This paper examines the importance of dress to the construction of Egyptian identity in the interwar period, a period of central importance to the formation of Egyptian national culture. Unlike Turkey and Iran, Egypt did not enact legislation mandating wearing the suit and tarboush, forms of dress that had become associated with progress and the self-consciously modern, middle-strata efendiyya. However, as the twentieth century progressed, the stigma attached to the gown and turban of the religious scholar increased significantly, with growing numbers of students at al-Azhar wanting not only to transfer to civil schools, but also to take on the dress and title of the efendiyya. For instance, Taha Husayn writes in the second volume of his memoir about wanting to to join the “lay world of the tarboush” because he was “sick to death of the turban and all that it implied.” The symbolic importance of dress in interwar Egypt is further demonstrated by the 1926 student strike at Cairo’s Dar al-‘Ulum teacher-training. Dar al-‘Ulum students were officially classed as shaykhs and expected to wear religious dress, but in the first quarter of the twentieth century an increasing number of them had started using the title efendi and wearing the suit and tarboush similar to graduates of other higher civil schools. The strike was brought on by a government ban on graduates of Dar al-‘Ulum from doing this, supposedly because of confusion related to having the same person listed as a shaykh in some documents and an efendi in others. The strike eventually resulted in a government decree which officially changed the dress of the school. Interestingly, however, around the same time as the strike, graduates of other civil schools petitioned to switch from the tarboush to western-style hat. The centrality of efendi dress to Egyptian national identity is shown further by the ability of early Islamists, such as Hasan al-Banna, to establish themselves as religious leaders while wearing suits and tarboushes, combined with religiously-inspired beard. The paper closes with an investigation of early forms of neo-Islamic and hybrid (religious-civil) dress among Egyptian Islamists. This paper extends Birgit Meyer’s work on aesthetics to show how dress can assist individuals to establish membership or leadership of a social or religious group. It is based on analysis of an extensive range of Arabic-language memoirs and periodicals, amassed as part of a book-length work on the place of Islam in Egyptian national culture.