Ottoman Clothing and Appearance

From the fourteenth century to the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, clothing combined shirts, trousers, robes, headgear, shoes and ornament for different settings. The choice of garment and fabric could answer practical needs while also making rank, wealth, occupation or religious community visible. A woman’s layered robe, a courtier’s silk kaftan and an official’s nineteenth-century uniform belonged to different moments and uses.

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Garments and layers

Ottoman men’s outer dress could combine baggy trousers with a matching kaftan, a long robe that crossed over the front, or a sleeveless vest. Women wore related forms, generally with more layers, more tailoring and smaller patterns. A short jacket or second robe could be added according to the wearer’s means, weather and occasion.

An entari was a robe worn over a gömlek, or shirt, and şalvar, loose trousers. An eighteenth-century entari in the Metropolitan Museum was held closed at the front by a sash. Its side seams opened near the waist, revealing the trousers and shirt underneath, while its long sleeves opened at the elbow so the extra length could fall away from the arms. Triangular inserts widened the front of the robe. These details show how a garment’s cut arranged its layers and allowed the wearer to manage its sleeves and openings.

The surviving entari is made of embroidered wool with silk and metal-wrapped thread, and its edges carry small sequins. A nineteenth-century silk entari from Turkey has pockets near the side slits and was later relined with gold-colored fabric.

Fabric, rank and court dress

Silk was used for garments and furnishings, and Ottoman examples often combine large stylized patterns with shimmering metallic threads. Court-controlled workshops in Istanbul, in present-day Turkey, made cloth of gold and silver for palace clothing and hil’at, robes of honor given to courtiers and foreign ambassadors. Bursa, also in present-day Turkey, supplied luxury velvets and silks to domestic and export markets. Other Ottoman silk textiles and woven patterns show the range of these materials.

A mid-sixteenth-century kaftan-back fragment in the Metropolitan Museum preserves a peacock-feather pattern woven in costly silver-wrapped silk. The museum identifies it as part of a ceremonial robe worn by a sultan or high-ranking official. At court, the clothing rules described for this textile barred foreigners, non-Muslims and people of low standing from wearing cloth of silver. Rank also determined what service members received: a vizier, the sultan’s senior minister, might receive three robes, several yards of fine cloth and material for turbans, while an ordinary soldier received only a few yards of cotton. Robes and fabric therefore served as both clothing and ranked rewards.

Headgear and public appearance

Headgear helped complete a person’s public appearance. In his diary, Swedish envoy Claes Rålamb described Sultan Mehmed IV’s procession through Istanbul on 24 September 1657. Rålamb watched from a house on the route and recorded the layers of the procession: the sultan rode in a gold-cloth coat, violet trousers and yellow boots, with black heron feathers set in his turban. His pages wore red outer robes and triangular caps, while foot guards wore long white shirts beneath short overgarments. The garments and head coverings made the roles of ruler, page and guard visible within the ceremony.

The procession put the court’s clothing on display before the city. Rålamb describes streets kept quiet until the sultan approached, when townspeople came out to throw flowers along his route; hundreds of elite soldiers and court dignitaries joined the procession.

Household clothing and personal property

Clothes and accessories could also be transferred as family property. In Tripoli, in present-day Lebanon, in 1840, Maryam ʿAnklis recorded a legal gift of seventeen personal items. Sixteen, including a gold necklace and silk shirts, went to her younger, unmarried daughter. Historian Beshara B. Doumani suggests the clothing may have formed part of a trousseau, the clothing and personal goods prepared for a marriage. Maryam also specified that the personal belongings remaining at her death be sold at auction, showing how clothing and jewelry could be valued, gifted and passed through an estate.

Nineteenth-century Ottoman nalın, or bath shoes, had wooden platforms inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

Nineteenth-century reform and fashion

Sultan Mahmud II, who reigned from 1808 to 1839, enforced a new official dress code of fez, frock coat and fitted trousers. The Metropolitan Museum describes this code as replacing older clothing forms that marked rank and religion. The fez, a red felt cap with a tassel, entered Ottoman military dress by decree in 1829. Officials later required civilians to wear a plain dalfes, with no cloth wrapped around it, to distinguish them from state officials. After civilians resisted, artisans were allowed to wrap certain fabrics around the cap.

Women’s fashions changed through their own choices and settings. From the middle decades of the nineteenth century, elite women in Istanbul and other cities adopted accessories such as gloves, parasols and stockings, and altered entaris with sleeve cuffs and gathers at the waist. Velvet bindallı dresses, embroidered in gold-colored thread, were worn by brides and guests at weddings and at other special occasions. These dresses retained Ottoman robe forms while responding to changing urban fashions and regional preferences.