Romanian traditional clothing
Today, the vast majority of Romanians wear modern-style dress on most occasions, and the garments described here largely fell out of use during the 20th century.
[1] The seven main traditional regions are: The Romanian popular costume finds its roots in the part of Thracian, Dacian and Getae ancestors and resembles that of the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula, of course with differences consisting of decorative and colourful details.
[4] Portraits of the founders provide important information about the type of material of which were made the pieces of the port and about elements of tailoring, decor and chromatics.
Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, votive paintings on the walls of churches reserved for the country's rulers and nobility hypostasiate a wider range of donors.
In Codex Latinus Parisinus, written during 1395–1396 by Paulus Sanctinus Ducensis, a military engineer of King Sigismund of Luxembourg, besides portraits of knights and footmen appear described ancillaries of the army: craftsmen, cartmen, and fishermen.
Diaries of foreign travellers, particularly those of Antonio Maria Del Chiaro Fiorentino (secretary of Italian language of Constantin Brâncoveanu) and officer Friedrich Schwanz von Springfels contain rich information about the garments of Romanians: ladies, patronesses and peasant women wore identically tailored shirts, distinct being only the methods used for decoration.
[5] In the context of building the national conscience, beginning with the mid-19th century there was a process of standardization and idealization of the Romanian port, in order to distinguish it from surrounding ethnic groups.
After World War I, the popular clothing generalized across traditional communities remains just in the everyday life of the older generation, becoming a ceremonial vestment.
The ițari are typical for Moldovans and represent a pair of long peasant trousers that were sewn from țigaie (a special breed of sheep wool) and had a length of 2 m, but being narrow, they were crimped on the leg from ankle to the knee.
The cioareci are peasant pants of white woollen cloth (dimie, pănură or aba) woven in four threads, therefore thicker than the ițari.
Romanian: Opinci are made of a single rectangle of cow, ox or pig hide gathered round the foot in various ways.
The suman is a long peasant coat, a cold weather garment, worn by both sexes, usually knee-deep, in white, cream, brown, gray or black woollen cloth (felt), decorated with various găitane.
They were normally tailored rough at home by the poor or by special suman makers from strips of shrunk woven boiled wool cloth, processed in water-powered fulling-mills known as "vâltoare".
Fur hats are made by furriers and are most often black, although white căciulă are worn in parts of Banat and grey in central and north Moldova.
Felt hats with hard upturned brims – cu găng – were worn in Crișana, Hunedoara and Bukovina following a fashion of the gentry.
Green "trilby"-style hats worn by Romanian border guards and mountain corps are still found in Pădureni and other areas today.
The three-part decor code of this pleated shirt is almost always the same: in addition to the upper arm embroidery, the altiță (derived from Serbian ла̏тица), there is a single horizontal row on the sleeve, known as increț, and diagonal stripes below the armpit and shoulder, the râuri.
[12] The fotă has several names, according to the ethnographic region: pestelcă (in Muntenia), opreg, vălnic and zăvelcă (in Oltenia), catrință or cretință (in Moldova), păstură and zadie (in Transylvania), peștiman (in Bessarabia).
In Muntenia, the stripes are replaced by compact woven decoration or heavy geometric embroidery, covering the whole surface except for the area which is overlapped in the front.
