Responding to a recent post on Boushra Almutawakel’s “Mother, Daughter, Doll” photo series, a reader reminisces about mid-century Yemeni fashions:
I spent one of the best parts of my childhood living in Yemen in the early- to mid- 1960s, where my father worked at the US Consulate in Taiz. We had the opportunity to mingle in the streets, to shop at the souq (albeit with a guide/male domestic worker who negotiated with the vendors) and to see how Yemenis dressed. Yemeni women did not wear the hijab much at that time – the Yemeni counterpart, called a sharshaf, was generally made of lively colorful printed fabric, and many women did not cover their faces. A number of women wore colorfully embroidered dresses with a head scarf. Yemeni fabrics and clothing were exuberantly colorful, and while I couldn’t know the level of pressure within Yemeni society to conform to modesty requirements, it didn’t appear that there was an expectation that women should be made invisible. (From my Western eyes it did seem very puritanical, but I’d spent the prior two years living in Beirut, where Lebanese women wore bikinis on the beach.)
I’ve since learned from tourists who’ve visited Yemen that there’s now a great deal of pressure to completely cover not only women, but pre-pubertal girls, who in the past were not expected to dress more than modestly. It’s also sad to learn that the famous Yemeni textile industry has gone extinct, as fabrics and retail clothes now come almost exclusively from China. Compared with the problems of poverty, gender inequality and child marriage that Yemeni women and girls must deal with, fashions and textiles are much less important, but there’s no question that their oppression is reflected in their clothing.
(Photo: Yemeni women line-up outside a polling station to cast their vote in the presidential election in Sanaa on February 21, 2012 that brings an end to President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s 33-year hardline rule in Yemen. By Mohammed Huwais/AFP/Getty Images)
The Dish 
