means for covering up and weren’t as elaborate as we’d like to think. Typically, they were made out of linen fiber to keep the ladies cool. The royalty didn’t really have to be exposed to the sun though, and most often than not, they enjoyed beautiful beaded dresses with lots of ornaments or worship on them.

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Minoan dresses

The Minoans really cared about their garments. They dyed them in a myriad of colors to make them appear nicer. They also embroidered them with beautiful beads.

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Greek Dresses

And this is where the dresses really became a shiny beacon. Quite literally. The Greeks loved dying their dresses so much that there was barely any pure white ones to see around. What a jump in time!

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The Etruscans and Romans were also documented as serial dress-wearers, however, their crafting of the garments was similar to the Greek ones, hence why they are just briefly mentioned in this post.

Would you like to learn more about the history of the dress? We will time-travel to medieval times in our next blog post. And in the meanwhile, do let us know if you have any more ideas you would love for us to write about in the comments down below.