Ottoman Dress and Design in the West: A Visual History of Cultural Exchange Charlotte A. Jirousek 9780253042163

Ottoman Dress and Design in the West is a richly illustrated exploration of the relationship between West and Near East through the visual culture of dress. Charlotte Jirousek examines the history of dress and fashion in the broader context of western relationships with the Mediterranean world from the dawn of Islam through the end of the twentieth century. The significance of dress is made apparent by the author's careful attention to its political, economic, and cultural context. The reader comes to understand that dress reflects not simply the self and one's relation to community but also that community's relation to a wider world through trade, colonization, religion, and technology. The chapters provide broad historical background on Ottoman influence and European exoticization of that influence, while the captions and illustrations provide detailed studies of illuminations, paintings, and sculptures to show how these influences were absorbed into everyday living. Through the medium of dress, Jirousek details a continually shifting Ottoman frontier that is closely tied to European and American history. In doing so, she explores and celebrates an essential source of influence that for too long has been relegated to the periphery.

Charlotte A. Jirousek (1938-2014) was Associate Professor of textiles and apparel in the College of Ecology at Cornell University. Jirousek published extensively in refereed journals and contributed to several edited collections including The Encyclopedia of World Dress and The Fabric of Life: Cultural Transformations in Turkish Society.

Sara Catterall was born in Ankara, and grew up in Minneapolis. She has worked as an academic librarian, book indexer, editor, and writer. She lives outside Ithaca, NY.

"This amply illustrated, attractive book is valuable for dress history scholars and makes a reasonably priced, ideal textbook for courses on clothing and cultural history. But it is also relevant for the most significant, growing and vital field of East-West exchanges, as well as for history surveys of Europe, the Mediterranean world, and the Middle East, anthropology, ethnography, and the history of identity and mentality."-Journal of Dress History

"The book is lavishly illustrated in colour; many images have lengthy and helpful captions. A brief glossary is also useful, as is a more comprehensive index. The illustrations include only a very few of the surviving garments from the periods and categories in question - dress survives poorly. For this reason, Jirousek relies on prints, paintings, the odd sculpture and photography and film for the later period - these are the best and sometimes only sources."-Amanda Phillips, University of Virginia, Textile History