Thoroughly pointless protest
AS Richard writes, this week London saw its first Modest Fashion Week: models on the catwalk wearing colourful headscarves, turbans, hijabs and loose robes. They looked vivid, pretty and much more enticing than the normal drab Middle-Eastern garments worn by many Muslim women but they are still designed to cover and obscure hair, arms and legs.
Interestingly the women in Dubai mostly wear a plain black hijab but they manage to look glamorous because they are so heavily made up.
I’ve never seen so many false eyelashes, so much thick black eyeliner and bright red lipstick. If the women are compelled to dress modestly that certainly doesn’t apply to their maquillage. Dolly Parton would have ONE of the more inconsequential yet baffling mysteries of last year’s Strictly was why model Daisy Lowe kept ending up in the dance-offs. Judy and I love Daisy to bits – that megawatt smile, warm personality and effortless dancefloor delivery. Why weren’t viewers voting for her?
Not that she appeared to give a monkeys. Daisy cheerfully and confidently goes her own way. Monday saw the first London Modest Fashion Week: the catwalk was all billowing kaftans and abayas. Some household-name models dutifully covered up for a few days. But what did Daisy cheerfully wear to a separate event? A daring thigh-split pencil skirt, spike-heeled stilettos and a seriously revealing plunge-necked tight-fitting bolero jacket.
You go, girl! fitted in perfectly if she wore a headscarf.
Still, fashion-conscious women will always make the best of themselves even if they have to completely cover up – and good on them. But it still feels oddly contradictory to see a hijabi (ie, a woman in a hijab) with a face-full of wonderfully immodest Hollywood-style make-up.
Of course many women in the Emirates don’t wear the hijab but even those dressed in Western clothes are subject to immense cultural pressure.
I was intrigued to read in the Gulf News about two young women who had to fight all the way to train as Olympic figure-skaters. One was a hijabi aged 23, the other a non-hijabi of 25. Yet even this progressive girl still had to struggle to convince her parents to let her train. SOME people will protest against anything and the heterosexual couple legally denied a civil partnership this week are two of them.
Rebecca Steinfeld, 35, and her partner Charles Keidan, 40, vowed to continue their fight against what they perceive as discrimination.
The couple, who already have a daughter, could get married of course but claim to be ideologically opposed to marriage because of the “patriarchal baggage” the institution carries.
They want a civil partnership – so why not get married in a register office, then? In that civil ceremony there is no religious Many Emiratis think ice-skating is dancing, which women are forbidden to do in public.
But these two brave young women managed to convince their parents that skating really is a sport and received their grudging permission – although the parents of the one without the hijab still warned her to “respect your culture”. And both women said how difficult they found it to be trained by men and how they had to resist their modest instincts when they skated at a rink where the sexes are allowed to mix.
I cannot imagine a 20-something Western woman (my daughter, for instance) asking her parents for permission to do anything they choose. The pressures on some young Muslim women to live hugely restrictive lives is upsetting and it’s a tremendous shame. or “patriarchal” content at all.
The irony is that gay men and women had to fight for civil partnerships because without them they had no legal right to be each other’s next of kin or to inherit the other’s estate.
Miss Steinfeld and Mr Keidan don’t realise how lucky they are.
In these days when everyone refers to a husband or wife as their partner there’s absolutely no pressure to behave traditionally. A marriage is a legally binding contact, so is a civil partnership.
This daft couple can call each other – and their relationship – whatever they want. And no one will care.
a bit of winteR sun? not in dubai
SO we decided to take the broken arm to recuperate somewhere in the sun. We wanted to go to Florida but that didn’t work out. So our globetrotting daughter told us to go to Dubai – “a week’s guaranteed sun,” she said as she waved us off.
Ha! We did indeed land on a sunny morning but that was the last glimpse of warming rays we had all week. Freak weather, everyone said. Two low pressure systems, meaning dust storms, rain and a sunless sky. We kept telling ourselves it was bound to improve but every morning as we pulled back the curtains the same grey gloom stared balefully back at us.
I’ll say one thing for the Brits (most of our fellow guests were from the UK) – they don’t half put a brave face on bad weather. Of course we’re used to it. Every day we all sat by the pool despite the leaden skies, all cheerful and chatty. It was half-term and the kids splashed gaily on, ignoring the chill, while mums and dads gritted their teeth and pulled on hoodies and woolly jumpers. And there’s not a lot to do in the desert during a dust storm.
The hotel staff told us that Dubai had had more rain in three days than they normally get in a whole year.
But everyone stayed chipper, the broken arm was rested (and is now much better). But actually I think we would have been better off – and warmer – in Blackpool.