Talli is a traditional Egyptian art of embroidery using metal thread, usually gold or silver, to create designs on tulle, a fabric that resembles a net. Black tulle is usually used as a background for talli work, with the word in Arabic meaning “to mesh with metal”.

 Talli products like dresses, blouses, and shawls are associated particularly with Sohag in Upper Egypt along with Assiut. However, they mostly date back to the late 19th century, whereas the craft is much older and is associated with ancient Egypt.

It is said that some samples of talli clothes have been found in the tombs of the ancient Egyptians. Today, it is practised as a traditional handicraft by women in Upper Egypt. In some villages in Sohag, it is still a tradition in some areas for a bride to wear a talli wedding dress that is then passed down to her daughter and granddaughter. 

Each pattern in a gown or shawl made of talli is a symbol and carries social meanings. For instance, if a bride’s dress has palm trees and camels on it, these could be a symbol of the journey a bride takes until she reaches her husband’s home.  

The craft of talli has been struggling for some time, however, in terms of recognition on both a national and international level. In order to encourage and preserve this traditional craft, the government has intervened to organise fairs in Upper Egypt and in Cairo, including the Turathna Exhibition (Our Heritage) where women working in the field can display and sell their products. 

It was after some other countries started to claim that the art of talli was their art and that it was not Egyptian that the government started to take action to ensure that talli products are registered as Egyptian trademarks. 

This year, the National Council for Women (NCW) in partnership with the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) has started a project called “Intellectual Property and Entrepreneurship for Women, Empowering Women in Local Communities through Intellectual Property, Collective Branding, Talli Craft Sector in Sohag, Egypt” that has registered the Egyptian traditional handicraft with a collective trademark (talli Al-Sohagy and talli Shandawil), an NCW press release said.

The project consists of five stages: assessing needs, identifying beneficiaries, raising awareness, building capacities, and establishing and registering collective and individual intellectual property rights. Twenty-seven women working in the field have been trained and 18 trademarks granted for craftswomen who took part in the project.

The aim of the project is to complete what women working in the field of talli have started in creating a sustainable structure to facilitate the registration of their rights. It has worked on providing them with intellectual property rights (collective trademarks) as well as management, branding and marketing rights for the benefit of women-led companies and craftswomen in local communities such as Sohag and to establish sustainable links between their businesses. 

In the past, female entrepreneurs could face challenges in protecting their products as they were sold through merchants or galleries without appropriate trademarks, which led to no information being available about the artist who made them. The NCW-WIPO project is keen to educate project beneficiaries in local communities about the importance of intellectual property and its value to their businesses and to provide them with practical and accessible tools.

The NCW cooperated with UN cultural agency UNESCO in 2005 and 2006 to train young women artists, craftswomen, documentarians, and teachers to record and document these traditional crafts. Small projects were established to provide job opportunities for women working in the field. 

In 2002, the council launched a project, “Supporting the Role of Women as Preservers and Workers of Traditional Crafts”, in the Assiut and Sohag governorates that worked on documenting the craft with photographs and videos, collecting various models and motifs, and introducing talli tools and materials. It also published a booklet on the history of the art. 

A website was designed and dedicated to the craft, and fairs were organised for talli craftswomen to sell their products.

TALLI BRANDING: Samah Al-Feki is a talli trainer and the owner of a talli clothes factory in Sohag who has taken part in the training sessions of the NCW-WIPO project and was herself granted a trademark. 

She described how she started to work in the field, what the impact of the project has been on her work, and what she aspires to after participating. 

“Talli has existed in Egypt for a long time, at least from the era of Mohamed Ali Pasha and even before that. We inherited it from our grandmothers. It has started to disappear, however, as in the past talli clothing was worn by kings and sultans. When it started to be worn by oriental dancers and singers, it became unsuitable for the kings, who refused to wear it,” Al-Feki said, adding that in the past the material was also exported to other countries.

According to Al-Feki, pieces of Egyptian talli clothing are displayed in museums. One example is a piece displayed in the British Museum in London that says made in Egypt on it, encouraging the curiosity of many visitors.

“In the 1970s, UNESCO sought the origins of this piece and found that there was an old woman living on Shandawil Island who made such pieces of talli clothing. When they visited her, they asked her to show them how she made her work, so she started demonstrating to them how the stitches are made.”

“After that, they asked her to train 10 girls in the work. These 10 girls each trained 10 other girls until the craft was revitalised and spread,” she said.

There have also been attempts by scholars to collect as much information as possible about traditional handicrafts in order to document them. These have included Nawal Al-Messiri, who collected and documented talli designs in books like her The Traditional History of the Talli Craft in Egypt.

“I live in Cairo, but I am from Shandawil originally. I wanted to have something to occupy me, so I decided to learn talli. Then I started to make products and market them,” Al-Feki said.

“I started a project after I was trained by some NGOs, both local and international. I was trained by the Local Development Programme [LDP] in Upper Egypt for five years. They connected us with fair organisers and gave us both technical and financial support. I was also trained by the government’s Micro, Small, and Medium-Sized Enterprises Sector (MSME), which gave me the opportunity to participate in the Turathna fair,” she added.

Local organisations in Sohag started to market products for Al-Feki and her colleagues, like the Upper Egypt Development Authority, the Project Development Authority (PDA), and the governorate of Sohag. Some 25 professional talli craftswomen were able to display their products inside and outside Egypt with the help of these organisations. 

The Industrial Development Authority provided Al-Feki with a shop in the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation (NMEC) in Cairo to sell her products. “We also worked with the World Bank in cooperation with the LDP,” she said, adding that she is also a member of the board of trustees of the Cooperative Society for Handicrafts and Heritage.

