Dressing, attire, beauty care

Apparel makes a man

In the past, social position and wealth were expressed by jewellery made from white limestone, spondylus shells, or clay in the Neolithic era, while from copper and gold in the Copper Age. Due to the rising aesthetic, hygienic, and cultural standards in the Bronze Age, the importance of beauty care increased, as reflected, for example, by the appearance of bronze razors. Clothing pins, later brooches, sewn-on ornaments, pendants, braid rings, bracelets, and diadems indicate the growing importance of apparel among (primarily) elite men and women. Diverse textile stamps were used in the Carpathian Basin in the Scythian Period to decorate the body and the clothes. Celts were especially conscious about their appearance: men wore colourful clothes, cloaks and trousers fastened with brooches, while women had headscarves, shirts, and skirts, and completed their looks with bronze bracelets and armlets. Glass beads are also an Iron Age invention that made necklaces more colourful than ever before.

Sarmatian women favoured bead-embroidered garments for almost two centuries; the beads were usually sewn on the bottom part of the clothes. Anthropological analyses have also revealed that embroidered attire was a privilege for older women in the first place.

Migration Period people had sophisticated aesthetics accompanied by high standards and an elaborate toolkit for grooming, remains of which are frequent additions to graves of women: rouges and other paints in small cosmetic jars, a personal grooming kit with an ear wax spoon and tweezers, a mirror, and a comb. Avars of eastern, steppe origin were the first men in the Carpathian Basin to wear earrings. Later, Magyar (Hungarian) conqueror men and women wore garments lavishly adorned with gilded silver mounts probably made (at least partially) from the silver of the coins they obtained in looting campaigns throughout Europe.