Tatreez in Conversation: Six Dresses, Six Stories

Date: Thursday, September 25, 2025
Time: 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM EST
Location: Online, Zoom link will be emailed 24 hours prior to event
Instructor: Wafa Ghnaim, Dress Historian, Researcher & Educator
Registration Fee: Sliding scale, starting at $10

Description: Until the mid-twentieth century, the dress of the Palestinian people was descriptive of identity; first by societal segment (city dweller, villager or nomad), and then by the region in which the wearer came. Within each regional style, finer distinctions in women’s dress (thobe) were expressed that shared the maker’s life and the natural world around her. Palestinian women recorded their identity in their thobe with embroidery (tatreez) through a shared illustrative language of embroidered patterns, stitching techniques and thread colors.

After al-Nakba and throughout the 1960s, the thobe transformed into a reflection of national identity. It no longer signified a woman’s village, tribe, or town, her marital status, or her familial lineage, but instead bore the material impact of colonialism, occupation, war, and exile. While the loss of regional identity in dress is registered as part of the violence Palestinians endured during al-Nakba, this shift also marks a moment of unity in Palestinian communities newly dispersed and scattered across the region. The six-branch dress, a dress construction that became a governing style by the 1960s, showcases innovative approaches by women at the time to protect a vital component to Palestinian cultural heritage.

This lecture will focus on the six dresses presented in Tatreez Inheritance, examining their material characteristics, their paths to the United States, and the ways in which one can employ the art of “close looking”—a skill Wafa learned from her mother at a young age—to uncover evidence of a woman’s personality, vocation, life, and sense of pride.