clothing: how a person is dressed, taken as a whole outfit rather than as one particular garment
Greek had plenty of words for individual pieces of clothing. This one names the whole look: what a person has on, taken in all at once, the way you size up a stranger across a room. It is not the cloak someone owns (ἱμάτιον), and not the tunic worn underneath it (χιτών), but the overall dress, and it shows up where a writer wants you to picture how somebody appeared.
That is why it never stands alone. In every one of its seven verses a describing word rides along with it, and the describing word carries the point:
- clothing that flashed like lightning on the two men who met the women at the empty tomb (Luke 24:4)
- white clothing on the two men who stood by at the ascension (Acts 1:10)
- bright clothing on the visitor who appeared to Cornelius (Acts 10:30)
- splendid clothing that Herod draped over Jesus in mockery (Luke 23:11)
- royal clothing that a later Herod put on to address a crowd (Acts 12:21)
- bright clothing on one man entering a meeting and shabby clothing on another (James 2:2)
Two settings account for all of them. In three, the clothing marks someone as coming from God, and the men who wear it are described in terms of light. In the other four, it marks a person's standing among other people: a king's robes, a mock king's finery, a rich visitor's good clothes beside a poor visitor's worn ones. James builds a whole argument on that second use, because the gathering he describes sizes both men up by nothing but what they walked in wearing.