Ive noticed in any portrait of an Ottoman consort or such she always has her hair out. Which seems very unusual for the late medieval and early modern Islamic world.
Was it that they were considered "special", and thus the rules did not apply to them?
If you are referring to classical portraits of Ottoman royal women like this one then the answer is quite simple; they weren't actually true portraits of Ottoman women but rather were the products of artists imagination. I get the impression that most people seem to think that these portraits represented some kind of objective reality, i.e. that the women in the picture actually met and modelled for the painters, but in fact that is not the case. Most Western Artists who painted Ottoman royal women did not even step foot in Istanbul let alone meet the women they sought to paint. Even if they did visit Istanbul, the very fact that the Imperial Harem (Where Ottoman royal women spent most of their time) was off limits to men (excepting male relatives and eunuchs) would basically mean that there was no way that these painters could have ever seen let alone paint any of the Sultan's family. As a result most of these paintings are essentially fantasy and instead of reflecting some objective reality of how these women actually looked like, they are more or less just the painter's interpretation of how they thought these women could look like. This is also why the dress used in these portraits are often quite strange and are not reflective of broader Ottoman fashion of the time and instead more often 'European' looking.
Sources:
Madar, Heather. “Before the Odalisque: Renaissance Representations of Elite Ottoman Women.” Early Modern Women 6 (2011): 1–41.
Faroqhi, Suraiya. 2019. The Ottoman and Mughal Empires : Social History in the Early Modern World. London, UK : I.B. Tauris.
