In our House Series we speak to the renowned Shahira Mehrez at her Cairo apartment designed by the legendary architect Hassan Fathy.

Shahira Mehrez is photographed here in a traditional Egyptian peasant dress and the Palestinian Keffiyeh.

What made you become a historian and collector?

My main problem was a problem of identity because of course I was born in 1943 and at the time like now most of the schools were foreign schools so we were very in different foreign languages. We did not speak Arabic at home. I couldn’t read and write properly. I felt I needed to have an identity so I started very early to look for this identity by first studying architecture and then from architecture I went into folklore, and I discovered that what we called folklore in Egypt is not folklore.

It is traditional clothes. When you say folklore it is reductionist.  It is as if it was the production of less of people but when you say tradition, it shows that it is something much more deep and much more important. It is the heritage of thousands of years. This is what I was looking for to architecture. This is why I looked for Hassan Fathy and this is how I started. My first major was chemistry. After I got my degree in chemistry I moved to Islamic architecture and Islamic art. I was looking for the rest of our tradition what I called the lost legacies. From here I started looking at costumes.

Are the costumes Arabic?

Egypt is a very old country and Egyptians are an accumulation of different civilisations. It is ridiculous to say that we are simply Arab or if you are a Christian that you are a Copt. We are the combination ancient Egypt of the Ptolemaic period and that of the Greek Roman period and the Byzantine period and the Islamic period. We are a multi layered culture, and a multi layered civilisation. When you negate one of them, it is as if you were erasing part of your identity. Egyptian people are a complex thing, we are not  monolithic we are multicultural and we are pluralistic.

I knew very well I didn’t want to work in chemistry and I realized that Egypt was disappearing. The Egypt I lived in has very little to do with the Egypt you have now there were still a lot of living traditions that were dying out so this is why I started first with architecture and then architecture. I went into discovering other parts of Egypt. The Egypt that is outside of the capital. It’s not simply Cairo or Alexandria. It is a whole much more complex country where sadly a lot of traditions had disappeared from big urban centres.

Together with my friend Hassan we got out of the big cities we went to the Oasis we went to Siwa, we went to the Red Sea, we went to the discover the towns of the Mediterranean. We discovered different communities that were still practicing old legacies that have now disappeared. We knew that villages that did not have a railway station would be less exposed and therefore might have helped their traditions for longer. These villages were the ones we would drive to.

Why are we collecting and archiving?

Traditions whether costumes, Jewelry, artefacts and the way of living is disappearing and it is not properly recorded because most of the books that you find exist up to now are very poorly documented.

What kind of costume Egypt has been very documented what is well documented at the biggest historic look. Period Egypt Egyptian craft the past two or 300 years of our history are very bad documented so this is what I failed. I could do because I was strained as an Islamic artist historian and therefore, I knew the sources once you study Islamic art you also have to know something about God about art about Bernard, so my studies allowed me to recognize things existing in the 20 century and relate them to things southern years before, so this is what I felt was in the way my duty to show the relation to show which extent it is the simpler people of Egypt. The person that was dwellers the bedroom that have preserved for us the educated people of the urban center our editor that we had for shaken, we changed, started to a different western costume at the time where they still were getting south of old traditions.