Fashion in Late Ottoman Istanbul

Photography and Identity in a Global City
Places the Ottoman female consumer at the centre of a study of the transformation of womens dress in the long 19th century.

This dynamic exploration of two key modes of visual culture – fashion and photography – in 19th-century Istanbul contributes to an expanding body of research on fashion and the dressed body outside the Euro-American context. Based on meticulous analysis of visual, written and material objects, it focuses on women’s lived experience during a time of dramatic change in the Ottoman Empire.

Over the 19th century, the women of Istanbul gradually transformed their appearance, adopting European dress and new modes of self-fashioning, including photographs. The book reconstructs a complex fashion history, and the dramatic changes that took place in womens lives in this period, and given the diverse population of Istanbul in terms of ethnicity, class, race and religion, attends to the differing clothing habits of the women of the city. The book focuses particularly on elite women as fashion tastemakers and on the dress of enslaved and working women.

Appealing to scholars across a range of fields, including fashion history, Ottoman studies, womens and gender history, visual culture and photography history, Fashion in Late Ottoman Istanbul provides a fascinating insight into women’s histories, writing and dress practices in a rapidly changing Istanbul.