Mourning clothes
Mourning clothing is the traditional clothing that relatives wear after a death in the family as a symbol of mourning . Participants in a funeral ceremony usually also wear mourning clothes.
Type and color of the mourning clothes
Already in ancient times it was the custom to signal sadness by wearing special clothes and their color. In Central European and North American cultures, since the 19th century at the latest, care has been taken to ensure that the color of clothing is black or at least very dark, because black in the western world symbolizes death , among other things . In other countries and at other times, other colors of mourning came and still do, for example in Europe in the past not only black but also white . In Asia and in Buddhist countries , among other places, white is still the color of mourning. In ancient Egypt , the color yellow was considered a sign of mourning. In the African region there is usually no typical mourning clothing.
In European village areas, mourning clothing was worn until recently and is sometimes still today for very specific, conventionally fixed periods of time, depending on the degree of relationship. When a spouse died, a year of mourning was often considered appropriate, especially for widows. In southern Europe, for example in southern Italy or Greece, widowers traditionally wore black until the end of their lives. For example, after the death of her husband , the British Queen Victoria wore only black clothes for 40 years at her own request until the end of her life, in order to signal to the outside world the deep mourning for the deceased. Headgear, veil and gloves are traditional components of European mourning clothing for women.
In traditional folk costumes, a distinction is made between different forms of mourning clothing:
- Full mourning clothing (completely black, up to six weeks after death)
- Half mourning clothing (black with white accessories , until the first anniversary of death)
- Mourning clothing (black with white accessories, from the first anniversary of death)
In the Hessian town of Schwalm , for example, all the villagers, including the children, switched to mourning clothing when the first war-related death occurred in the community. This so-called national mourning was still used in part during the Second World War . But also outside of the traditional folk costumes, with bourgeois clothing in the city, the wearing of mourning clothes in the above-mentioned form, i.e. decreasing depending on the elapsed period, was recommended in the 1950s, but was no longer generally accepted.
A black often - as a further sign of mourning is - about to uniforms armband as a so-called black armbands worn.
Basically, wearing mourning clothes is less common in Germany today than in the past. Often black clothing is only worn on official occasions, for example at a funeral or other commemorative event, while this was previously also practiced in everyday life and a too early transition to normal clothing was considered inappropriate.
See also
literature
- Brunhilde Miehe: Staying true to the traditional costume, studies of the last regional forms of clothing in Hesse. Bad Hersfeld 1995: Verlag Brunhilde Miehe Haunetal
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Erna Horn : High School of Lifestyle, Kempten 1954.
- ↑ Italians against Germany with black ribbon , welt.de, June 27, 2012.