Overview
The Mamluks were a ruling class of slave soldiers, not a hereditary dynasty, so rank had to be visible rather than inherited — and dress carried the whole system. Cairo under them was also one of the great textile cities of the world, which meant the means were abundantly available.
Key garments and style
The military elite wore the qaba, a long fitted coat, and kaftans of silk and fine cotton, belted, with headgear that changed by office and by period: the fur-trimmed sharbush of the earlier amirs, later the takhfifa and other turban forms whose winding and cloth marked the wearer.
The distinctive Mamluk invention is heraldic. Blazons were assigned by office and displayed on dress, arms, buildings and metalwork — a cup for the cupbearer, paired polo sticks for the master of polo, a pen box for the secretary. It is a system of visual rank with few parallels outside European heraldry, and it makes Mamluk objects unusually easy to attribute.
Robes of honour worked here as elsewhere in the Islamic world: the sultan invested an officer by clothing him, and tiraz inscription carried the sovereign’s name on the cloth. Dress also enforced legal status downwards — Christian and Jewish subjects were periodically required to wear turbans of distinguishing colours, so what a man wore on his head stated his standing before the law.
Transition
The Ottoman conquest of 1517 brought Istanbul’s court fashions and its own hierarchy of headgear into Egypt, and Mamluk forms persisted below the new ruling layer rather than disappearing.