The first comprehensive exhibition of its kind, Dress Codes: Revealing the Jewish Wardrobe at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem brings together an array of traditional apparel from the 18th through the 20th centuries from the Museum’s world-renowned collection of Jewish dress. The exhibition is on view from March 11 through October 25, 2014.

The exhibition features over one hundred costumes from four continents in a visually rich display that showcases the colors, textures, history, and symbolism of clothing. Opening the door to garments deep within the Jewish wardrobe, the exhibition presents clothing as representative of such universal human themes as identity and memory. Dress Codes offers a cross-cultural celebration of the history of Jewish dress and the ways in which traditional clothing has stimulated fashion design throughout history and continues to inspire the styles of today.

The exhibition is organized around five themes, providing a framework for exploring the range of clothing on view:

THROUGH THE VEIL

The extent to which a woman is concealed by her clothing raises the recurrent question of free choice versus social pressure and has inspired a long-standing debate over whether such symbols of modesty represent a positive assertion of religious identity or a form of coercion. The theme of “Through the Veil” explores this tension through items of women’s clothing from Central Asia. Influenced by local Islamic cultures, the wraps, cloaks, and facial veils on display were worn as outdoor garments by Jewish women. In addition to covering a woman’s body and face as an expression of modesty, these trappings reveal important aspects of her identity relating to religion, status, and place of origin. In the mid-20th century in Herat, Afghanistan, for example, the everyday attire of the Jewish women differed from that of Muslim women. While Jewish women wrapped themselves with a black chader and hid their faces behind a white netted and embroidered veil, Muslim women covered themselves with a wide, colorful one-piece wrap (chader burkah) that hid their bodies from head to toe, with only a netted opening for the eyes.

 Left: Jewish women's wrap (izar) and face veil (khiliyye)  -
Baghdad, Iraq, late 19th - early 20th century
Right: Women’s dress, Germany, 1850s
Copyright: Israel Museum, Jerusalem

 

EXPOSING THE UNSEEN

This section of the exhibition provides an opportunity to examine the fine and often hidden details of clothing. Underclothes, linings of garments, and icons stitched into clothing – whether hidden or in plain view – can be carriers of intriguing cultural symbols, often understandable only to some. These garments or details, often elaborately crafted, sometimes paradoxically drew attention to the very thing they were intended to obscure. Highlights include items worn by women in the Baghdadi community in India that blend traditional dress from Baghdad with strong Victorian influences. A bodice or brassiere, worn under the shirt and visible through it, accentuates the bosom, while also covering it.

FUSION IN DRESS

In many different places in the world, the melding of fashions imported from afar with local costumes led to innovative creations in dress. A fascinating example of this early fusion is a popular Persian women's costume from the early 20th century that recalls a tutu. The Shah, following a trip to Paris in 1873, brought home with him an enthusiasm for European styles, particularly of the costumes he saw at the Parisian ballet. Over the years, the influx of Western culture into traditional societies gradually merged with local clothing traditions to create a new fashion vernacular. In later years, this trend became reversed, with Western cultures embracing non-Western garments as exotic and authentic sources of fashion inspiration. 

LITTLE WOMEN AND LITTLE MEN

Many of the children’s garments displayed in this section of the exhibition appear as miniature versions of adult clothing, a reflection of children’s roles in traditional societies, in which they were considered adults-in-the-making from an early age. Because of the higher value often placed on boys by traditional societies, superstitious attempts were made in some communities to confuse the evil forces intent on harming young boys by dressing them in girls’ clothing. In addition, babies and toddlers often wore special amulets to protect them from harm, due to fears of child mortality. Such is the case with the dress from Yemen illustrated here, worn by a girl after her recovery from smallpox and covered with amulets to keep its wearer safe.

CLOTHING THAT REMEMBERS

Clothing often serves to perpetuate the memory of the dead, sometimes after being redesigned to fulfill a new role. From the late 19th century, it was a common practice for Sephardi Jewish women in the Ottoman Empire to donate precious dresses and trousseau items to the synagogue, where they would be transformed for ritual use. The exhibition features examples of these items, including a bindalli bridal dress alongside a Torah ark curtain created from a similar dress. The tradition of donating such items to the synagogue endured long after the original dresses had become dated, and transitional bindalli fashion thus remained alive in Sephardi synagogues long after the passing of the brides who wore these dresses.

Dress Codes: Revealing the Jewish Wardrobe is curated by Efrat Assaf-Shapira, Associate Curator in the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Wing for Jewish Art and Life. The exhibition is made possible by the Aaron Beare Foundation, Durban, South Africa, and the donors to the Museum’s 2014 Exhibition Fund: Claudia Davidoff, Cambridge, MA, in memory of Ruth and Leon Davidoff; Hanno D. Mott, New York; the Nash Family Foundation, New York; and Yad Hanadiv, the Rothschild Foundation in Israel.