The young women of Baghdad acknowledge that there are more serious concerns in Iraq these days than hair, clothes and makeup.
But they also say that there might be nothing quite as exhilarating as stepping out of the house in a pretty dress, hair flowing freely behind them, behaving as if their country had not been shattered by war and dominated by religious conservatism for much of their lives.
“For girls,” said Merna Mazin, a 20-year-old Baghdad University engineering student, “life would be tasteless without elegant fashion.”
What Mazin calls elegant fashion bears little resemblance to couture or to the skin-baring summer street clothes of the West, of course.
It was 40º C in Baghdad on a recent day, but Mazin was wearing a multicolored sleeveless dress over a pair of jeans. A long-sleeve black shirt covered her arms.
Her black hair, with subtle blond highlights, was free of a head covering, however — not a small victory for Mazin, a Christian who wore the traditional Muslim woman’s head scarf for two years to avoid being singled out by Islamic militias.
Although her clothes might attract attention during a summer day in New York only because they looked so uncomfortably hot, in Baghdad Mazin is one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young women whose freedom to develop a personal style is a signal of a thawing in Iraq’s cultural conservatism.
After the US-led invasion in 2003, women here found their fashion choices largely dictated by clerics during Friday prayers and enforced by armed militia members who would threaten, kidnap or even kill those who were provocatively dressed. That was defined for quite some time as any woman who was not wearing an abaya, the cloaklike covering meant to conceal the shape of a woman’s body completely.
Women who were threatened for wearing Western-style clothes were often forced to quit their jobs or school and retreat home, sometimes for years.
But now that security has improved in Baghdad, the capital, some young women have begun shaking off their abayas and started dressing more like the women they see on satellite television channels beamed to the city from around the world.
Most of those testing the limits are college students with only dim memories of women’s fashions before the war. They still represent a small proportion of women in the city. Most women, by and large, continue to wear plain black abayas.
Sitting in a student lounge at Baghdad University recently, Mais Mowafaq, 20, was wearing a head covering. But the rest of her outfit, though quite conservative, could have gotten her killed a few years ago: an ankle-length black skirt, a long-sleeve black shirt and a long silver necklace over her shirt.
Mowafaq said that during the worst of the sectarian violence she had begun to wear an abaya after a neighbor warned that she risked being kidnapped, or worse.
“Militias did not want women’s bodies to be visible, because they thought it might charm men,” she said. “Charming men is a sin? And it deserves being killed for?”
Mowafaq said she had also stopped using cosmetics, which many young Iraqi women regarded as a necessity even during the most dangerous period.
“All my rouges and other makeup stuff expired, and my mother refused to accompany me to shops to buy more,” she said. “She told me, ‘This is not a time of makeup. This is a time of bombs.’”
Dua’a Salaam Sabri, 23, and her sister, Riam, who is 16 but looks several years older, remember when the only real danger associated with dressing in the fashionable clothes they favor was the aggressive flirting they encountered from boys on the street.
“’I will give my eyes for your beauty,’” they said men would tell them.
But in 2005, two carloads of militia members drove up as Riam was walking home from school with her father. The men tried unsuccessfully to kidnap her as punishment for not wearing what they called “respectable clothes,” she said. At the time, she was wearing her school uniform, a long skirt and a T-shirt.
The next day, her mother, Bushra Khadhom al-Obeidi, bought the daughters their first head coverings and abayas.
“As abayas became more popular, they also became very, very expensive,” Obeidi said.
Riam dropped out of school, and the sisters said they began to suffer psychologically.
“You see how skinny I am?” Dua’a asked. “That’s because I couldn’t eat. I was sad. We were sitting at home and couldn’t go anywhere.”
They have recently started going out again, but typically only in the company of their mother. And they have reverted to their old styles.
Dua’a was wearing a tight jean skirt that fell to her knees, while Riam wore a body-hugging white top and a snug denim skirt. Each exposed her arms and legs, which is uncommon here. For now, their abayas hang in the closet.
At Fashion Away, a shop in the Karada neighborhood that sells women’s clothing, the owner, Hussein Jihad, said he sold only traditional garb until a few months ago.
“We are adapting to the situation,” he said. “When the situation was bad, we offered only long skirts, and when the situation improved, we started bringing in modern clothes.”
The shop sells tight leopard-print tops, sleeveless blouses and other designs yet to appear with regularity on Baghdad’s streets. It also offers a US$35 miniskirt. Jihad said that he had bought 50 miniskirts two months ago and that only one was left.
Hiba, a 20-year-old engineering student at Baghdad University who asked that her last name not be published out of concern for her safety, said the unsettled times had tested her creativity.
As she studied for finals in the student lounge recently, she was wearing a black lace head covering, paired with a knee-length jean skirt over white leggings. She was showing a hint of bare leg, from just below her knees to the top of her black Mary Jane shoes.
“I like to mix my fashion between secular and Islamic, so I guess I am a modern veiled girl,” she said, smiling. “The militias did not succeed in preventing me from primping, but my final exams are.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would