A special 90-minutes webinar with Richard Wilding, Trustee, Mansoojat Foundation speaking on Traditional costumes and heritage of Saudi Arabia in conversation with Dr. Reem El Mutwalli, The Zay Initiative’s Founder.

The costumes and jewellery of Saudi Arabia reveal a great diversity of regional and tribal identities, reflecting the Kingdom’s contrasting urban and rural, settled and nomadic, desert and mountain environments.

Over the past eleven years Richard Wilding has worked with Mansoojat, a group of Saudi women in Jeddah, to document the Kingdom’s traditional costumes and heritage. The results of this work have been published in Traditional Costumes of Saudi Arabia (ACC Art Books), a 320 page book released in 2021.

In this talk, richly illustrated with his photography, Richard Wilding describes the research trips undertaken with Mansoojat throughout the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, his photography of the Mansoojat costume collection and the process of editing the resulting publication. After the presentation, Richard will be joined by his Mansoojat colleagues in Jeddah to answer questions from the audience.