I became enamored of this traditional dress as I plunged deeper into research for my cyanotype collage project on the women of North Africa. I discovered a treasure-trove of images, not only studio photographs of women marking their transition into married life, but also paintings by illustrious artists from the 18th and 19th Century’s Orientalist school, such as Eugene Delacroix, who chose to represent women of the Orient as Jewesses festooned in this traditional costume. I collected these images over several years, waiting to touch them with my own hand, and somehow transform them into a meaningful body of work. The gold embellishments on the dresses were the inspiration for the extensive use of gold and copper leaf. I added photo fixer to the metal sheets to corrode the surface as a nod to my own intervention as a photographer, and to communicate that this is part of a way of life that has itself been lost over time. In obscuring the backgrounds of the original studio portraits and paintings, I created my own visual framework for gathering the women of the photographs and the women of the paintings together and harness a more focused, feminine dialogue – with viewers and with each other. The book structure aggregates them into an intentional collection, while its flag format allows those engaged with it to view the cards interactively in any order (front-to-back, back-to-front, anywhere in-between), to view the women as a group with a common tradition, or as individuals each marking her own personal rite of passage in the universal role of the bride.