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Early Modern · Middle East & North Africa · 1500 - 1800
The rival Ottoman and Safavid empires dressed their courts in silk kaftans and robes, elaborate turbans, and richly patterned silks woven in royal workshops.
By Dan Schnau · Last updated
Descriptions of Ottoman dress identify layered shirts, trousers, and robes; accounts of Safavid Persian dress describe robes over trousers with belts or sashes.3,13,1 This guide focuses on those courts and selected North African and Yemeni traditions.
| Court tradition | Garments and textiles |
|---|---|
| Ottoman | Kaftans over shirts, wide trousers, and inner robes; court silks included brocade, velvet, and cloth of gold.3,13 |
| Safavid Persian | Qaba robes over trousers, with sashes or belts; early Safavid turbans were wound around a distinctive twelve-gored cap.1 |
Follow the Ottoman clothing guide for a closer account. For earlier Islamic dress, see medieval Middle Eastern clothing; for the fez and later reforms, continue to nineteenth-century Middle Eastern clothing.
At the Ottoman court, the kaftan was an outer garment made in luxurious textiles.3 Court fabrics included kemha (a heavy brocade), seraser (cloth of gold and silver), and çatma (cut velvet).3 Their bold, large-scale patterns favored tulips, carnations, and round medallions resembling pomegranates.5,6,7,12 Some 2,500 garments, including kaftans of the sultans, survive in the Topkapi Palace collection.2,3
Beneath the kaftan, Ottoman men wore a gömlek (shirt), şalvar (wide trousers), and an entari (inner robe); the sultan crowned the ensemble with a turban of fine muslin wrapped around a tall cap, a headdress whose shape changed from reign to reign.3,13 Elaborate turbans, wound from layers of fabric around a shaped cap, signaled rank among court officials and other elites.8
Women's dress in the Ottoman world consisted of similar layered garments — shirt, trousers, inner and outer robes — in fine fabrics such as bürümcük, a raw silk crepe used for the shirt, with gilded trimmings and ribbons.4 Outdoors, women covered themselves with a large enveloping cloak called a ferace and a face veil or yaşmak.4,18
For a closer look at how these silks were worn at court, and how dress changed after 1829, see Ottoman clothing: kaftans, the fez, and the stambouline.
The Safavid dynasty (1501–1736) made Persia a rival to Ottoman Turkey in textile splendor. Shah Abbas I established royal workshops in Isfahan to produce silk fabrics, and Safavid weavers made figural silks showing human figures and animals — unlike the mostly floral designs of Ottoman court kaftans.9,1,3 Men wore a qaba (robe) fastened with a narrow belt or sash over trousers tapering to the ankle, and over the 17th century the court robe came to be cut close to the torso; in 1736 a French traveler likened the cut of Persian men's dress to European clothing and contrasted it with the long, loose robes of the Ottomans.1 The distinctive early Safavid taj — a twelve-gored cap with a tall, pointed finial, around which the turban was wound — was a symbol of the Shia dynasty, its twelve gores standing for the twelve Shia imams.1
Across the broader Islamic world, dress reflected both shared principles and local adaptation. In North Africa, men wore the burnous (a hooded cloak), and women wrapped themselves in the haik, a draped wrapping cloth.11,14 The silk-weaving workshops of Fez were a large-scale urban industry whose fabrics and shawls were exported to Europe, Asia, and trans-Saharan Africa.15 In Yemen, garments of indigo-dyed cotton became a lasting tradition, with the dye associated above all with the town of Zabid.16 Yemeni men wore the curved dagger called the jambiya at the waist, as both weapon and status marker.10 Trade connected these diverse regions: Safavid textiles were prized at the Mughal court of India, Persian sashes were exported to India and Poland, and over the 17th century Indian cotton cloth made growing inroads in Anatolia, the Ottoman Arab provinces, and Iran.9,1,17
Encyclopaedia Iranica builds its account of Safavid dress from written sources, pictures and surviving garments.1 Ottoman court garments survive in large numbers, and the Topkapı Palace collection includes the kaftans of the sultans.2 Other kaftans were kept in imperial tombs, placed over the graves of the deceased in accordance with Ottoman custom.6
