Scarf
Description
[Africa, North Africa, Egypt, Assiut, Egyptian maker] Egyptians may have innovated <em>tulle-bi-telli</em> (“net with metal,” also called <em>assiut</em>) after the French introduced machine-made netted fabric (tulle) in the late 1800s. It drew from <em>telli,</em> 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.
Cross-references (2)
- Wikidata Q79927111 tier-1
- CMA-id 147672 tier-2
About this record's data
- From the source institution — accession, description, dimensions, and dating are as catalogued by Cleveland Museum of Art (Egyptian).
- AI-inferred — the image-analysis panel (deities, names, signs) is machine-generated and may be wrong.
- Approximate location — most map points are plotted at the site centroid, not the exact findspot.
- Inferred links — cross-references marked with a match method other than explicit-source-field were matched by us, not stated by the source.