Description

Shalwar are gathered at the waist and held up by a drawstring or an elastic band. The pants can be wide and baggy or more narrow, and even made of fabric cut on the bias.
The kameez is usually cut straight and flat; older qamees use a traditional cut, as shown in the illustration above. Modern qamees are more likely to have European-inspired set-in sleeves. The neckline, sleeves and bottom edge (daaman) are often decorated with embroidery or lace.
For women, an integral part of shalwar kameez is the dupatta — a long shawl wrapped around body or covering the head in more conservative families. The shalwar kameez fashion has revolved around the cuts and lengths of shalwar and of qamees and the print styles and color palette of the dupatta. Most women in Afghanistan were forced by the Taliban to hide their faces even when wearing a shalwar kameez.
In Britain, especially during the last two decades, the garment has been transformed from an everyday garment worn by immigrant South Asian women to one with mainstream, and even high-fashion, appeal.^[1]

Etymology and history

Shalwar kameez dates back to the 12th century, the Islamic or the Iranian era, which was then followed by the Mughal empire.
Garments cut like the traditional kameez are known in many cultures; according to Dorothy Burnham, of the Royal Ontario Museum, the "seamless shirt," woven in one piece on warp-weighted looms, was superseded in early Roman times by cloth woven on vertical looms and carefully pieced so as not to waste any cloth. 10th century cotton shirts recovered from the Egyptian desert are cut much like the traditional kameez or the contemporary Egyptian jellabah or galabia.^[2]
The pants, or shalawar, are known as shalvaar qameez (شلوار قمیض) in Urdu, salvaar (शलवार क़मीज़) in Hindi, salvar (ਸਲਵਾਰ ਕ਼ਮੀਜ਼) in Indian Punjabi and salvaar or shalvaar (શલવાર કમીઝ) in Gujarati. The word comes from the Persian: شلوار, meaning pants.
The shirt, kameez or qamiz, takes its name from the Arabic qamis. There are two main hypotheses regarding the origin of the Arabic word, namely:

1. that Arabic qamis is derived from the Latin camisia (shirt), which in its turn comes from the Proto-Indo-European kem (‘cloak’).^[3][4]
2. that Mediaeval Latin camisia is a borrowing through Hellenistic Greek kamision from the Central Semitic root “qmṣ”, represented by Ugaritic qmṣ (‘garment’) and Arabic qamīṣ (‘shirt’).

English spelling

Transliterations starting from Urdu, Persian, Pashto and Turkish languages use "sh". Both spellings are found in common English usage. Transliterations starting from Punjabi and Hindi often render the sibilant sound at the start of salwar/shalwar as an "s". The shalwar spelling seems to be most common in Canada and the United Kingdom, and is the preferred spelling in the Oxford English Dictionary. Salwar seems to be more common in the US and is found at many online stores selling shalwar kameez. The word kameez is often incorrectly spelled with an H, as in khameez.