Brooklyn Museum of Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Reina Lews of the London College of Fashion explores the importance of Western and Ottoman women’s travel writing and harem literature for understandings of late Ottoman dress and society.
Within a popular middlebrow genre premised on women’s gender-privileged access to segregated life, depictions of the embodied experience of dress formed a key component of the contact zone of the harem visit and accounts of women’s public presence. For all writers, the enunciation of taste rests on the consciousness of being both the viewer and the viewed as their dressed bodies move through Ottoman spaces. The presence of Western bodies in western fashions – from governesses in Ottoman homes to travellers’ harem visits to the Empress Eugénie at state events – served in the transmission of fashion knowledges. So too the fashionscape of harem ladies’ ensembles when greeting visitors and the parade of jewels on the bodies of slaves. I draw on approaches from cultural and fashion studies and the sociology of work to analyse how fashion was performed in these encounters, attending to the differential processes of subjectification engendered by the dressing of free, enslaved, and manumitted bodies.
Brooklyn Museum of Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Issue 67, December 2024
Beauty in the Wilderness
