Overview
Egypt in these centuries was ruled from more than one place at once — kings in the Delta, the High Priests of Amun in Thebes, then Libyan dynasties, then Kushite ones — and dress became a way of saying who you were within that arrangement. The New Kingdom wardrobe was kept, deliberately and conservatively, while each incoming group added a marker of its own that was never absorbed into the Egyptian repertoire.
Key garments and style
The base is unchanged: finely pleated linen, the broad wesekh collar, elaborate wigs, and for the elite an increasingly heavy load of amulets and beadwork. What is new is added on top rather than mixed in. Libyan rulers kept the ostrich plume set in the hair and the long cloak that Egyptian art had used for generations to depict Libyans, and went on being shown with them after they had become pharaohs. The Kushite kings of the 25th Dynasty are the sharpest case: dressed as Egyptian pharaohs, but wearing a close skull-cap crown with a double uraeus rather than one, and ram’s-head amulets on cords at the neck — a deliberate statement of rule over Kush as well as Egypt, legible at a glance.
The period’s other distinctive contribution is not worn in life. Investment shifted from tomb decoration to the body itself, producing elaborately painted coffins and, over the wrapped mummy, nets of blue faience beads. Some of the finest surviving evidence for this era’s ornament was made for the dead.
Transition
Under the Late Period and the Persian and Greek rulers who followed, this conservative Egyptian dress persisted, especially in temple contexts, alongside imported styles that never displaced it.