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February 12, 2007
NYTimes gets the kaffiyeh kraze wrong too
Speaking of people who think Israel is an "apartheid state" . . . . you might assume a scruffy youngster with a kaffiyeh around his/her neck would be booking it down to the Judson Church for some (self) righteous Palestinian solidarity, but that young person might just be trying too hard to be hip.
Three months ago, Jay Hukahori, a 24-year-old fashion design student at Parsons, went to a party at Guesthouse, a club in Chelsea, in an outfit topped off by a kaffiyeh, a scarf with a black and white chain-link pattern and knotted tassels that is typically worn in Arab countries. “I knew that with the doormen, it’d be easily identifiable as a hip accessory,” Ms. Hukahori said.Once the trademark headwear of Yasir Arafat, and long associated with his Palestinian countrymen, the kaffiyeh has lately shown up on the shelves of adventurous boutiques in the United States and even mainstream retailers like Urban Outfitters. Its newest wearers, who wrap it around the neck like a scarf, say they are less Fatah sympathizers than fashion party crashers. The kaffiyeh appears to be the dubious successor to last year’s Che Guevara T-shirts, a symbol denuded of any potent political associations by pop culture.
Not quite denuded! Jewschool proprietor Dan Sieradski aka Mobius was one of those who protested when the the Urban Outfitters clothing chain recast the kafiyyeh as an "antiwar scarf" in its catalog, and he is quoted in the NYTimes article. But this is the Times, remember? So they don't even fact-check their fashion coverage. Mobius explains:
Id be happy about this were it not for the fact that the Times totally mischaracterized my post, and furthermore attributed my post with URBN’s decision to unstock the item, despite the fact that Stand With Us, a pro-Israel campus group, was responsible for pressuring URBN to drop its keffiyeh line, and that I would never have promoted nor sought such an action. In fact, I quite clearly mocked the Jewish community in my post for what I expected would be the surge to suppress the keffiyeh sales, noting, “I’m sure some readers are already ramping up their e-mail clients to send nasty letters to URBN.”The purpose of my post was not to suggest that the keffiyeh was a terrorist symbol, but rather to criticize Urban Outfitters for degrading a very potent symbol of national resistance (”the kaffiyeh just got 10 TIMES MORE PASSE and 10 TIMES MORE TRIVIALIZED, thanks to Urban Outfitters”). In doing so, I humorously pointed out the irony of calling such a symbol of resistance “anti-war,” when it is quite clearly a modern form of war paint.
As of a few weeks ago Urban Outfitters was still selling the political fashion accessory in their European stores (of course), plus the "Desert Skull" variation you can view at that link.
Judith | 02/12/07 at 12:26 AM | Categories: - Gaza and Palestine
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Comments
You can buy nice olive or tan ones (so much more anti-war...) at Amazon too.
You really thought European stores had a monopoly on this sort of thing?
Rob | February 12, 2007 08:44 PM
Ugh. I spent July 1987 to August 1989 in Israel, during the height of the first intifada. The association I grew to have with the kaffiyeh was of Palestinians using them to hide their faces when throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers. When I returned to graduate school at Harvard in fall of 1989, I was extremely startled to see some idiotic Harvard student wearing one, either as a "fashion accessory" or in order to show his "solidarity with the Palestinian struggle." In either case, it struck me as really inappropriate, and I still don't think of it as a fashion accessory.
Rebecca | February 13, 2007 12:55 AM
