Where's the Aberration?

I've been doing more thinking about the information from Nørre Sandegård Vest, particularly the information suggesting that the Scandinavian apron dress of the Vendel and Viking period may have been a kind of uniform reflecting the woman's status and affiliation with a particular "tribe"  and not an individual fashion choice.

The picture that is emerging of relative uniformity of apron dress colors and and accompanying jewelry over time reminds me of is late (e.g., 18th through early 20th century) period European folk costume. Dresses and overdresses in this era, such as the bunad, tended to be limited to particular styles and colors among people living in a particular region, and tended to differentiate between married and unmarried marital status.  Perhaps the Vendel/Viking apron dress was a garment reflective of married women's status, that varied in style primarily depending upon the region in Scandinavia in which the woman was living. (Tortoise brooches, in contrast, seem to have evolved into standardized patterns that appeared wherever "Viking" women settled.)

The suggestion that Scandinavian women's costume changed little from the Vendel period through to the end of the Viking era raises another question. I've read scholars (names are not coming to mind right now) who suggest that fashion, as we know it--i.e., short-term social trends affecting the appearance of individualized outfits--did not appear in Europe until the 15th century and is not typically found in other parts of the world until after their first contact with Europeans. In other words, what we think of as "folk costume" is typical of clothing changes before the age of "fashion", and the invention of "fashion" is an abrupt aberration from the pattern of slow, status-oriented clothing style change that was the norm for most of recorded history.

All of this idle speculation will be knocked into a cocked hat, of course, if it turns out that the apron dress finds that have been analyzed so far are not  "typical." But right now it is easier to assemble a picture of apron-dress wearing Viking women as flaunting a "tribal" affiliation as their descendants would do with later-period folk dress than to match the existing finds to an image of Viking fashion as based primarily upon individual expression, in the manner of Renaissance European clothing.   I suspect that we eventually will have enough finds to be able to say, with as much confidence as is possible about the distant past, that Viking women likely wore similar dark blue or brown apron dresses with stylistic differences characteristic of the region in which they lived, or something similar. When that happens, I guess I will have to find another use, or another home, for all of the red, orange, green, and pastel apron dresses I have made.