Even by the standards of a world where dress codes and sumptuary laws were near universal, the Ottoman Empire developed a sartorial culture remarkable for its systematization and semantic charge. The empire’s multiethnic and multiconfessional makeup, together with its distinctive status as a simultaneously European and Islamic power, engendered a correspondingly rich set of practices centered on the affordances of costume. Ottoman rulers and subjects alike used clothing to express—and transgress—the hierarchical, religious, and communal distinctions defining their society. These practices fascinated foreign visitors and observers, who were themselves brought into this framework through diplomatic ceremonies involving the gifting and wearing of robes.

This far-reaching sartorial system is the subject of my current book project, “Turkish Habits: Ottoman Costume and the Art of Self-Representation,” which explores how and why dress became such an enduring site of identity formation, meaning-making, and communication in the Ottoman Empire’s dealings with the wider world, especially western Europe. My project is concerned in particular with what we might term the meta-sartorial: objects and phenomena that thematize, showcase, or otherwise invoke Ottoman dress in ways that may or may not intersect with fashion history. These materials, which span the early modern and modern periods and run the gamut from sculptural tombstones to museums of clothed mannequins, offer striking evidence of the Ottomans’ special relationship to and instrumentalization of dress.

In keeping with the project’s cross-cultural framing, I focus on artworks made primarily for Western audiences, who regarded the empire’s sartorial traditions as a window into its political and social order. My book’s title features the word “Turkish” to signal this dynamic, parroting the term by which Europeans referred to the Ottoman Empire and its peoples. Produced by Ottoman and non-Ottoman artists alike from the 16th to the 19th century, the works in question have too often been discussed as derivatives of European models that pandered to the exoticizing gaze of their foreign viewers. My reassessment treats them instead as embodiments of local attitudes and practices, thereby foregrounding the Ottomans’ share in determining foreign notions of their costumes and customs. By bridging the early modern and modern periods, moreover, “Turkish Habits” crosses conventionally drawn chronological boundaries and offers a fuller picture of the continuities as well as differences between these two time frames. This approach reveals the ways in which Ottoman actors were able, even in the face of 19th-century colonialism, to utilize their sartorial history to respond to Orientalist discourses.

Having already completed most of my fieldwork in various European and Turkish collections, I have spent the greater part of my fellowship developing three of the book’s four chapters, which combine thematically driven case studies with a broadly chronological progression. The first chapter—the subject of my colloquium—traces the consolidation of Ottoman sartorial consciousness in tandem with the empire’s emergence as a global superpower during the early modern period. Centered on the turban, which assumed a leading role in ceremonial display and funerary commemoration, this chapter considers the workings, disparities, and challenges of the Ottoman sartorial system. Chapter 2 takes up perhaps the most robust genre of Ottoman sartorial imagery: costume albums produced for foreign visitors by Istanbul’s commercial painters. Its analysis is built around two highly distinctive 17th-century examples that lay bare the extent to which Ottoman dress prompted European viewers to reflect on their own political and cultural positionalities. While Chapter 3, which focuses on the complexities of turquerie portraiture during the more porous 18th century, remains at an early stage of development, I have made substantial progress on the fourth chapter, which examines the rise of new technologies of sartorial self-representation in the 19th century, when sweeping dress reforms brought Ottoman male attire into closer alignment with European models. Exhibiting their colorful sartorial past through photography and mannequins, Ottoman actors of this period succeeded in undercutting Western notions of a timeless Orient while also catering to a growing appetite for vibrant exotica. An article based on this chapter was accepted for publication by The Art Bulletin, boding well for the project as a whole.

Johns Hopkins University
Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow, 2025–2026

Ünver Rüstem will return to his position as the Second Decade Society Associate Professor of Islamic art and architecture at Johns Hopkins University, where he will complete his book manuscript.