So translating to modern wages (in US/Western Europe) somewhere between $500 and $1500 for the simplest tunic, or between $7000 and $21000 for the finest quality.
That certainly puts the practice of robbers to take people's clothes into perspective.
Cloth was so valuable that the words for both the robber and the extremely valuable robes they stole and plundered share a common origin:
The prices in Diocletian's degree don't really make much sense, e.g. for 40 Denarii you could buy ~5 pounds of beef or only 8 pounds of rye/barley. So likely the price for tunics is quite a bit higher than the real market price. Based on 1st AD prices/wages a tunic cost 15 sestertii which is equal to around 3-4 days wage (a "worker" likely earned ~ 4 sestertii per day)
Something that's stuck in my mind is how prosperity in India, not that many decades ago, meant that women could wash one Sari in the river without being naked, since they now owned two.
When I see people complaining about too much "disposable" clothing, I am not impressed.
Go look at the price for a nice suit, or a designer dress. Those numbers are not terribly high.
The cost of those luxury items don't come from the cost of making them. They come from the fact that they are luxury items -- it's the exclusivity and signaling that you're paying for. For more on this phenomenon see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
Wedding dresses?
That's not entirely true, especially when it comes to haute couture. For example, clothes made by a French fashion house may take tens/hundreds of hours to make, at Western European salaries. Yes, agreed, the markup puts the cost into the stratosphere, but the point is that clothes made like this would need to cost thousands of dollars at minimum just to cover the labor (instead of the tens of thousands they sell for).
I interpreted the parent's comment of "not terribly high" as meaning not terribly high when compared to modern day clothes that take a similar amount of labor. When you think about it, the amount of manual labor that would need to go into a tunic (shearing wool or picking cotton, washing and spinning the fibers, weaving the cloth, sewing and cutting the garment) is enormous without modern day machines. The reason stuff like fast fashion today is so cheap is not just that it's put together in poor countries (though that's obviously part of it), but that the total amount of labor that goes into something like a shirt or dress is in the the ~10-15 minute range, not the 30-40 hour range.
It's not that onesided, good linen trousers are usually somewhat more free-fitting, and usually don't chafe as much as typical jeans models. But still.
Also superior water vapor exchange is superior.
Also probably the source of the "they'd take the shirt of his back" saying.
If you give someone a $20 shirt, causing yourself a little embarassment, that's not quite the same commitment to charity as giving them your $20,000 car.
That's what the phrase conveys.
How did women earn these - were linen garments a form of payment to effective prostitution?
YES: Source; Kimono.
So yeah, DIY all the way.
Dollar analysis like 'how much did X cost in a pre-industrial economy' is incredibly unsuitable for answering these kinds of questions.
The answer is - most people weren't wage workers. Most people didn't have money. Most people were subsistence peasants, and they paid taxes, rent, and for many services in goods. What money they had would usually go towards buying things they couldn't make.
Most people wore homespun. Clothing a typical Roman peasant family[1] would take ~3,000 hours of domestic labour a year - every year, most of it devoted to spinning flax. Being domestic labour, done by the family, for the family, most of it, was, of course, unpaid. Being the kind of labour that you can do on-and-off throughout the day, as you are waiting on other tasks, it was mostly done by women. [2]
[1] https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t...
There was a post on HN `2013 or so, about a wiki for instructions on how to rebuild civilization through plans to start with primitive farming equipment up through more modern equipment...
We need this.