ABSTRACT
Modern clothing design is a rich, emerging subject for classical reception studies. Many pieces from the late eighteenth through the twentieth centuries have conjured up the look of clothing on ancient art, as Harold Koda’s Goddess: The Classical Mode (2003), one of a handful of works on the subject, has shown. What is especially interesting about Greek dress as an instance of modern cultural production is its complex negotiation of temporality and theatricality. Greek-inspired dress rests at crucial, unstable junctures. Like all modern designs, it tends toward obsolescence, yet as something classical it is linked to both historically located and timeless Greece. It is semiotically marked for performance, yet, as everyday dress, requires some degree of unmarked casualness. This chapter studies the case of Eva Palmer Sikelianos, who fashioned herself by weaving Greek-style dresses for both performances and everyday wear. This chapter probes the contents of papers and materials in the Jacques Doucet Bibliothéque Litteraire, Benaki Museum, Smithsonian Archive, and the Center for Asia Minor Studies to follow the course of her creative work and its relationship to other related experiments in archaeological replication. Before designing her well-received Greek costumes for the Delphic Festivals of 1927 and 1930, Palmer developed an experimental method of replicating visual clues of dress from ancient art. More crucial, she made her body an allegorical vessel of Greek freedom, breathing, moving, posing in, and advocating hand-woven creations. She was probably the most ardent promoter of Greek dress in her day, arguing that upper-class Greek women should weave straight-lined creations as an antidote to crypto-colonialism. By following the threads of Palmer’s arguments and the rather complex responses to her dress in both Greece and the United States, the chapter explores the connections between classicism, women’s bodies, and the chronological paradoxes of the certain strains of modernism that saw the youth of the world in antiquity and argued that the future depended on reanimating and occupying the ancient past.
