What did Iraqis wear in the 1990s, and how has Iraqi fashion changed since? How did the lifespan of a shirt shrink from five years to just five wears? This is the story of Iraqi clothing, shaped by war and economic collapse and decades of overlapping crises, from the sanctions era to today.

“We barely had enough to eat, let alone think about clothes.” 

Umm Alaa (52) from Dhi Qar, in southern Iraq, sums up the relationship Iraqis had to clothing during the Iran–Iraq war of the 1980s and the era of sanctions during the 1990s following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. 

Years of hunger hollowed out daily life. For many Iraqis, the question was not what to wear, but how to secure food and necessities, especially for the poorest families and public-sector workers whose salaries could not even cover a single meal. 

During those years, people devised countless ways to make clothes last down to the last thread. Garments were reused, repurposed, and reshaped again and again. A single item might pass through several lives, worn in different forms and by different bodies, over many years. 

From fabric to fabric 

“Ready-made clothes are nicer—but if you can’t afford them, you sew at home.” 

As a child, Umm Alaa did not understand what the international economic blockade on Iraq meant. Instead, she lived it. Choice, abundance, variety – these were foreign concepts. From the windows of shops, she dreamed of colourful, patterned dresses and the outfits worn by girls her age. But as a child from a family that, in her words, could not afford even “a glass of sugar,” she wore clothes sewn by her mother and stitched by her father, a tailor, to save the cost of labour. 

Trips to the bazzaz—the fabric seller—were the only option. There, she would choose cloth that her father’s sewing machine would transform into a dress resembling what she dreamed of. 

A single dress could cost a month’s income or more. Like most families, hers turned to tailoring. But for large, low-income households, even this was expensive. Asmaa (45) from Diyala in northeastern Iraq grew up in a family of seven children. Each child, she says, was allotted “one outfit for inside the home and one for going out per season.” Their mother bought fabric, and the neighbourhood tailor sewed it. 

Girls learned basic sewing early on, Asmaa recalls. They made their own clothes or redesigned old garmets. Scarcity, she says, forced them to invent beautiful, striking outfits in their own way. 

One time, unable to afford a dress for a special occasion, Asmaa improvised. She took a long skirt and turned it into a strapless-style dress. “The maxi style was in fashion,” she says. “I took a very long old skirt, pulled it up to my chest, fixed it with a floral belt, and wore a jacket over it. Everyone was shocked.” 

She went all out with her makeup and hairdo. People fell in love with the dress. She never revealed the secret, telling them instead that she had bought it from Al-Nahr Street, one of Baghdad’s most famous shopping streets. A cousin, she adds, also made a jacket from an old floral blanket inherited from relatives. 

In the 1990s, Iraqi clothes were shared, remade, and worn until the last thread. Once mended, shared, and remade, clothes in Iraq were shaped by sanctions, scarcity, and survival. 

Aqeel (49), a tailor from Dhi Qar, remembers the demand for custom tailoring in those years, especially after Japanese sewing machines like Brother became common. They rarely broke down and could handle all kinds of fabric. 

Even Aqeel’s own family, he says, chose the cheapest fabrics they could afford. As the sanctions tightened, Iraqis had to go beyond simple mending or patching. One garment had to be reinvented multiple times. 

Turning the cuff 

In the years of hunger and scarcity, Asmaa says, clothes were never thrown away. They passed from older to younger siblings, between cousins, relatives, and even neighbours. 

When fabric wore thin, it was given a new life. Tailors used a small tool known as a fattaka—a seam ripper—to undo the stitching, flip the cloth to its less-worn side, and sew it again, either at home or at the tailor’s shop. This process, known as “turning the cuff,” extended a garment’s life, often passing it on to a new wearer. 

When even that side wore out, the fabric still wasn’t useless. It became cleaning rags, mattress stuffing, or floor mops. 

Limited resources pushed women and girls to redesign, adapt, and creatively transform old clothes—turning necessity into quiet acts of ingenuity and style. 

Asmaa remembers the pride she felt wearing a borrowed white school shirt on Iraqi Students Day, lent to her by a cousin. It was loose, but she felt overjoyed. “The shirt was shining,” she says. “That day I didn’t eat or even drink water. I was scared to hug my friend in case I ruined it.” 

Only later did she realise how different she looked from her classmates, whose shirts had yellowed from years of repeated use. She felt like an odd note in the group. 

School pinafores, the sleeveless uniforms worn over shirts, once worn through on both sides, were turned into bags that girls used for years—then into floor rags. “They’d become cleaning cloths or mattress stuffing,” Asmaa says. Some families even used them as fuel for heating or cooking. 

Clothing exchanges weren’t limited to special occasions. Sisters and cousins swapped outfits even for family outings, creating a sense of abundance through sharing. 

