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promise to be oneof the last of these kind of posts-rome hbo
#61
Quote:Some of the textiles are really bad. The Roman Senators and Equestrians didn't have to wear coarse materials, they had spinners and weavers who could make really fine wool cloth.

Grrr...that bugged me too. No one seems to understand that pre-industrial textiles were for the most part, far better than anything we have today.

None of the women main characters had outfits that were anywhere near correct. They went to great lengths to do decent hairstyles and then put them in crap dresses. The slaves in the background had decent outfits tho'.

The other thing to remember is that COSTUME designers are not costume HISTORIANs and if they do try to do things historically accurate, they usually get trumped by the production designer who wants things to be more "fantastical" as in bigger and bolder not more fantasy-like. They did do some nice touches like the red boots for the senators and putting Cato in a black toga without a tunica. I would have liked to have seen the off-duty soldier wear their belts with their dangliums.

And enough with the antiquing!! Please people, it was NEW back then thus their gear would have been shiny and in good condition.

At least no one was in birkenstocks or teevas. That really cheeses me off.

But overall, I think the series did a nice job of recreating Rome. Sure it wasn't 100% historically accurate but it did give you the flavor of how things were. The curses, the plays, the graffiti, eatting door mice and goat's testicles, nice touches. The episodes wove together well and the acting was superb. I wasn't expecting a historical documentary but as a historical drama, it's one of the best ones out there.
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Deb
Sulpicia Lepdinia
Legio XX
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#62
" No one seems to understand that pre-industrial textiles were for the most part, far better than anything we have today. "

Really? I would have thought that machine looms could use much finer thread, and weave it more tightly than hands could weave any home-spun, even that of professional spindlers. Not my field, though.

rkmvca/rich klein
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#63
Quote:Really? I would have thought that machine looms could use much finer thread, and weave it more tightly than hands could weave any home-spun, even that of professional spindlers. Not my field, though.

Machines could probably duplicate historical textiles but there really isn't any demand for it. There are bolts of Egyptian linen found in tombs which are finer than any linen today, mainly because no one uses fine linen today. I've also seen dresses from the 1700s with hand-loomed fabric that is woven so tightly, it doesn't unravel when you cut it. People didn't used to hem garments because the fabric didn't unravel. If you've got 10 yards of material in a a medieval dress, no one is going to care that you have a few threads hanging out. Plus with that amount of yardage, your outfit isn't going to frey enough to make a big difference. The daggings that you see in sleeves like scalloping, castellations (squares) or foliation (looks like leaves) were also to help prevent the fabric from freying and unraveling.

There is such a demand for cheap clothing that most manufacturers cut back on the thread counts and consequentially, people expect to throw out their clothes after a season. Compared to the fabrics that were made 100 years ago on machine looms, the stuff we have today is crap.

So in hand-weaving times, if you were going to spend the time weaving, you were going to make the best fabric that you could so it wouldn't wear out as fast. Nubby, slubby, unevenly woven, or loosely woven fabrics would have been considered poor quality. Plus the clavi on the togas and tunicas would have been woven in as stripes, not applied later. I know it's hard to find wool with the correct stripes these day but at least the costumers could have tucked in the edges or finished them off so they didn't look raw. That would have been a sign of old clothing and no one of upper class would ever want to be seen in public in old clothes.

Also, the neck slits were probably made in the weaving process so the edges would be finished off like selvedges (the sides of a bolt of fabric as opposed to the ends where it is cut) so they wouldn't unravel or frey that badly as well.

If you have a chance to go to a really good fabric store that caters to the fashion industry or coture markets, take the opportunity. Compare the $10/yd wool with the $100/yd wool or the $20/yd linen with the $100/yd linen. There is a huge difference in the drape, feel, and quality of the fabric. The handweavers were consistently producting fabrics of the $100+/yd fabrics like we have today instead of the cheap bargain bin stuff that people associate with "handwoven".
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Deb
Sulpicia Lepdinia
Legio XX
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#64
Very interesting, thanks for the reply.

rkmvca/rich klein
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#65
Back to "Rome" for a sec ...

We are far from the only group to complain about historical inaccuracies in movies; check out this thread about the upcoming movine "Flyboys" (Lafayette Escadrille in WWI) on a Flight Simulator board:

http://agw.bombs-away.net/showthread.ph ... post772344

At least the movie did put out an interesting (if self-serving) "movie vs history" paper:

http://www.mgm.com/flyboys/pdf/real_vs_reel.pdf

@Lepidina -- another reason for the relatively poor quality of modern fabrics might be the prevalence of Central Heating in Europe and America over the past century or so. The dense weaves of earlier times were no doubt very helpful in retaining warmth when you were in houses that were unheated much of the time. I recall when I was a kid listening to my grandparents talking about having to crack the ice from the top of their washbowls in the winter. Then again, maybe this one of those, "10 miles to school, and uphill both ways!" stories. These days though we can crank up the thermostat and wear short sleeve shirts in winter.

rkmvca/rich klein
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