ABSTRACT
The sizing-up of the philosopher's cloak by Christians spanned a range of positive and negative attitudes and reflected the complexities of participating in ancient educational contexts. This chapter examines Christian attitudes towards the tribn, focusing on verbal and visual representations of the garment. In his classic work, Systme de la mode, the French theorist Roland Barthes presented a semiotic analysis of dress and fashion in which garments could be interpreted as 'signifiers' in a 'vestimentary code'. This code, conditioned by social, cultural, and historical assumptions, provides a profuse, though not limitless, array of significations that can be ascribed to garments and their wearers. These significations can be delimited to varying degrees by transforming the real garment into what Barthes called 'image-clothing' or 'written-clothing'. Image-clothing' is the visual representation of a garment, as in a drawing or photograph.
