Fashion in Late Ottoman Istanbul

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 women’s 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, women’s 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.

Nancy Micklewright writes primarily about the history of photography and fashion history in the Ottoman Empire with a focus on gender. She was most recently a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow in Istanbul, working on a new project, Dressing the Republic: Women and Fashion in 1920s Türkiye. Previously she has received research fellowships from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Pasold Research Fund and the American Research Institute in Turkey. She is the former Head of Public and Scholarly Engagement for the Freer and Sackler Galleries, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art., US.