[Discussion] PUBL.: Ottoman Costumes: From Textile to Identity

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

From: Muhittin Salih Eren <eren@tnn.net>

NEW PUBLICATION

Ottoman Costumes - From Textile to Identity
Edited by Suraiya Faroqhi and Christoph K. Neumann

Ottoman consumption history is a field that has been worked only
intermittently. In consequence, studies of subfields such as costume are
also comparatively rare, especially when it comes to those items worn by
people outside of the sultans' palace. Yet the study of clothes and
dressing has great potential for social and cultural history: as in many
societies before the mid-twentieth century, Ottoman urbanites expected
to be able to judge from the clothing of a man which walk of life he
belonged to. As to the women, the situation was somewhat different, as
all females were to be modestly dressed and ideally, almost invisible.
Yet in practice, at least from the eighteenth century onwards, if not
earlier, it was often possible, at least in Istanbul, to distinguish
fashionable from soberly pious women. Moreover in the case of the
former, the knowledgeable observer may have been able to tell who was
well-to-do and who was simply interested in clothes. To be aware of
people's modes of dressing thus was part of knowing one's way around in
the Ottoman world.

But clothes were not only part of the order of society on the local
level, enforced, as far as the individual person was concerned, by
relatives and neighbours.  In addition the Ottoman state took a major
interest in regulating the public appearance of its subjects. This
involved differentiating between the adherents of the empire's varying
religions by means of clothing. At the same time, particularly but not
exclusively in the nineteenth century, unification of costume among
public officials and military men was another state concern.Official
regulation of costume, enforced or merely attempted, thus should be
studied as part of the image that the Ottoman bureaucracy, with the
sultan at its head, wished to project concerning its own position in the
world.

CONTENTS
Introduction, or why and how one might want to study Ottoman clothes
Suraiya Faroqhi

The historiography of costume: a brief survey
Odile Blanc

Furs and skins owned by the Sultans
Hulya Tezcan

Female costumes in late fifteenth-century Bursa
Suraiya Faroqhi

The place of dress in pre-modern costume albums
Leslie Meral Schick

Dress codes in the Ottoman Empire: the case of the Franks
Matthew Elliot

Whose laws? Gendering the Ottoman sumptuary regime
Madeline C. Zilfi

Clothing the uncivilized: military recruitment in Ottoman Yemen and the
quest for native uniforms, 1880-1914
Thomas Kuehn

Undressing the Albanian - Finding social history in Ottoman material
cultures
Isa Blumi

How did a vizier dress in the eighteenth century?
Christoph Neumann

Ottoman kaftans with an Italian identity
Louise W. Mackie

Ottoman influences in Western dress
Charlotte Jirousek

A sartorial tribute to late-Tanzimat Ottomanism: The Elbise-i Osmaniyye
album
Ahmet Ersoy

* Published by Eren Press
336 pages, 51 black-white and color illustrations. 16.5 x 24 cm.
Paperback version: $30.00 + $7.00 for P&P (Credit cards accepted)

Copies may be ordered from:
         EREN Press
         Tunel, Istiklal Cad.
         Sofyali Sokak 34
         Beyoglu-Istanbul / Turkey
         Tel: +90-212-251 2858 Fax: +90-212-243 3016
         e-mail: eren@tnn.net