Hipparchia chose the cloak.
A wealthy young woman of Maroneia refused every suitor and threatened to kill herself unless she could have Crates. She put on the same cloak and lived with him in public.
Hipparchia is why Cynicism cannot be filed as a men's club, and the sources treat her as a scandal rather than an exception. Diogenes Laertius gives her a section of her own in Book VI, notes that she went to dinner parties with her husband — which respectable Athenian wives did not — and records a philosopher at one of them trying to humiliate her by pulling at her clothes. Her brother Metrocles was a Cynic first; she chose the life anyway and gave up the wealth and the marriage market that came with her birth. The tradition also says she and Crates had children and raised them the same way, which is the one point where needing nothing meets a dependent who needs something.
She fell in love with the discourses and the life of Crates, and would not pay attention to any of her suitors, their wealth, their high birth or their beauty.
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers VI.96, R. D. Hicks translationBook VI gives Hipparchia her own section — one of very few women treated as a philosopher in her own right in the Lives.
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