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Turkish Habits: Ottoman Costume and the Art of Self-Representation
16 May 2024, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm
For this Research Seminar, we welcome Ünver Rüstem (Johns Hopkins University) for a talk on ‘Turkish Habits: Ottoman Costume and the Art of Self-Representation’.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Queenie Lee – History of Art
Location
-
IAS Forum, Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS)South WingWilkins BuildingLondonWC1E 6BT
In the Ottoman Empire, how one dressed was a deeply political affair. Ottoman rulers and subjects alike used clothing to express (and transgress) the hierarchical, religious, and communal distinctions defining their society, much to the fascination of foreign visitors and observers, who, throughout the early modern and modern periods, sought knowledge of the empire’s sartorial traditions in media running the gamut from illustrated travelogues to wax museums. Focusing on costume albums made by Ottoman painters for European buyers during the seventeenth century, this talk considers how and why dress became such a charged site of cross-cultural interaction, posturing, and self-assertion in the empire’s dealings with the West. It pushes back against the view that Western interest in “Turkish” garb was driven by a taste for the exotic Other and instead highlights the Ottomans’ own conscious utilisation of their dress codes to engage, shape, and correct outside perceptions of their political and social order.
Image: Ottoman costume album produced in Istanbul in 1618 and owned and inscribed by Peter Mundy (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
About the Speaker
Ünver Rüstem
Second Decade Society Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Johns Hopkins University
Ünver Rüstem is the Second Decade Society Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Johns Hopkins University. His research centres on the Ottoman Empire in its later centuries and on questions of cross-cultural exchange and interaction. He received his PhD from Harvard University and has held fellowships at Columbia University, the University of Cambridge, and Harvard University. He is the author of Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton University Press, 2019) and has published articles and chapters on subjects as diverse as the reception of illustrated Islamic manuscripts, the ceremonial framing of Ottoman mosque architecture, and the distinctive funerary art of Ottoman Cyprus. At present, he is working on a new book project that explores the role of costume in Ottoman interactions with Western Europe during the early modern and modern periods.
More about Ünver Rüstem