Ottoman Costumes

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.