Ceremonial Clothing in Western Cultures - Death

Death

See also: Mourning dress

The dead are honored with a funeral and often a reception or a wake following. Anyone attending the funeral is expected to wear black or at least sombre or drab-colored clothing. A widow may wear a black veil over her face.

Following the funeral, family and friends now resume their normal clothing. This is a modern innovation. Until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, relatives were expected to wear mourning for periods that varied depending on the closeness of their relation to the deceased. The rules for mourning wear were strict and complicated. They may only have been observed in their entirety by the wealthy with money and time for a course of mourning that started with black clothing, progressed to grey, then violet, and ended with the wearing of colors again. The poor might just wear a black armband over their regular clothing as a sign of mourning.

Mourning bore heaviest on the widow. In many Mediterranean countries, she might wear black for the rest of her life. In England, she wore a cumbersome outfit called widow's weeds: an all-black dress surmounted with a widow's cap trailing a long black veil.

Read more about this topic:  Ceremonial Clothing In Western Cultures

Famous quotes containing the word death:

    “for it is not so much to know the self
    as to know it as it is known
    by galaxy and cedar cone,
    as if birth had never found it

    and death could never end it:”
    —Archie Randolph Ammons (b. 1926)

    “It is a strange, strange fate, and now, as I stand face to face with death I feel just as if they were going to kill a boy. For I feel like a boy—and my hands so free from blood and my heart always so compassionate and pitiful that I cannot comprehend how anyone wants to hang me.”
    —Roger Casement (1864–1916)

    “We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.”
    —Philip K. Howard, U.S. lawyer. The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, pp. 186-87, Random House (1994)