Overview
Egyptian dress starts before Egypt does. By the Badarian and Naqada periods, flax was being grown, spun and woven into linen, and the wardrobe that the dynasties would keep for three thousand years — white linen, wrapped rather than cut, worn with heavy ornament and eye paint — is already recognisable in outline.
Key garments and style
Men wore a cloth wrapped and belted at the waist; women a longer wrapped or slipped-on linen garment; animal skins continued alongside cloth, and leather was worked for belts and sandals. What survives best, as ever, is what does not rot: beads of shell, bone, ivory and carnelian, and from Naqada onwards faience, strung into collars and girdles.
The cosmetic palette is the period’s signature object. Flat slabs of siltstone, often carved as fish or birds, were used to grind malachite and galena for eye paint — found in graves in large numbers and across classes, so this was general practice rather than elite display. The great ceremonial palettes at the end of the period, the Narmer Palette among them, are the same object grown monumental.
Bodies themselves carry evidence. The naturally desiccated Gebelein mummies, examined with infrared imaging in 2018, were found to bear figurative tattoos — the oldest yet identified in Africa, and direct evidence that appearance was worked on the skin as well as clothed.
Transition
With unification the wrapped linen kilt and the sheath dress settle into the standard forms, and pleating, wigs and the broad collar become the apparatus of Old Kingdom rank.