ABSTRACT
The evolution of the Algerian art of dress in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is intertwined with the circulation of merchants, diplomats, and migrants who conveyed various commodities across the Mediterranean world, together with new techniques, knowledge, and styles. Caught between the Ottoman and Spanish empires, the people of Algiers were able to design specific forms of dress to reinvent their social life through their appearance. Migration movements from Spain to North Africa actively contributed to this flow of people, things, ideas, and know-how. New variations of ceremonial and everyday caftans and jackets, unusual associations of sarouel pants with silk fouta pareo and extravagant headdresses, among which the elongated sarma, determined the increased sophistication of local people’s sartorial practices. Far from resulting only from the overlapping of cultural exchanges and the circulation of foreign luxury goods, however, Algerine sartorial practices embodied the ability of local people to generate new patterns of innovation and consumption within unstable political contexts.
