@ileolai:# WHY DOES AZIRAPHALE LOOK LIKE HES BEEN FED THRU A WOODCHIPPER THO # LIKE HIS CLOTHES ARE JUST SHREDDED # IN CLOSER SHOTS YOU CAN SEE WHAT LOOKS LIKE HASTILY SEWN ON PATCHES # MEANWHILE CROWLEY IS READY TO POSE FOR AN EDITORIAL
Due to a wildly misspent youth, I can actually answer this one! The answer is that they’re actually BOTH dressed for a Vogue editorial - the difference is that Crowley’s actually up-to-date and is wearing expensive clothing for the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean, while Aziraphale’s wearing expensive clothing for the nomadic Ancient Near East.
Aziraphale’s overcoat looks so ragged and patched because it’s lots of tanned skins sewn together - you can see it better HERE. He’s wearing the same linen clothing with golden beads at the neck that he wore in Mesopotamia three thousand years ago, but he’s added the skin coat and a turban. More skins = more animals. More linen = more work. Along with the gold, a very long tunic, a long coat (WITH SLEEVES), and a turban of a lot of material all indicate that Aziraphale is dressed very expensively, but very expensively for a Canaanite nomad in 3000 BCE. However, by 33 CE, the major indicator of wealth wasn’t the amount of material being used in clothing: it was the dye the material was coloured with. We think of black being a minimalist, ascetic colour, but right through to the Middle Ages, black was one of the most expensive clothing colours because of the sheer amount of dyes used to achieve it. Crowley’s veil and sash in particular are a deep black - that’s a large amount of dye that’s being used! (Crowley’s veil is also very sheer, meaning it’s either very fine linen or even silk, which was around in the West at this point but was desperately expensive) The difference between Crowley and Aziraphale in this scene is actually demonstrated by my very favourite Biblical mistranslation. Genesis 37:3 reads, “Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age: and he made him a ketonet passim.” This phrase is only used twice in the Tanakh, here, and to describe Tamar’s clothing in 2 Samuel 13:18-19. More importantly, this is the only use in the Torah.
From context, we know that this item of clothing was special. In the English-speaking word, this is the “coat of many colours”, the “amazing technicolour dream coat”. But passim is more likely to mean “to the extremities” (i.e. hands or ankles), thus meaning a long coat, or a coat with sleeves. JUST LIKE WHAT AZIRAPHALE IS WEARING.
When the Torah was being translated into Greek in Alexandria in about 250 BCE (the Nevi'im and the Ketuvim are translated later, often using whatever precedents for rare words were set by the translators of the Torah), the translator comes across this rare adjective, and thinks, “Fucked if I know what that means.” And they know from context that this coat is special and expensive, and they live in a world in which colour and dye are the main things that makes clothing special and expensive, so they write in poikilos (multi-coloured), and move on to the next sentence.
tl;dr: Both Crowley and Aziraphale are well-dressed in the Crucifixion scene, Aziraphale’s just out of fashion by two or three millennia.
I cannot believe that the costumers– knowing, surely, that only a miniscule fraction of the audience would be able to appreciate it– went through the trouble of ensuring that, true to form, Aziraphale was dressing wildly out of date.
…Both of them are dressed in MENA typical clothing. Dye and embroidery were status symbols in the MENA. It’s more accurate to just say that Aziraphale is dressed according to older standards and Crowley is dressed to newer ones. While the dye thing could be influenced by Rome, we developed our own modes of fashion outside of it, and we used similar dyes (including expensive ones) because we live around the same ocean.
In fact Crowley is dressed really weird if they were going for a Roman look: his veil is smaller than typically seen and as such is draped more similar to a modern Iranian woman might drape it (I’ve seen women with this EXACT kind of scarf in modern Iranian photography) than a Roman woman. For a Roman her veil is basically a large cape/shawl that could theoretically be used as a blanket. He’s wearing a long garment that reaches his feet, which in Rome is an indication of high status and femininity. In southwest Asia and North Africa that’s just practical- even poor people typically have had a garment with long sleeves and long hem just for the sake of protection from the elements.
He’s also not wearing a Roman over dress, which would be very common for a wealthy woman because it indicated citizenship. Naturally if you subscribe to the theory that he’s meant to be Magdalena in this scene, that’s fine, but I’m pretty sure a lot of sex workers didn’t wear a palla. Technically nothing stopped them, but it was connected to ones “virtue” iirc, just like the over dress.
His garment is also very similar to his Mesopotamian one, and might be the same one or a copy meant to show time has passed and it’s been modified. That garment was also Black. Crowley always wears black as his main color in the series, which makes me heavily doubt the costumers thought about dye cost. If they did then he should also be wearing other colors, like purple (fancy person color but not actually restricted to royalty I think), possibly tapestry woven into medallions and trim and stitched onto his clothes, though that’s later Roman and specifically became its peak in beauty in the hands of Copts who made it their own thing. They could’ve also just had it be red or orange since he wears those accents more often, and it would make sense as yellowy colors were somewhat associated with West Asia in Rome and madder is common there too. There should be stripes, patterns, and/or embroidery- that definitely symbolized wealth if it was up to a certain quality, and did in the SWANA region for awhile but that is also due to Indian influence from imported fabrics.
TD:LR; Rome isn’t a big influence here and I hate that a certain breed of classicists have influenced people to mistake so many SWANA clothes as being Greco-Roman. Apologies FYI for not using Roman terms, I’m only familiar with their fashions in passing abd in relation to Egyptian fashion history, and I had to double check to make sure I wasn’t saying anything horribly inaccurate.
Edit: as an aside there are plenty of poor people today who wear black traditional clothes in the MENA. I know the industrial revolution probably impacted that but at first glance crowley looks like he’s lazy for not embroidering his clothes.
