Originally produced in Egypt as a simple cotton sleepwear set, Kastoor pajamas were never designed to carry symbolism beyond comfort and everyday use. They were ordinary garments, familiar and unremarkable — until history assigned them a role they were never meant to play.
Following the October War of 1973, Israeli captives were returned not in military uniform, but dressed in Kastoor pajamas. In that moment, an object of rest and privacy entered the public eye as a silent marker of defeat. The absence of uniform stripped away rank, identity, and authority, replacing them with vulnerability and exposure.
What made the moment powerful was its restraint. There was no spectacle, no announcement, no staged symbolism. The message was embedded entirely in the image itself — soldiers returning home dressed not for battle, but for sleep.
Kastoor 73 does not attempt to dramatize this event. Instead, it observes how meaning can settle quietly into material. How fabric, through circumstance alone, can become a carrier of memory, humiliation, and reversal of power.
The project treats the garment as a historical witness. Unaltered. Undecorated. Presented as it exists. The weight it carries is not visual embellishment, but context. The story lives in what the object was forced to represent.
In conflicts, history often remembers weapons, strategies, and victories. Kastoor 73 remembers something smaller — a piece of clothing — and asks how such an ordinary object can hold such extraordinary significance.
Power does not always arrive loudly.
Sometimes it is folded.
Sometimes it is worn.
And when the moment comes,
Egypt already has the pajamas ready.