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Edited by Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood

Dressed with Distinction: Garments from Ottoman Syria offers a window onto the history of textile production in the Middle East during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The elaborate garments documented here originated in western Syria and were worn until the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I when political and social changes led to the dominance of Western-style commercially manufactured attire. Until then, for hundreds of years, skilled artists in Syrian cities produced intricately woven textiles and garments for the royal courts, worldly merchants, and elite Bedouin families.

In addition to articulating the social and seasonal contexts in which the garments were worn, this publication examines the styles of 28 examples of dress once worn by women, men, and children in Ottoman Syria. These garments include cloaks (abaya), head-coverings (hatta), women’s body coverings (çarşaf), and jackets (qumbas).

Dressed with Distinction: Garments from Ottoman Syria features the collection of David and Elizabeth Reisbord, gifts and promised gifts to the Fowler Museum at ucla.

Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood is the Director of the Textile Research Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands. She is the author of Encyclopedia of Embroidery from Central Asia; The Iranian Plateau and the Indian Subcontinent, Bloomsbury, London (2019); and editor and author of the Encyclopedia of Embroidery from the Arab World, Bloomsbury, London (2017). With William Vogelsang, she co-authored Covering the Moon: A History of Middle Eastern Face Veils, Peeters, Leeuven (2008).

Joanna Barrkman is Senior Curator, Southeast Asian and Pacific Arts, Fowler Museum at ucla, Los Angeles. She co-edited Textiles of Timor: Island in the Woven Sea with Roy W. Hamilton, Fowler Museum Textile Series, Vol. 13, Fowler Museum at ucla (2014). She authored Textiles of Covalima, Timor-Leste, National Directorate of Culture and Creative Industries, Timor-Leste, Dili (2015).