Sola Topi, Fez and Top Hat

Throughout the nineteenth century the top hat remained the most respectable headpiece, even though some kinds of felt hats appeared, i.e. during the 1848 revolution as a part of revolutionary dress. Later in the century straw hats became fashionable as

102 Tarlo, Clothing Matters, 37.

103 Ibid., 38.

104 Ross, Clothing, 39.

4 The Gender of Modernity and Ottoman Dress

headwear for the summer.¹⁰⁵ The cylindrical shape of the top hat was the repetition of the leading principle of uniformity and ostentatious nonchalance apparent in cut of the clothes of late nineteenth bourgeois male dress, i.e. sleeves, trouser legs, trunk.¹⁰⁶

For British colonial rule in India the top hat proved insufficient as a demarcation from aspiring Indian elites. Thus from the 1870s onwards the sun helmet took its place as a marker of British claim to superiority, and it became a “[...]demarcation of the danger the Orient held for Europeans.”¹⁰⁷ The sola topi or pith helmet was a means deployed by the British to accomplish sartorial distinction from the Indian population. It is one of the many examples where headgear became a major sign of distinction in the colonial setting. Ross and other authors report that the compulsory wearing of the sola topi in British India by colonial officials as a marker of the British claim to superiority in India was widely despised because it was extremely uncomfortable.¹⁰⁸ Nevertheless, it served its purpose and helped to strengthen the labeling of Europeans as topi walas (head-wearing people),¹⁰⁹ suggesting that the establishment of the wearing of brimmed European hats as a sign of imperial domination was part of colonial politics itself, not just its expression.

Magret Pernau more specifically elaborated on the question of headgear in colonial India in relation to British rule. She particularly focused on developments leading from the Mughal turban as an encompassing headpiece worn after the establishment of Mughal rule to the development of elaborate regional styles from the 18^th century onwards.¹¹⁰ The development and preservation of these distinct styles was supported by the British colonial rulers, who saw it as a means to prevent political unity. The development of these elaborate “Indian” styles took place parallel to strict restrictions to the adoption of the dress of the Indian nobility by British colonial personal. The British colonial rulers fostered the differentiation of distinct ethno-religious styles of headgear in

105See Brändli, Der herrlich biedere Mann, 144.

106 See Ibid., 199 and 263.

107 Pernau, ‘Shifting Globalities - Changing Headgear: The Indian Muslims between Turban, Hat and Fez,’

67.

108 Headgear also played its part in the mechanization of clothes production insomuch as the first example large-scale production, which took place in South London in the eighteenth century, were hats. See Ross, Clothing, 26-27.

109See Tarlo, Clothing Matters, 32-38.

110 Pernau, ‘Shifting Globalities - Changing Headgear: The Indian Muslims between Turban, Hat and Fez,’

255.

4 The Gender of Modernity and Ottoman Dress India as a measure to strengthen colonial rule.¹¹¹

Also from the 1870 onwards, at the same time as the appearance of the sola topi, emergent Indian Muslim middle classes, in their efforts to create respectable styles, employed the Ottoman fez to create an Indian Muslim modernity. Pernau read this use of the fez as the symbol of a newly emerging Islamic piety and of pan-Islamism but to a greater extent as a Pan-Indian symbol.¹¹²

The fez, then, with its cylindrical form, carried a basic principle of bourgeois men's dress as it was established throughout the nineteenth century. The fez itself followed this trend and developed its form towards a more strictly geometrical one. While the kind of fezzes depicted from the time of its introduction under Mahmud II. were quite high and voluminous, on the top broader than at the rim, sometimes without the sharp contours known later, with an enormous tassel further blurring its shape, at the end of the century they had became shorter with a sharper cut with a short unobtrusive tassel that often did not appear in photographs taken from the front.¹¹³ Photographs also suggest not just a chronological development but also a differing of forms according to social strata, as such that later in the century the stiff straight fezzes were worn by military and civil elite and those with a slightly different form, more narrow on the top and a bit shorter, by men from lower classes.¹¹⁴ Nevertheless, I could not tell from my material if certain shapes of the fez had been restricted to certain social strata.

The politics of dress were crucial to postcolonial nationalism and challenged

111 See Ibid.

112 See Ibid., 265. On colonial Muslim modernity see also Ayesha Jalal, ‘Negotiating Colonial Modernity and Cultural Difference: Indian Muslim Conceptions of Community and Nation, 1878–1914’, in Modernity and Culture from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, 1890-1920, ed. Leila Fawaz (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2012), 230–260.

113 Also Abdülmecid (1839-61), Mahmud II's successor, was portrait with a huge fez with a big tassel.

Mahmud II's and Abdülmecid's fezzes might also indicate the prevalence of the ruler's headpiece as a marker of outstanding position. That also becomes apparent by the painting depicting Amhed I (1603-17). His headpiece and the way of presenting it appears not so different from Abdülmecid's. See Jennifer Scarce, ‘Principles of Ottoman Costume’, Costume 22 (1988): 12–31. For this research I could not track how linear the process from softer to the stiffer shapes was. Remarkable in this regard is the fez with which Sultan Abdülaziz (1861-1876?), is generally depicted, which was a very short and conically shaped; it almost looks like a soft felt cap, and is very far from the stiff impression the Fez normally provides. See i.e. Özendes, Photography in the Ottoman Empire, 152. Yet, this was not the only form of fez present at that time, the cylindrical stiff shape also present in the 1860, such as the one worn by Server Paşa in 1865, see Ibid.,151. For an early example of the nineteenth century Ottoman fez see Mustafa Reşid Paşa's portrait in Selçuk Akşin Somel, Historical Dictionary of the Ottoman Empire (Lanham, Md. [u.a.]: Scarecrow Press, 2012), 264. On the shapes of different fezzes see also Ahmed Rasım, ‘Fes Hakkında’, İstişare, no. 7 (Teşrin-i Evvel 1324 (October/November 1908)): 316–20, where he quotes historical sources of fez descriptions.

114See Özendes, Photography in the Ottoman Empire, 155 and 158.

4 The Gender of Modernity and Ottoman Dress

European claims to dictated dress codes that would secure their claim to superiority. As in the Ottoman case, there are many examples of how headgear became a marker of difference and national identity.¹¹⁵ It was a piece of dress not as easily given up as others and marked national affiliation, such as in India where “too it was headcovering which was the most likely to remain unchanged.”¹¹⁶