Overview
When central kingship broke down, dress did not. The men’s linen kilt and the women’s sheath dress continue straight through the period; what changes is who was making them and to what standard. With the royal workshops at Memphis no longer setting the pattern for everyone, provincial nomarchs became the patrons, and their local craftsmen worked to their own conventions.
Key garments and style
The wardrobe stays Old Kingdom: the shendyt kilt for men, wrapped and knotted at the front; a narrow linen sheath for women; broad bead collars and faience jewellery to mark rank. The difference is in execution. Provincial tomb painting of these centuries is bolder, flatter and less exactly proportioned than Memphite work — long read as decline, now more often read as regional schools no longer copying a single court model. Painted wooden tomb models from Asyut and elsewhere are the period’s most concrete evidence, showing ranks of soldiers, servants and boatmen in plain kilts, and so recording ordinary working dress rather than the idealised elite figure.
Dress also became a way of talking about the collapse itself. The Admonitions of Ipuwer — a literary text, probably composed later and looking back — pictures the world upside down precisely through clothing: those who owned nothing now in fine linen, and the formerly rich in rags. Whatever it is worth as history, it shows that Egyptians understood cloth as the plainest possible index of social order.
Transition
The Middle Kingdom reunification restored a single court standard and with it the finer weaving and the more exact proportion of the Old Kingdom, though the regional workshops that grew up in the interval did not simply disappear.