Surviving Safavid garments are limited. Iranica blames heavy wear, the burning of court garments to recover their gold and silver, and above all the destruction of the Safavid court wardrobes in the sack of Isfahan in 1722. Among the best represented survivals are men's robes, especially of the 17th century, and sashes, preserved mainly in European collections.1
Pictures fill some of the gaps. Ottoman costume albums were produced from the middle of the 16th century, and the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin notes that early examples were made partly in Istanbul and sold in the bazaars.21 Ferriol, the French king's ambassador to the Porte, ordered paintings made from life in 1707 and 1708, and engravings after them were published in 1712 and 1713 as the Recueil de cent estampes. Its plates are signed "JB," perhaps for Jean-Baptiste Vanmour, from whom the original paintings were commissioned.20
Travelers described what they saw. Sumiyo Okumura credits the Italian Luigi Bassano da Zara, who visited Istanbul in 1545, with the first Western information about Turkish dress.3 Jean Chardin, a French jeweler who traveled through Iran from 1673 to 1677, included engravings of four costume styles for men and women in his account.19 Iranica cautions that Persian painting is often idealized and standardized, though usually correct in essentials, and that few observers could describe women's dress at first hand because women were usually veiled in public.1
In the 16th century, the basic garments of Safavid men and women were almost interchangeable except for the headgear.1 A typical man's costume began with a collarless silk shirt fastened at the right shoulder and loose trousers tapering to the ankles. Over these went a jacket or long robe that opened down the front or fastened under the armpit, held by a narrow velvet or leather belt or a narrow sash, and a second long robe went over everything. Black was rarely worn.1 In the 17th century Chardin called the three-quarter-length robe cabai, that is, the qaba.1
Headgear carried the politics. The Met describes white turbans with twelve folds wrapped over a red felt cap with a baton, credited to Ismaʿil's father Haidar and called the taj Haidari or taj-i Safavi. The Safavids implemented it for all royalty and related administrative personnel, and it was regarded as the ultimate signifier of political allegiance.19
In the 16th century, women wore a long, loose shirt open to the waist in front, fastened by a brooch, over trousers often of diagonally striped cloth. Outdoors they wore a floor-length white chador with a white face veil or a black horsehair visor.1 Around 1600, women's headwear was the chahar-qad, a square cloth placed on the crown of the head and fastened with a thin silk ribbon; after 1625, paintings show a loose veil held by a small tiara or a silk ribbon.19 The Met dates a shift toward tailored garments to after 1650, when women wore jackets with tight sleeves.19
Apart from groups such as grooms and dervishes, most Safavid evidence concerns the upper classes, though Iranica suggests that all classes wore the same basic type of dress, simplified to varying degrees.1 In the mid-17th century Raphaël Du Mans described peasant costume as heavy cotton clothes cut in the urban fashion. In winter peasants added thick felt cloaks or lambskin coats, and they went barelegged or bound their legs with linen strips.1 Travelers also associated different turbans and belts with different social groups.1
The Recueil shows Turks and, in the Royal Academy's words, other persons of the Ottoman Empire, such as Greeks, Albanians, Vlachs, Armenians, Bulgarians, Arabs and North Africans.20
The sources used here say little about the dress of nomadic groups. One exception is the Yemeni jambiya, which Rachel Parikh describes as an ideal weapon for a semi-nomadic and rural population that used it mainly in defense; worn at the waist, it allowed comfort while traveling on horse or camel.10
In Morocco, the silk workshops of Fez used large draw looms operated by male weavers and assistants, who were organized and controlled by guilds.15 Tunis was long the center of fez making. Its guild-based industry employed some 20,000 workers in the mid-18th century and gave the city its most numerous export.24 A scarlet felt burnous believed to have belonged to Napoleon, and to have been made between 1798 and 1805, is Maghrebi in style, closer to Algerian and Moroccan forms than to Egyptian cloaks, according to the Textile Research Centre.11
