Overview
The regal period is the thinnest-documented stretch of Roman history, and almost everything said about its dress is inference: from Etruscan tomb painting and bronzes, from a handful of archaic finds, and from later Roman writers describing an origin they could not check either. What can be said with confidence is that the garment Rome made its own was not invented in Rome.
Key garments and style
The wardrobe is wool and simple. A tunica — two rectangles seamed at the shoulders and sides — served as the basic garment for everyone, and over it the wealthy wore a large draped wrap. That wrap developed from the Etruscan tebenna, a rounded mantle worn by Etruscan magistrates and shown repeatedly in their tomb paintings; in Roman hands it grew larger and more strictly semicircular and became the toga.
Two other Etruscan borrowings stuck to Roman public dress for the whole of its history: the purple border that marked office and, later, freeborn boys, and the curved-back calcei worn by magistrates. Roman writers themselves credited these to the kings and to Etruria, which is unusually candid about a foreign origin.
Transition
Under the Republic the toga hardened from elite mantle into legal costume: the garment a Roman citizen was entitled to wear and, at certain moments, obliged to. Its cut and bulk went on growing for centuries, until it became too unwieldy for anything but ceremony.