Ottoman Costumes

The Study of clothes and dressing has great potential for social and culturan history. Typically Ottoman urbanies sitiuated their fellow men after a glance at the clothing worn by the latter. As to 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 İstanbul, 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.