What Clothes Do We Die In?
Burial clothes speak less to the taste of the dead than to the living’s attempt to script dignity, purity, or intimacy onto a body that has already slipped away.
Hindu Rites of Cremation at Kathmandu’s Pashupatinath Temple, 2019. Photographed by Tyler Roney. Available via Travelogues. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
We rarely discuss burial clothes. Mourning attire dominates that strand of the macabre imagination. We reach for the veiled Victorians or Jackie Kennedy’s austere elegance at Arlington. While Jackie may have worn different shoes the next day, the ‘best for last’ principle remains curiously underconsidered on the other side of the lid. Across cultures, the clothing of the dead reflects not just variables of taste, but negotiations between ritual, theology, social class, and the living’s need to reconcile themselves with a body that has ceased to be a person. Overall, sartorial codes of burial dress often tell us less about what the dead liked to wear and more about what the living believe the dead should be.
The Western ‘Sunday Best’ and (the Illusion of?) Continuity
In the West, burial clothing often stages an illusion that the deceased might, at any moment, rise from the casket in utmost decency and attend a family wedding. A tailored suit, a silk dress, hair fixed just so—funeral directors have noted the common request to dress as they were in life (Tegeler Monument). Dressing the dead as though they are still socially legible also neutralises the awkwardness of their transformation into lifelessness. On the contrary, Walter Benjamin claims, “Fashion stands in opposition to the organic. It couples the living body to the inorganic world” (Benjamin 102), and nowhere is that clearer than in smoothing death’s wrinkles with an iron and a pressed collar. In more recent years, some families have rejected formality in favour of intimacy, burying relatives in pyjamas, football jerseys, or one’s favourite cardigan (In Valhalla). In place of public identity or rectitude, this choice favours private attachment, the preservation of domestic persuasions over traditions of ‘social righteousness.’
Judaism, Islam, and the Egalitarian Shroud
In Jewish and Islamic burial traditions, the dead are wrapped in white, and simplicity reigns. ‘Tachrichim’ in Judaism and ‘kafan’ in Islam, these are garments without pockets, ornaments, or tailoring (In Valhalla ). This burial dressing rejects eminent presentation, focalising the alternative integrity in the stripping away of self; to be put to rest as a body equal to all others, and to return to earth without the hierarchical bearings of clothes. Performing two functions, the white shroud signals ritual purity and enforces egalitarian attitudes. In a society otherwise organised by visible status markers, their meaning lies in the absence of distinction. These rites sustain a theological teaching that you leave the world in precisely the same fabrics as the poorest stranger in the grave next to you.
Hindu and Buddhist Rituals: Colour as Cosmology
Hindu cremation rituals often clothe the dead in white cotton, the colour of purity and detachment, but there are notable allowances for certain life circumstances. An unmarried woman may be dressed in red or yellow, hues that carry distinct symbolisms in Hindu cosmology. Red, associated with fertility, auspiciousness, and the energy of life, acknowledges her interrupted passage through the expected life cycle. It marks the vitality that was never transposed into marriage. Yellow, linked to sanctity and knowledge, situates her as spiritually elevated (Tegeler Monument, 2022). Buddhist traditions, meanwhile, often favour plain white robes or the deceased’s own minimalist clothing. In Theravāda contexts, the robe is a final affirmation of monastic principles, to be stripped of material attachment until the very last moment, even as one is being most materially attended to (My End).
While it’s out of our hands, it’s worth giving the last outfit some thought. It’s impressive how, in any case, the clothes we die in always say something about the world we left behind. Whether the world we knew thought of us as souls in transit, or as compost for a greener future (with eco-burials being all the rage at the moment). Whatever it may be, it could be worth putting in a good word now.
