Women’s Clothes

Women’s traditional clothes are widely diversified and divided into several classes, general long and flowing, made of luxurious textiles mostly made of natural silk that came in lively plain and attractive colours with a great deal of embroidery with genuine gold and silver threads. There were also silk and cotton threads of different colours. Those dresses were quite often inlaid with precious stones, beads, metal flakes and coins.

A woman used to wear two or three pieces of external clothing at a time. A woman wears the dress, called ‘darra’ah’ and wears a flowing, baggy robe (thawb) over it. The most famous robe is thawb alneshel. Outdoors, a woman wears a third piece, the cloak or aba’ah which used to be called aldaffah. It covered the woman from top the top of her head to the feet.

There is a special dress for little girls, it is called albakhnaq, and covers the head and chest, and flows over the back.