A Comparative Study of Men's Clothes in Travel Memoirs and Drawings of Safavid Period

European expeditionary groups who visited Iran in Safavid period wrote about various topics of Iran’s society in Safavid period and left reports as travel memoirs which later were considered seriously in reviews and studies of historians. Persian painting has always been a precise and appropriate tool for researchers and painters. Savafid painters also helped a lot in recognizing some parts of the cultural and social history of that time through representing the details of men’s clothes. These details are useful in showing how to wear the different parts of men’s clothes; since men’s clothes were composed of various layers and components.
The present research aims to answer the questions regarding how men’s clothing in Safavid era is reflected in travel memoirs and drawings of this period and to what extent they coincide with each other. Whether we can use the travel memoirs to study the men’s clothing in Safavid period? And whether these travel memoirs are reliable to study the clothes? For investigating this issue and hypotheses based on, the most important travel memoirs written in Safavid period have been studied and their contents regarding men’s clothes have been investigated comparatively with drawings of Safavid period. This research is a theoretical one and a mixed method of descriptive-analytical-comparative has been used and the data is collected from library documents.
The results of this research imply that the contents of Europeans’ travel memoirs in this period can be considered as a written and reliable source about men’s clothes in Safavid period; particularly with drawings of this period, they can be regarded as valid documents.