For Yemen, Parikh reports the collector Stephen Gracie's theory that the jambiya's curved, double-edged blade arrived with the Ottoman conquest and occupation of Yemen (1538–1630) and through trade with Iran and India. The dagger certainly existed by 1763, when al-Mahdi ʿAbbas, the imam of Yemen, gave the explorer Carsten Niebuhr a jambiya as part of a set of traditional garments.10
Bursa, in northwest Anatolia, was the main center of Ottoman silk weaving; the industry was established there in the 15th century, largely to compete with Italian imports.5 Silk was regulated: municipal codes fixed the number, weight, length, twist and dye of the warp threads, and an inspector called the arşıncı stamped approved cloth before it was released to the market.3
In Iran, Shah Abbas I placed the distribution of raw silk under state control and encouraged workshops in Yazd, Kashan and Isfahan to make silk lampas and velvet for apparel and furnishings. Persian velvets were lauded as the finest and most expensive on the international market.19 The Kashan velvet above once had its ground covered with flat gilded metal threads, the kind of fabric European visitors to the Safavid court called "gold velvet."27
Cotton was widely grown and woven in Anatolia, and Syria, particularly Aleppo, was known for its cotton goods.17 In Iran, Dutch merchants imported cotton from Golconda in India for turban material, and in mid-17th-century Isfahan trousers, robes and stockings were also made of English broadcloth.1
Niki Gamm writes that these Ottoman sumptuary laws "have not been seriously studied" and that they do not seem to have been seriously enforced, partly because the laws of a sultan who died or was deposed had to be renewed by his successor. What is known, she writes, is that the laws covered what a man could wear: his headgear, his outer garments, including their materials and lengths, and the color of his shoes.25
Several dated rules concerned non-Muslims. A book by Nicolas de Nicolay, published in 1568, reports a yellow head covering that distinguished Jews, while Jewish physicians wore a red-crimson hat.26 Under Murad III (r. 1574–1595), according to Gamm, Jews were required by law "to wear a kind of cap instead of a turban, and to refrain from using silk in making their garments." Gamm also reports that "a 1702 law determined that Jews were no longer to wear yellow slippers, but only black coverings on the feet and head," and adds that this may have applied to Christians as well.25 Not every order was aimed at non-Muslims. According to Gamm, Halil Hamit, grand vizier from 1782 to 1785, ordered that everybody use only traditional materials "rather than the Indian and European robes that had become the mode since the Tulip Period."25
Mahmud II's fez law of 1829 broke with this tradition; the Ottoman clothing guide covers that law and the reforms that followed.24 Abraham Ofir Shemesh writes that the restrictions on dhimmis, including distinctive colors for their clothes, hats and shoes, began to lapse only in the mid-19th century with the Tanzimat reforms.26
Safavid dress was also managed at court. A manual of Safavid administration written in the early 18th century describes royal and amirial tailoring departments that ordered fabrics, cut court dress and prepared robes of honor for the amirs. After the dynasty, Nader Shah, a Sunni, introduced a four-pointed cap, the kolah-e naderi, usually red, representing the first four caliphs.1
Myth: everyone in the early modern Ottoman Empire wore a fez. In Istanbul the fez belongs to the 19th century, as the Ottoman clothing guide explains.24
Myth: European paintings of Turkish women show the harem as it was. The Pera Museum notes that Western artists could not freely access the Muslim household and often chose models from non-Muslim families for interior scenes with women. Vanmour had unusual access, but his scenes of Turkish women were so popular that similar compositions were produced repeatedly in his Istanbul studio.22 William Hogarth's harem print of 1723–24 adapts Vanmour's figures from the Recueil and adds others.23
Myth: Safavid men wore the tall taj throughout the dynasty. Album pages by Riza-yi ʿAbbasi, court painter to Shah Abbas I, show the elongated taj-i Safavi abandoned for a wide, bulbous turban adorned with an aigrette.19
