Travel Without Clothes!
I've just been reading Homer
on the plane back from Paris. Arriving with many bags that required anxious
waiting, lugging, and shoving, I found myself wishing that modern clothing
habits were a bit more Homeric.
Since the
Odyssey recounts a journey in many stages, with several other trips
contained in it, Homer describes many arrivals and departures, often at
princely houses. In Homeric times as now, a luxurious welcome involved a bath,
food and drink, entertainment, and a comfortable bed for the night. Unlike now,
however, it involved new clothes, too. At the time Homer wrote about, clothing
was a household supply, like a wine cellar full of casks or many herds of
cattle and coops of chickens. Guests would use the clothes the way they used
the food, wine, water, fuel, and service.
Reading about Telemachus' trip to Sparta to visit Queen
Helen and King Menelaus, for example, you realize that he brought no luggage at
all, except gifts for his hosts. When he arrived, he was stripped, washed,
oiled, and freshly dressed from head to foot in garments woven by the lady of
the house and her servants. His own were presumably cleaned and absorbed into
the household--no word from Homer on this. The same thing happened every
evening throughout his stay, and he left for the next stage of his trip, also
carrying only gifts, dressed in whatever his hosts had last given him to wear.
He could expect to be reclothed by whomever he visited next.
Homeric
clothes were often elegant. Elaborate patterns, some of them with narrative
scenes, might be woven into fabrics of great finesse, their finely spun fibers
dyed in strong and subtle colors. Women did all this work, and they did it
unceasingly for their households, which could become famous because of it, if
the mistress of the house was a talented fabric designer and had skilled help.
For clothes, they wove the cloth in person-sized widths and lengths--no cutting
off the bolt--and garments were created by draping, pinning, or wrapping them
onto the body. Sometimes two pieces were sewn up the sides and across the
shoulders, with slits left for head and arms, to be slid on and belted or
sashed--very basic, a few sizes would drape to fit all.
The most famous clothing drama in the
Odyssey begins with Odysseus washed up on a beach, naked and half-dead,
on the island of Aeaea. The goddess Athena, his watchful patroness, soon
arranges to get him saved and sent onward. She prompts the island's Princess
Nausicaa to cajole her father into letting her drive a year's worth of dirty
clothes all the way down to the water's edge in a big ox-drawn wagon, to spend
the day with her maids washing and drying them on the beach, right where Athena
knew she would find the shipwrecked Odysseus.
Reading
about this, you realize that laundry could be so large and rare a project only
because the palace was supplied with hundreds and hundreds of available
garments, along with hundreds and hundreds of sheets and blankets, and kept on
making more. The princess wanted the laundry done right now, though, because
she hoped to find a husband soon, and the family would need clean clothes and
bedding for possible marriage feasts. A handsome, stranded stranger would be
certain to capture her interest, too. Those gods left nothing to chance.
All goes as planned, and the princess gives Odysseus a suit
of the family clothes, now clean and dry. Then she tells him how to find the
palace and how to approach her royal parents to ask their help, not liking to
present him as somebody she had picked up on the beach. But when Odysseus
appears alone as a needy traveler before them, the queen narrows her eyes:
And just where did you get those clothes you have on? The queen
recognizes garments she had designed and woven herself. Nausicaa had forgotten
to allow for the artist's long-term proprietary knowledge of her own work.
That
sounds familiar enough, since we're used to the distinctiveness of designers'
ideas and craftsmen's pieces. What seems alien is a particular garment being
always linked with its maker but not with a particular wearer. In a world
without textile or clothing markets, each piece of weaving was like a family
meal or a home performance of music, available to anyone present but the
property of no one person, never bought or sold, always identified with the one
who had created it inside that house. Except in times of war or pillage, it
changed hands only as a gift.
Since most garments were plain rectangular
pieces, being well dressed meant having an attractive personal style--draping
your cloak in a novel fashion, sashing your waist with particular flair. When
Homer wants to dwell on the perfections of dressed persons, he mentions the
dash with which their clothes are worn, unless the point is the beauty of the
fabric and who had woven it. Often the poet has a guardian deity adding more
dash after the person is fully dressed--refining the coiffure, improving the
facial expression, and sprinkling extra grace over the frame.
Ordinary
clothes in the modern world are even now approaching a certain Homeric sameness
in their basic shapes, with individual appeal added by the wearer's own style.
You can see the ideal in the Gap ads: A T-shirt and denim pants just sit there,
until a supple person slides into them and strikes a cool pose. The more
fantastic grow the evening gowns on the runway, the more uniform grows the garb
of the crowds on the subway. Mass-market pants and shirts and jackets are
everywhere much the same, and suggest interchangeability; outstanding effects
arise from interesting fabric or a terrific-looking wearer.
What contemporary travel needs to become truly convenient
are updated versions of Homeric households. You get to a hotel room in your
travel-stained sweater, shirt, and pants, and drop all these down a chute. You
shower, slip on the robe provided (this part we already have), and then, in the
cupboard, you find stacks of pants and shirts and sweaters, maybe a wrap-skirt
or two and some jackets, all in many colors and all in your size, since you
e-mailed the information ahead with your reservation. You dress afresh in your
choice of these, have dinner, spend the night, dress anew in the morning if you
like, and check out. On to the next hotel, same story. Eventually you get home,
carrying no bags, wearing some clothes you can add to your own collection as
souvenirs of your most recent stay--ready, of course, to offer them to your
next houseguests in exchange for theirs.
If somewhere on your travels
you find you suddenly need a really good suit for the day, that would be
arranged, like a rental car, or added as an extra hotel service. The hotel
would deliver the desired ensemble to you (along with the indispensable
needle-and-thread person and the right shoes) and would return it after you had
checked out. At posh hotels with posh connections, supplies would be high-level
and instantaneous. Nonposh ones would put you in touch with the nearest agency
for a more modest range of products. You'd have to invoke your own gods for the
requisite charm.
Underwear didn't exist in
Homeric times, and women didn't travel, except for goddesses who flew through
the air. For my scheme to work, certain questions, I admit, need more thought.
But the thought of traveling without packing, except maybe for a tiny computer
and a tiny camera, has a powerful charm of its own. Some might even take a
sketchpad instead, or a paperback volume of Homer.
