Overview
When the Mycenaean palaces fell they took the writing system, the administration and the organised textile industry with them. What replaced them is the plainest dress in Greek history, and the sources for it are correspondingly thin: no documents, few images, and mainly the metalwork that survives in graves.
Key garments and style
The garment is a rectangle of woollen cloth wrapped round the body and fastened at the shoulders with pins — the ancestor of the Doric peplos, made without cutting or sewing. It is the exact opposite of the fitted, tailored Minoan and Mycenaean dress that preceded it, and the change is a real one rather than a gap in the record.
The evidence is largely the fasteners. Fibulae — safety-pin brooches — and long straight dress pins are among the commonest objects in Early Iron Age graves, and their numbers, positions on the body and increasing elaboration are how the garment is reconstructed at all. Small Geometric-period bronze and terracotta figures supply the outline. Weaving returned to the household: loom weights are found in ordinary houses, not in palace workshops, which is the whole economic story in one artefact.
The poverty is relative rather than absolute. By the later Dark Age, graves such as those at Lefkandi show gold, faience and imported goods, so some households were dressing well before the Archaic revival proper.
Transition
In the Archaic period this wrapped-and-pinned garment is refined into the Doric peplos and joined by the lighter, sewn Ionic chiton, and Greek dress becomes a system with alternatives in it.