فاس

The fez — the cylindrical red felt hat with a flat top and a tassel — takes its name from Fez (Fās, فاس), the ancient Moroccan city founded in 789 CE. The connection between the hat and the city is traditionally explained by the dyeing process: crimson dye made from berries of the Kermes oak, abundant in the region around Fez, was used to color the felt a deep red. Whether the hat was actually invented in Fez, or merely made its characteristic color there, is debated. Hats of similar shape appear in Ottoman records from earlier periods, and the fez may have evolved gradually across the southern and eastern Mediterranean. What is certain is that by the early nineteenth century, the hat was widely known by the city's name in European languages.

The fez's most consequential chapter was its appointment as mandatory headwear by Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II in 1826, as part of his sweeping Tanzimat modernization program. Mahmud abolished the Janissary corps, revamped the military, and — in the same spirit of uniform standardization — replaced the diverse turbans and headwear of the Ottoman military and civil service with the fez. The logic was partly practical (turbans of different styles encoded a social hierarchy Mahmud was dismantling) and partly symbolic: the fez did not require prostration during prayer in the same way as brimmed Western hats, making it a compromise between Islamic practice and Ottoman modernization. A hat was drafted into the service of empire-building.

The irony of Mahmud's 'modernizing' fez was that it was manufactured not in the Ottoman Empire but in Austria. The fez-making industry centered in Strakonice, Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), produced millions of fezzes for the Ottoman market throughout the nineteenth century. Austrian industrialists grew wealthy supplying the head-covering that symbolized Ottoman tradition. The fez was a locally mandated garment produced industrially abroad — a globalization of dress that preceded the word's modern meaning. Meanwhile, within the Ottoman Empire, the fez became a marker of Islamic and Ottoman identity, particularly in contrast to the 'Western' brimmed hat.

In 1925, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, having established the Turkish Republic, banned the fez by law in a dress reform that made Western-style brimmed hats mandatory. The Hat Law (Şapka Kanunu) was not merely a fashion directive — it was a statement about civilization, modernity, and the break with Ottoman Islamic governance. Men who refused to remove their fezzes were prosecuted; some were executed. A hat that Mahmud II had mandated to modernize the empire was now banned to modernize the republic. The fez had traveled from local dye-tradition to imperial symbol to banned relic in less than two centuries. Today it is worn primarily as cultural dress in North Africa and by performers and actors representing the Ottoman period.