TUNIC SIZES

[M. Demetrius]

Speaking only as a person who makes clothing, not necessarily a historian, bias cut cloth must be cut from much wider material than that cut with the weave. Experiment with the largest rectangle you can cut from a sheet of typing paper, when the new rectangle is cut at 45 degrees to the paper. You'll be wasting about as much cloth as you get, and to make a tunic, with a horizontal measure say of 45", you'd need a piece of cloth better than 72" wide, by around the same length. Cloth being hand woven at that time, it would be prohibitively expensive for average people to afford a simple garment. Most clothing was made with rectanglular pieces of cloth, because that's the way it came off the loom.

Obviously, things like the curved edges and odd shapes of a toga were exceptions, but they were very expensive. Still are.

I'm not saying they didn't do it, just that if they did, they'd be weaving cloth more than twice as large and costing about twice as much per piece of fabric if they intended to use it on the bias.

Bias cutting in modern clothing allows for the cloth to be curved on a seam, like for a neck facing, or casing around some hem or other. But to sew two bias cut pieces together and keep a long seam straight is a lot more trouble than some might think.

(If you cut, you're a cutter. If you weave, you're a weaver. If you sew, are you a sewer?)