Yazidi Traditional Dress

In Toowoomba, the city where I live, there is a large population of Yazidi refugees. These people fled the Yazidi genocide in Iraq in 2014. They come from the Kurdistan region of Iraq and are a minority culture and religion. They are very proud of their culture and heritage and often wear their traditional dress to weddings and other important cultural events.

The traditional Yazidi dress consists of a long, loose, white dress pulled in at the waist with a sash. Over this, the women wear a black waistcoat style garment. On their heads, they have a black turban with a white or lilac veil attached to it. The turban is stuffed and decorated with gold trimmings.

The traditional dress of Kurdistan, the area in which the Yazidi people live, is different. The Kurdish women wear a long dress with long trailing sleeves. Over this they wear a jacket-like overdress that reaches the floor and is split up the sides and opens in the front. The overdress is usually very decorative and has elbow or wrist length sleeves. It is worn open to display the underdress and the whole ensemble is held together with a gold chain belt.

I met many Yazidi ladies while teaching an English language class for refugee women with very low English skills. One of these ladies invited me into her home and we became friends. As we struggled to get to know each other around the massive language barrier we discovered a mutual interest in clothing. She dressed me up in some of her traditional pieces of clothing including her Yazidi turban and some of her formal Kurdish dresses. 

When she discovered that I could sew, she asked me to make several items for her; normal clothing like a pantsuit. But one day she asked me to copy one of her traditional Kurdish dresses. She gave me the dress she wanted me to copy and the fabric to make it from and I went from there, hoping that we had communicated properly.

I used the original dress to draft a pattern to work from and then cut out the fabric. When I was finished, the dress was an exact copy of the original except the trailing section of the sleeves were shorter due to not having enough fabric. My friend paired the dress with her gold belt and intended to wear it to a Yazidi wedding. That seemed like a successful sewing job to me!