Cross-cultural Dressing in the Late Ottoman Empire

Abstract

Cross-cultural dressing is usually seen as a Western activity, but elite Ottomans would have been by the end of the empire perfectly accustomed to wearing Western clothes - something which challenges current theories about cross-cultural dressing. The following considers photographs of cross-cultural dressing in books written by two friends: the Ottoman Zeyneb Hanum, who with her sister, Melek Hanum, collaborated with Pierre Loti on his novel, Les Désenchantées, and the English feminist and Turkophile, Grace Ellison. Zeyneb Hanum's epistolary account, A Turkish Woman's European Impressions (1913), was edited by Ellison, whose own story of visits to Turkey, An Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem, appeared two years later in 1915. In both books the authors appear cross-culturally dressed, yet the images register very differently.