If this dress makes you see red, you might just be too sensitive
Utah teen Keziah Daum sparked outrage by wearing a Chinese dress to her prom.
In Cairo I bought several cotton caftan dresses, nicely embroidered, longsleeved and ankle-length but cool in the North African heat. They still serve me well.
In Fiji, it was colourful sarongs, unisexual. In Beijing, beautiful silk cheongsams. And in Afghanistan, resisting the culturally ordained head covering for females, I deliberately adopted the versatile shemagh — or kaffiyeh — widely worn by males, tying it as a man would, end pieces crossed over the crown and knotted at the nape of the neck, hanging loose down the back or over a shoulder. To my mind that satisfied the proscriptions against women baring their head but was also a statement, gender-neutral: I’m not acquiescing to cultural practices, imposed on females, that I loathe.
Also, a shemagh goes better with khakis than a burka.
We are, perhaps, what we wear and most of the time — the ubiquitous Palestinian kaffiyeh an exception — there is no political subtext.
I’ve never had occasion to don a sari but if I lived in India I would. They’re pretty.
Only the most anally aggrieved would cavil.
But there’s a lot of that going around, gripers dumping their objections and scolds on the heads of culturally appropriating transgressors, accused.
Utah teenager Keziah Daum got an earful on social media — the bullhorn for bullies — last week after posting a photo of herself attending the high school prom, dressed in a lovely cheongsam sheath she’d found at a vintage clothing store.
You’d think the poor girl had wrapped herself in the Shroud of Turin, such was the hostile blowback.
“My culture is not your goddamn prom dress!” blasted one ethnic Chinese complainant, retweeted 42,000 times last I looked.
Really, I do try to ignore the river of vomit that is Twitter and resist the tendency for cross-media trending, with social media shaping the news.
But there was Daum, barely 18, getting pummelled for her wardrobe choice and defending herself on Good Morning America. “I never imagined a simple rite of passage such as a prom would cause a discussion reaching many parts of the world.” And, on her own posting: “I don’t see the big deal of me wearing a gorgeous dress I found for my last prom. If anything, I’m showing my appreciation to other cultures and I didn’t intend to make anyone think that I’m trying to be racist. It’s just a dress.”
And: “I’m tired of all of the backlash of hate when my only intent was to show love.”
Not just the high-collared dress offended the easily miffed but the pose as well, which some took — mistook — for purported mimicry of a prayer pose. Which got all tangled up with mocking religion. Except Daum says she was inspired by a popular YouTube channel h3h3Productions.
Ah, but Daum isn’t Chinese. And apparently she ought not dress up to evoke Chinese, not in this chauvinistic hands-off era when anything that resonates of culture is considered proprietary. Mine, not yours. I now know more about the cheongsam — also called a qipao — than I care to: traditional ethnic clothing of the Manchu, who took over China in 1644 and established their own Qing Dynasty. They mandated that all adult Chinese men in service of the throne wear Manchu garb, turning the straight-line apparel into a symbol of elite status and a stamp of Manchu domination.
But I strongly doubt even most Chinese in China are aware of that background these days. Sometimes a dress is just a damn dress. There are no co-opting implications.
Fashion houses are all the time raiding cultures and history for their labels: the year of the Cossack, the year of the Native Indian, the year of the Boho, the year of the Mexican. Themes, not memes. Nobody gave it much thought as one person’s everyday schmatta went another person’s upscale haute couture.
Or recall the Nehru jacket popularized by the Beatles in their Sgt. Pepper phase. Or the ubiquitous Mao jacket, found in every lefty activist’s closet in the ’70s.
Yet now Balenciaga gets roasted for “appropriating” from Black culture a designer label version of the hoodie. And God forbid a little girl wants to go trick-or-treating as Pocahontas. Yet nobody mind- ed, in the ’60s, when hippies made beaded headbands part of the counterculture ensemble. Today, a feather would likely get you tarred and feathered — like that person who complained about dreamweavers being sold at her local dollar store.
Too much bile sloshing around with nowhere else to express itself.
Naturally, the aforementioned prom cheongsam morphed into babble about imperialism and colonialism and “triggering” of, you know, bad feelings over historical oppression.
Such wildly over-the-top reactions should probably come as no surprise. There’s always somebody who will find offence in the benign and make it intensely personal. A couple of years ago there was controversy at the University of Ottawa over a yoga course — yoga taken from India and a culture that “experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy.” The course was cancelled, then restored, but only when the white woman who had taught it for years was replaced by a suitably ethnic Indian instructor.
It was a thing, for about a minute and a half.
Everybody’s a survivor of something.
Most consequential — where it really should be inconsequential — has been the debate about co-opting culture by authors, which blew up large in Canada last year with a mischievous, if quite silly, “Appropriation Prize” in an issue of Write Magazine devoted to Indigenous writers. Oh the pearl clutching, the apologies, the resignations.
While the prize was a dumbass idea, the broader premise, that only those with ownership of a culture have the bona fides to write about it, is deeply troubling. Writers imagine things — people, places, worlds — their work invested with both research and creativity. The best antidote for stories untold, or allegedly improperly told, with a post-colonial bias, is for Indigenous authors to be published, not to squelch and berate other writers.
But the whole notion of exclusivity, proprietary domain, is, sadly, taking hold, narrowing the universe to a figment bulwark of one — me, mine.
Keziah Daum thought she simply looked pretty in a cheongsam. She did. I’m not tossing my Che beret. Got a gripe? Get a grip.
Rosie DiManno is a columnist based in Toronto covering sports and current affairs. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno