Cloak

• 1. Introduction

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  A cloak fastens at the neck or over the shoulder, drapes to the hip, the ankle, or somewhere near mid-calf, and almost never has sleeves. That is the whole of its mechanical ambition. Yet this loose, sleeveless garment has wrapped Greek philosophers, Aztec emperors, Roman magistrates, and a Hungarian actor disappearing through a trapdoor. The word itself once meant a bell, named for the shape the cloth makes when it hangs. How did a simple sheet of wool come to signal citizenship in one society and sorcery in another? Why does the same garment that kept Aboriginal Australians warm at night also let Harry Potter vanish? And how did a piece of outerwear become the standard shorthand for spies, witches, and invisible starships? The answers live in the cloth, the language, and the stories people draped over both.

• 2. Bell-Shaped Words

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  Cloque was the Old North French word, and it meant bell. The trail runs back through Old French forms like cloche and cloke to Medieval Latin clocca, glossed as a travelers' cape and, literally, as a bell. The garment earned the name from its silhouette, the way the fabric flares outward like a bell when worn. That shared root carries a quiet surprise. Because the bell-word also gave us the device that chimes the hours, cloak is a linguistic cousin of clock. The same swelling curve that names a timepiece once named the thing you threw over your shoulders against the rain.

• 3. Badges Of Rank

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  The himation wrapped Greek men and women from the Archaic through the Hellenistic periods, roughly 750 to 30 BC. Romans later borrowed the Greek look in the pallium, a quadrangular cloth shaped like a square that sat on the shoulders much as the himation did. But Rome reserved a sharper meaning for a different garment. The toga, worn during the Republic, was a formal display of citizenship, denied to foreigners and worn by magistrates on all occasions as a badge of office. Tradition traces it to Numa Pompilius, the second semi-legendary king of Rome. Elsewhere the same logic of status held. Eminent figures in Kievan Rus' adopted the Byzantine chlamys in a fur-lined form known as the kurzno, marking the cloak as a possession of the powerful.

• 4. Cloth As Power

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  Cloth and clothing were of utmost importance to the Aztecs, and the tilmatli proved it. This Mesoamerican cloak, or cape, was worn by powerful noblemen and elite warriors of the Aztec Empire as a symbol of upper status. The more elaborate and colorful versions were strictly reserved, granted only to elite high priests, to emperors, and to the Eagle warriors and Jaguar knights. Across the world, Aboriginal Australians made cloaks serve more than display. Those in southeast Australia traditionally wore possum-skin cloaks, while those in western Australia wore buka cloaks made from kangaroo pelts. These cloaks doubled as blankets and even as drums, and their leather side was etched with personal symbols, turning a garment into a record of the person who wore it.

• 5. The Evening Drape

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  Quality is the point of the opera cloak, made from materials such as wool or cashmere, velvet, and satin. In full evening dress across Western countries, ladies and gentlemen reach for the cloak both as a fashion statement and as protection, shielding the fine fabrics of evening wear from the elements where a coat would crush or hide the garment beneath. The cut splits by convention. Ladies may wear a long cloak, falling over the shoulders or to the ankles, often called a cape, or a full-length version, while gentlemen wear an ankle-length or full-length cloak. Formal cloaks tend to hide their luxury inside, finished with expensive colored linings and trimmings of silk, satin, velvet, and fur. The garment even lent its name to the stage, supplying the title of a 1942 operatic comedy.

• 6. Cloth In Scripture

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  Matthew 5:40, in the King James Version, records Jesus of Nazareth on the subject: "And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also." The same teaching surfaces with the order reversed elsewhere in scripture. Luke 6:29, again in the King James Version, has it worded a little differently: "...and him that taketh away thy cloke, forbid not to take thy coat also." In one verse the coat goes first and the cloak follows; in the other the cloak is taken and the coat offered after. The garment sits at the center of a lesson about giving more than what is demanded.

• 7. The Vampire's Wardrobe

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  Bela Lugosi made the cloak unforgettable, and a trapdoor explains why. In the best-known stage version of Dracula, the production that first made Lugosi prominent, he wore a cloak so that his exit through a trapdoor concealed on the stage could seem sudden. When he reprised the role for the 1931 Universal Studios motion picture, he kept the cloak, and the impression was so strong that cloaks came to be equated with Count Dracula in nearly all non-historical depictions of him. The fantasy genre embraced the garment for its own reasons, drawn to the popularity of medieval settings, and tied it to witches, wizards, and vampires. Fantasy cloaks are often magical. They grant invisibility in the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling, shift color to help the wearer blend in with their surroundings in The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, and lift their owner as the Cloak of Levitation worn by the Marvel character Doctor Strange. A cloak may even nullify magical projectiles, like the cloak of magic resistance in NetHack.

• 8. Cloak And Dagger

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  A device demonstrated in 2006, albeit of limited capability, made real objects harder to detect, echoing a long-running science fiction dream. Franchises such as Star Trek imagine cloaking devices that avoid detection by making objects appear invisible, and the figurative sense of the word runs the same direction: a cloak is anything that disguises or conceals. That instinct gave English a darker pairing. Because a cloak keeps a person hidden and conceals a weapon, the phrase cloak and dagger came to mean espionage and secretive crime, suggesting murder from hidden sources. Such cloak and dagger stories are the mystery, detective, and crime tales built on that suggestion. The Marvel vigilante duo Cloak and Dagger takes its name from exactly this phrase, proof that a sleeveless overgarment still casts a long shadow over the words we use for secrets.