This paper explores the design, production, and political significance of Mahdist jibba during the late nineteenth century and its collection, display, and re-fashioning during the twentieth. The jibba is a garment popularized by Muhammad Ahmed al-Mahdi. This garment marked embodied belief in the Nile valley, served as an artifact of diplomatic exchange across the Sahel and the Red Sea, featured in British propaganda portraiture meant to popularize military intervention in Sudan (1896-1898), and became a prized artifact in museum collections, ranging from small regimental museums in rural Britain to the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My paper demonstrates how the Mahdist jibba has been a contested political symbol in every incarnation, from its origin to the present. The Mahdist jibba began as purposely-ragged cotton garment worn in early 1880s and was later fashioned into highly stylized incarnations as a demarcation of rank and status within the Mahdist state. It used color, fabric, and style as a visual and material marker of piety, regional affiliation, and economic isolationism. Yet woven into the very fabric of the garment were the inherent contradictions of this state: the pretense of piety transformed into the grandeur of the jibba, the state’s claim to level regional difference stood in marked contrast to the distinctly regional variations of the garment, and the presence of fabrics produced from outside Sudan contradicted claims of commercial sequestration. Arabic sources on cotton production and dress, military photography of prisoners (1886-1898), and acquisition reports from museums (1886-1915), show the transformation of the jibba into a trophy, tourist souvenir, period costume, and highly sought piece of Islamic art. In the years leading up to the British conquest of Sudan in 1898, European prisoners who escaped the Mahdist state dressed in the jibba and posed for portrait photographs and paintings to ceremony appropriate the power of the Mahdist state while at the same time discrediting its sovereignty. This unusual source is a three-dimensional text that can be read to understand politics within the Mahdist state, visual propaganda used to justify imperial interventions, and the legacies of the Mahdiyya in Sudan, Britain, and the wider world.