Moksha

the veil: it's the 'new black'!

After a slight hiatus (I have been entertaining!), I am back with a vengeance.

One of my secret indulgences is to cruise articles on the web about the lastest fashion crazes - there are glitzy hooplas called "fashion week" in Paris and New York - and there are always catwalk images with incredible clothes that I look forward to seeing in knock-off form in the months ahead.... but this latest round of catwalk days in New York (and maybe London??) is extremely disconcerting. Witness two examples of how designers have been swathing their models lately, in hoods (some with eyeholes and some without), quilted and linen veils, bondage masks and low slung hats. There were examples of this in the NYT from about five difference fashion houses.

The response has been somewhat predictable, I suppose. Some say the additions are misogynistic, while others dismiss the trend as frivolity that should not be taken seriously.
I am in the first camp. I do think that it is serious and comes directly out of our current relationship with the Middle East. I know the argument can be made that women's fashions in the west have historically toyed with head coverings and the like, but why is this the specific moment of the fashionable catwalk version of the burqa? How often do images of veiled Muslim women flash across your television screen nowadays without context?

Of course the veiled woman has, in recent years, provided the ideal grounds for which to propagate western conceptions of homogeneous oppressive cultures in the east. It is almost impossible to convince college students that most women who veil do not do so under duress from family or government. The juxtaposition between the "free" bared-faced white American woman and the "oppressed" veiled Muslim woman is so embedded in the general psyche.

And today, I would hazard, the veiled Muslim woman also stands (in the west) for the real lack of knowledge that we have about Islamic cultures, and how this ignorance is finally becoming glaringly obvious in so many tragic ways. She is a sign, in other words, of what we don't know and cannot access. A source of frustration, even as so many western politicians portend to want to "release" her. whatever. the rhetoric makes me queasy.

Parallels with the conception of the exotic, mystical harem as a metaphor for the inaccessible East by colonialists in the 18th and 19th centuries are, of course, purely uncoincidental. :)

And so it is not such a mystery that the veil makes a return on a neo-orientalist stage as a sign of the mysterious woman, the exotic and unknowable enigma, but thankfully sexy to men - and therefore, ultimately conquerable.

And it is no coincidence that the veil is now making a turn on the catwalks of the States and Europe. Designers like other artists, absorb what is around them and interpret it within their own visual filters. Doesn't the Vivienne Westwood hood above look like the one used in the Abu Ghraib torture images??Thus the "don't take it seriously" defense does not hold water.

This claiming and recasting of the veil is a sign of our times, and a sign of how the bodies of women once again in the history of the world provide the battlefield on which men live out their fantasies of war, of violence, and of conquest.

posted by Moksha @ 8:40 PM