Steiner's view that human dress arises to protect and to adorn, and that adornment makes the colours and forms of the astral body visible outwardly.
Clothing and the Astral Body in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account, given in the workmen's lecture of GA 352 (A Spiritual Scientific View of Nature and Man, 1924), of why human beings dress at all. Steiner separates two streams. One stream is mere protection against cold and weather, which he calls the philistine in clothing. The other stream is adornment, and adornment exists to make the supersensible visible. Earlier peoples sensed their astral body as colour, so they clothed themselves in red, blue, or feathers to externalise it, and they shaped dress to resemble the group-soul that held the tribe together. The Roman toga, the ritual vestment, and the sun-medallion all belong to this adorning stream. Modern materialistic dress, the trouser-tube and grey-on-grey suit, has lost the connection. The native chakra zone for this theme is the sacral, the seat of etheric and astral life-forces.
Clothing and the Astral Body names Steiner's teaching that dress is born from two distinct needs. Protection answers the cold, but adornment answers the spirit. When older peoples sensed the coloured, supersensible astral body within them, they made garments to reveal it outwardly, and they shaped that dress after the group-soul of their tribe. The toga, the ritual robe, and the medallion are remembered traces of this knowledge.
In Steiner's Own Words
The ancient Romans and Greeks still knew that when they go around showing their naked bodies, it is not the whole human being, but there is a supersensible body. They imitated this supersensible body in their toga, and so they formed the toga. In this way, the Romans wanted to recreate the supersensible body. The toga is nothing other than the astral body. And in the artful folds of the toga, the powers of the astral body came to light.
What it Means Today
Steiner did not leave this idea as theory. He turned it into a working art of dress at the Goetheanum, the anthroposophical centre in Dornach, Switzerland. In 1921 the sculptor Edith Maryon tried to model eurythmy gestures in three dimensions, and Steiner judged the result unsuitable. So in late 1922 he sketched a different solution: the thirty-five wooden eurythmy figures, flat painted forms in which each gesture wears a precisely coloured veil. The veil is the point. Its undulating colour expresses the feeling that moves through the soul, exactly as the older toga had expressed the astral body in its folds. These figures, gathered in the published volume Eurythmy as Visible Singing (GA 278), instruct costume designers to this day, and Waldorf and eurythmy stages still dye veils to soul-mood rather than to fashion.
Thalira synthesis: The eurythmy veil is the toga reborn for a self-aware age, a garment that no longer copies a remembered group-soul but consciously paints the living movement of the astral body in real time. Where the ancient adorner inherited a colour, the modern eurythmist chooses one, and that single shift, from instinct to deliberate gesture, is the whole distance Steiner traces between archaic dress and a spiritual culture of clothing yet to be built.
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