You Are What You Wear: Ottoman Costume Portraits in the Elbise-i Osmaniyye

Commissioned for the 1873 Vienna World's Fair, the photographic album Elbise-i Osmaniyye hosts a bona fide fashion show.Through seventy-four luminous photographs, it presents a transnational performance of regional Ottoman costume.As an intellectual index and a pictorial register of imperial industrial progress, the album testifies to an emergent and ethnically diverse modern Ottoman identity.This identity is not found in the faces depicted in the Elbise or in the wax figurines at the fair but materializes through the assertive quality of Ottoman dress.Through the Elbise and its exhibition in Vienna, drapery displaces physiognomy as the locus of a modern, multicultural Ottoman identity, manifesting a competition among legible surfaces: face, skin, and fabric.The costumes themselves, therefore, become faces-matrices for something other than themselves.This article explores what happens when Ottoman dress eclipses Ottoman faces, revealing Ottomanness to be as flexible and flamboyant as fabric, incapable of being signified by a single uniform or fixed image.