Ottoman Costumes: From Textile to Identity

Eren, 2004. paperback. Very Good. 0x0x0. 2004 Eren (Istanbul, Turkey), 6 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches tall trade paperback in color pictorial covers, copiously illustrated with color and black-and-white photographs and artwork, 336 pp. Slight soiling, rubbing and edgewear to covers. On bottom of rear cover, price label from Turkish bookstore. Otherwise, a very good copy - clean, bright and unmarked. ~SP25~ [2.0P] The study of clothes and dressing has great potential for social and cultural history. Typically Ottoman urbanites situated their fellow men after a glance at the clothing worn by the latter. As to the women, such conclusions were more difficult to draw, as all females were to be modestly covered up and ideally almost invisible. Yet in practice, at least from the eighteenth century onwards, it was often possible, at least in Istanbul, to distinguish fashionable from soberly pious women. To be aware of people's modes of dressing thus was part of knowing one's way around in Ottoman society. Contents: Introduction, or why and how one might want to study Ottoman clothes; The historiography of costume: a brief survey; Furs and skins owned by the Sultans; Female costumes in late fifteenth-century Bursa; The place of dress in pre-modern costume albums; Dress codes in the Ottoman Empire: the case of the Franks; Whose laws? Gendering the Ottoman sumptuary regime; clothing the 'uncivilized': military recruitment in Ottoman Yemen and the quest for 'native' uniforms, 1880-1914; Undressing the Albanian: finding social history in Ottoman material cultures; How did a vizier dress in the eighteenth century?; Ottoman kaftans with an Italian identity; Ottoman influences in Western dress; A sartorial tribute to late Tanzimat Ottomanism: the Elbise-i Osmaniyye album.