“Then I took part in the NCW-WIPO programme, in which they taught us what property rights are. They focused on teaching us our legal rights after we were granted brands. We learnt what to do if our brands were stolen, the time a brand lasts, and how to renew our brand,” she said. 

The programme also included communications segments and how to deal with other people. “The course was excellent,” she commented.

“Members of the NCW visited us at the Turathna fair, and they organised a workshop for us in which we were told we would be granted trademarks for our work. They trained us for six months on collective Egyptian brands. This was after one Arab country claimed that talli was one of its traditional crafts.”

While there are still some problems to be addressed, the handicraft of talli lives on, according to Al-Feki. “We have a problem with the availability of the right thread of the right quality. We still import it unfortunately. There have been attempts by various factories to make thread for us in Egypt, but it was either too thick or hard or the colours would fade and could not be used in our work.”

“The LDP organised a Zoom meeting with an Indian manufacturer who sent us samples to work with that were of very good quality. We even agreed on a price, but the project stopped as the dollar price was changing,” she said, adding that there have also been efforts to improve the handicraft’s textile base. 

“Work is continuing on manufacturing more raw materials for us in Egypt, since there is only one factory that produces them in the country,” Al-Feki said. This is not enough for a growing talli product market that is now popular with foreigners inside and outside Egypt. 

“The idea of branding a traditional product will enable Egyptian traditional culture to be better known worldwide. It is not the right of any other country to claim talli as its traditional craft, while the designs and the stitches in all the products are Egyptian, even the needles are traditional Egyptian tools,” Al-Feki said.

 “It will help me and my fellow craftswomen to document our work and the place it was made in, Shandawil Island.”

“But we still need to document talli as an Egyptian handicraft in UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage List.”

REDISCOVERING TALLI: Amal Sayed is a talli craftswoman, shop owner, and now a brand owner after she was granted a brand through the NCW-WIPO programme. 

“I am a graduate of the Faculty of Law, but I always had a passion for embroidery, knitting, and crochet. I joined a family planning project at the end of the 1990s, which was part of a programme to raise people’s awareness about overpopulation and its negative effects on development. I decided to organise talli workshops to teach women to take part in the campaign after I learnt it myself,” she said.

Sayed did not know much about talli at first but managed to learn from her aunt. “My aunt taught me the art of talli. She showed me how to use the needle correctly and how to stitch correctly. She told me that many of the clothes people wore in the past were talli garments,” she said.

“She told me that merchants in the market would provide people with the raw materials and then take the work after they had finished it and sell it for them. However, later this disappeared.”

After mastering the craft of talli, Sayed developed her own project. “I started my project with only LE50, with which I bought some raw materials like thread and cloth to work with. I stared with about six women who joined my classes and made talli products. Then I started looking for a place to display my work.”

“At first, I would sell it in the fairs organised by the larger project, but I was not yet able to price my products. Then I was told that the PDA was organising fairs, and I took part in one of them in Cairo,” she said, adding that she also took part in fairs organised by the Ministry of Local Development. 

“The ministry organised training courses for us and gave us allowances. I then joined the NCW-UNESCO project called ‘Supporting the Role of Women as Preservers and Workers of Traditional Crafts’. After that, people started to recognise our work more,” Sayed said, adding that some of the talli work she inherited from her family is now displayed in the NCW Museum. 

Sayed faced some difficulties at first since some of her family did not want her to work in the field of talli. “People did not understand what we were doing. They wanted me to work as a lawyer,” she said, adding that eventually she managed to convince them that this was her passion. 

“Now I have more than 600 women working with me in different crafts like talli, embroidery, and crochet. These complement each other. This sparked an idea in my head: I thought why don’t we mix these crafts together and make something more modern out of them for people to wear? So, I began to innovate in the designs of the talli clothes I make.”

Sayed has taken part in a fashion show in Uzbekistan that was part of an international handicrafts conference in which 26 countries participated. She represented Egypt through her talli products. She has also taken part in a fair in Italy organised for traditional handicrafts in the Mediterranean countries.

“I attended a fair organised by the Egyptian Embassy in Kuwait. It was there that I met Mohamed Adel from the WIPO, who later told me about the NCW-WIPO project. Someone from the NCW contacted me, and we took part in a fashion show and fair in Geneva in Switzerland. Everyone there was amazed at our work,” she said.

“Through the project, we attended three training courses in six months which included the concept of a trademark and how to make one and choose its name, how to evaluate ourselves, and how to market our brands,” Sayed said, adding that they also attended a fair organised by the British University in Egypt and the NCW at its Cairo headquarters. 

 Today, they have customers from many nationalities and backgrounds. “Foreigners, Egyptians, and Arabs all buy our work. However, those who buy it the most are Egyptians, especially young women. One girl wanted to wear something unique for her graduation party, for example, and she chose to buy a talli dress from my shop,” Sayed said, adding that her work is now being marketed on Facebook.  

The amount of time it takes to make a piece of talli depends on the amount of work and how talented and fast a craftswoman is. “A talli veil could take about a month to make, but this could be reduced to a week if the person making it is very skilled and fast,” she said. 

“The NCW and the WIPO advertised the project very well. The WIPO did a lot to publicise our brand. As a result, people would buy our work for the sake of obtaining a unique piece of this rare handmade work. We only make one piece of each design, so people take home a unique piece that is not repeated,” Sayed said.

“In the past, Egypt made clothes for the whole world and had a direct influence on fashion. I would like to see something like this come about again today, and for Egypt to influence fashion like it used to,” she concluded.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 19 December, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly