Scarf (early 1900s): Art, History and Details

Scarf (early 1900s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Egyptians may have innovated tulle-bi-telli (“net with metal,” also called assiut) after the French introduced machine-made netted fabric (tulle) in the late 1800s. It drew from telli, an earlier metal embroidery technique. Diamond and rectangle designs formed by knotting flattened silver wire into black tulle indicate this scarf’s early age in the genre. Urban Egyptian singers and dancers performed in heavy, shimmering tulle-bi-telli costumes during the late 1800s through the mid-1900s. Elite Egyptian city dwellers also wore it. Similar ones were sold at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and to tourists in Egypt, a possible origin for this example. In the US, tulle-bi-telli scarves were made into home decor and 1920s flapper-style clothing.

Object facts

• Title: Scarf
• Date: early 1900s
• Culture: Africa, North Africa, Egypt, Assiut, Egyptian maker
• Type: Garment
• Technique: Probably cotton and silver-plated copper foil
• Dimensions: Overall: 221 x 82.2 cm (87 x 32 3/8 in.)
• Collection: Textiles
• Department: Textiles
• Accession number: 1974.1058

A detail from the museum

There is so much metal in this shawl that it weighs nearly 4.5 pounds.

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. Edward N. Dekker, Sr.

Further reading listed by the museum

• Gillow, John. African Textiles: Colour and Creativity Across a Continent. London: Thames & Hudson, 2003.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.