Abu Hussein (60), a fabric merchant from Dhi Qar with over forty years in the trade, remembers the strength of Iraq’s domestic textile industry. State-owned factories across the country in Kut, Hilla, Diwaniya, Mosul, and Baghdad once produced high-quality fabrics under the Ministry of Industry and Minerals, some even exported abroad. That began to change in the early 2000s. 

Clothing post-2003 

Following the US invasion, most infrastructure—factories, workshops, state institutions—was destroyed. Government neglect and entrenched corruption finished what war had started, bringing production to a halt. 

A new relationship between Iraqis and clothing emerged, shaped by economic liberalisation after the fall of the previous regime. Imports soon dwarfed exports. 

In the past three years alone, Iraq has imported more than $9 billion worth of fabrics and clothing. According to statistics from the Kurdistan Region’s Ministry of Industry and Trade, imports between 2016 and 2018 reached $5.8 billion. 

Clothing and fabric now come from 24 countries, but 84.5 percent of imports are concentrated in five: China, Turkey, Iran, the UAE, and India. China alone accounted for $4.4 billion in those three years, followed by Turkey at around $2.5 billion, Iran at $977 million, the UAE at $656 million, and India at over $93 million. 

Global markets and the fast fashion industry brought cheaper, trendier clothes—especially appealing to young people eager to experiment with global styles. Over time, most Iraqis abandoned tailoring in favour of ready-made garments, which are faster and easier to obtain. 

Custom tailoring involves multiple steps: buying fabric, taking measurements, fitting sessions—days for everyday clothes, weeks or months for school uniforms, workwear, or special occasions. Before holidays, bookings had to be made far in advance. 

Ready-made clothes, by contrast, can be bought on impulse, or with a few taps on a screen. 

Social media, influencers, and fast fashion accelerated consumption, shortening fashion cycles and shifting value away from durability toward constant visual novelty. 

Abu Hussein says fabric buyers today are limited to certain groups: “Mostly older women who still prefer to sew, or people with special sizes who need clothes that fit them properly.” 

With Iraqi fabrics gone, cheap Chinese textiles dominate the market. “Sometimes we say it’s Turkish or German,” he admits. “It’s a sales lie.” Some traders, he says, mislead customers, and even new shop workers, to move stock that has lost ground to ready-made clothing. 

The younger generation, he notes, relies almost entirely on imported garments, especially since the internet and social media entered daily life. 

A new outfit every day 

According to Aliaa Al-Agili, an Iraqi image and fashion consultant, fashion cycles are driven less by creativity than by industrial demand. Trends constantly reproduce themselves in new forms, shaped by market needs, with designers adding contemporary touches to attract consumers. 

Economic and social shifts can influence fashion, she explains, but they don’t always produce something new. Sometimes styles are simply reused as they are. During the sanctions, for example, girls wore their mothers’ clothes—but this was a local response to hardship, not a global trend. 

Asmaa sees today’s consumption patterns as the result of social media pressure. Influencers appear in new outfits in every post. “In our time, a style would last two to five years, or we’d copy an actress from magazines or TV,” she says. “Now there’s a new trend every two days.” 

The result is stockpiling—people buying whatever is trending, even if it’s cheap, fake, or poorly made. She recalls her daughter’s first year of university: “She bought striped tops in every colour. They were cheap, but now they’re all stuffed in the closet because the trend ended. They were worn a few times, that’s it.” 

Repeated outfits are often linked to economic status—a belief rooted in the deprivation of the sanctions years, when financial comfort became associated with never wearing the same thing twice. One Iraqi poet spoke on a podcast about being criticised for wearing the same clothes “five times” during a period of financial hardship. 

The pressure affects many—students, employees, especially women. Quality matters less than avoiding repetition. 

While some Iraqis continue to buy clothes shaped by social pressure, others are beginning to step out of the cycle—questioning trends, repetition, and what clothing is meant to signal. 

Layla (25) from Baghdad says she used to spend heavily just to keep up with her peers’ appearance, regardless of quality. “I was hungry but shopping,” she says. “I always felt like I had nothing trendy to wear.” 

Sabah (30), a clothing shop owner from the city of Samarra, says he follows social media trends closely, importing limited quantities—50 or 100 pieces—because demand can vanish overnight. Markets now look increasingly alike, he says, and stocking something different is risky. Trendy items are cheap: around 25,000 dinars (around USD 20) for a dress, 10,000 for trousers (around USD 8), 5,000 (around USD 4) for a shirt. Higher-quality shops exist, but at higher prices. 

Despite her frustration with her children’s consumption habits, Asmaa doesn’t want them to live what she lived during the sanctions. She herself buys many clothes she never wears, justifying it by her job as a schoolteacher, where wearing something different each day feels necessary to keep up appearances. 

Layla, meanwhile, has stopped buying what she doesn’t need. She now invests in better-quality pieces. “It’s not my problem anymore,” she says. “I stopped caring about people’s comments and then realised that no one actually cares.” She discovered she had been running an imaginary race, trying to assemble a new outfit every single day.