Overview
Ottoman Egypt dressed in layers of authority. Istanbul’s court styles arrived with the conquest of 1517 and sat over a Mamluk military class that survived as beys, over an Arabic-speaking urban population, and over a countryside that changed hardly at all — so what a man wore located him in that order fairly precisely.
Key garments and style
The male ensemble was a long shirt under an entari or kaftan, an open-fronted robe reaching the ankles, closed with a wound sash at the waist and topped by a turban. The turban did most of the signalling: its size, the cloth used and the shape it was wound around distinguished ulama from officials from soldiers, and Ottoman observers could read it at a glance.
Women’s dress divided sharply between indoors and out. At home, bright silks and embroidered gowns with a short jacket; in the street, an enveloping wrap and a face veil, so the elaborate dress was seen only within the household.
The fabric economy ran both ways. Egypt supplied flax and linen and was a corridor for Indian cottons and coffee, while fine woollens and silks came from Anatolia and Europe. Sumptuary distinctions applied to non-Muslims, with colours of turban and slipper prescribed at various periods.
Transition
Muhammad Ali’s nineteenth-century reforms replaced the turban with the tarboosh among officials and the army, and put European cut into Egyptian public life for the first time.