page_title: Clothing in ancient Rome
section_title: Stola and palla
hierarchical_section_title: Clothing in ancient Rome / Formal wear for citizens / Stola and palla
caption_attribution_description: English: A female torso. Part of a former colossal-type Roman sitting statue sculpted in a provincial workshop. Español: Un torso femenino. Parte de una antigua estatua sedente romana de tipo colosal realizada en un taller provincial.
context_page_description: Clothing in ancient Rome generally comprised a short-sleeved or sleeveless, knee-length tunic for men and boys, and a longer, usually sleeved tunic for women and girls. On formal occasions, adult male citizens could wear a woolen toga, draped over their tunic, and married citizen women wore a woolen mantle, known as a palla, over a stola, a simple, long-sleeved, voluminous garment that hung to midstep. Clothing, footwear and accoutrements identified gender, status, rank and social class. This was especially apparent in the distinctive, privileged official dress of magistrates, priesthoods and the military.
  The toga was considered Rome's "national costume" but for day-to-day activities, most Romans preferred more casual, practical and comfortable clothing; the tunic, in various forms, was the basic garment for all classes, both sexes and most occupations. It was usually made of linen, and was augmented as necessary with underwear, or with various kinds of cold-or-wet weather wear, such as knee-breeches for men, and cloaks, coats and hats. In colder parts of the empire, full length trousers were worn.
context_section_description: Besides tunics, married citizen women wore a simple garment known as a stola (pl. stolae) which was associated with traditional Roman female virtues, especially modesty. In the early Roman Republic, the stola was reserved for patrician women. Shortly before the Second Punic War, the right to wear it was extended to plebeian matrons, and to freedwomen who had acquired the status of matron through marriage to a citizen. Stolae typically comprised two rectangular segments of cloth joined at the side by fibulae and buttons in a manner allowing the garment to be draped in elegant but concealing folds. 
  Over the stola, citizen-women often wore the palla, a sort of rectangular shawl up to 11 feet long, and five wide. It could be worn as a coat, or draped over the left shoulder, under the right arm, and then over the left arm. Outdoors and in public, a chaste matron's hair was bound up in woolen bands (fillets, or vitae) in a high-piled style known as tutulus. Her face was concealed from the public, male gaze with a veil; her palla could also serve as a hooded cloak. Two ancient literary sources mention use of a coloured strip or edging (a limbus) on a woman's "mantle", or on the hem of their tunic; probably a mark of their high status, and presumably purple. Outside the confines of their homes, matrons were expected to wear veils; a matron who appeared without a veil was held to have repudiated her marriage. High-caste women convicted of adultery, and high-class female prostitutes (meretrices), were not only forbidden public use of the stola, but might have been expected to wear a toga muliebris (a "woman's toga") as a sign of their infamy.
caption: Roman marble torso from the 1st century AD, showing a woman's clothing
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