Fustanella have also influenced the evolution of the fustanella based on statues of Roman emperors wearing knee-length pleated skirts (in colder regions, more folds were added to provide greater warmth). Folklorist Ioanna Papantoniou considers the Celtic kilt, as viewed by the Roman legions, to have served as a prototype. Sir Arthur Evans considered the fustanella of the female peasants (worn over and above the Slavonic apron) living near the modern Bosnian-Montenegrin borders as a preserved Illyrian element among the local Slavic-speaking populations. In the Byzantine Empire, a pleated skirt known as the "podea" (Greek: ποδέα) was worn. The wearer of the
Sybil Connolly peasant skirts. She made one skirt out of men's linen handkerchiefs, and in 1954 a summer dress out of striped linen tea towels, called the "Kitchen Fugue", leading her to be praised by Bazaar as someone with an "intuitively facile hand". Perhaps her most distinctive contribution to fashion was pleated handkerchief linen – as worn by Jackie Kennedy in the official White House portrait – it took up to nine yards of Irish linen handkerchiefs to create one yard of the uncrushable pleated fabric that she pioneered. Designs were created in Ireland, and Connolly employed up to 100 women, mostly