We live in a time where images of the Arab world are everywhere and nowhere.
All around America, every morning when we pick up the newspaper and each time we turn on the television, we see Arab faces, women and men dressed in a mix of Western and traditional Arab clothes; then we hear the reports from Baghdad and Kabul.
We cannot, for a minute, forget the Arabs’ identity, but, at the same time, we are totally removed from their experiences. We know and see so little of their cultures. In Europe, the impact of Arabs on everyday life is much more integrated, more visible and deep. Because of the continent’s history of colonialism — from the Ottoman empire through the expansion of French and British rule — Europe lives with the memory of political and financial domination, which also includes a few ironic reversals of fortune: the most exclusive neighborhoods and institutions in Paris and London are now largely Arab-owned.
In France, the speed of integration has been a political football for President Sarkozy, who has more than once called out the police to monitor head scarves in public schools. More positively, the actor Tahar Rahim was the main character in the French movie that won at Cannes, and the artist Adel Abdessemed had the best spot in François Pinault’s collection shown during the Venice Biennale. Indeed, Arab surnames are now part of mainstream French culture, and not just among inhabitants in far-off suburbs.
So it is no surprise, then, that French designers often look at the Arab world for inspiration, as they recently did in Paris. I am not saying that they do it consciously — I never think of fashion designers as sociologists or philosophers — still they have more sensitive antennae than most and, somehow, they are able to catch, usually subconsciously, the spirit of the times.
Some postcolonial references were already present in Milan in Donatella Versace’s collection and in a general trend for washed linen and light cottons in multiple layers worn over floppy pants. The look relied more on Peter O’Toole in “Lawrence of Arabia” and Tyron Power in “Beau Geste” than on any contemporary street fashion. Paris was different. How Arabs dress on the street made it to the runways.
Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy did it better then anybody else, leaving behind nostalgia and vintage references and looking straight into the eyes of modern Arab youth, mixing Western pop references — he was working on the costumes for the Michael Jackson “This Is It” tour — with graphic Arab prints, baseball hats, long-tailed shirts and sweats with punk tartan for a raw but sophisticated, Arab grunge look. Tisci is the youngest of the established designers in Paris, and he showed that he still has his fingers on the pulse of what happens outside the doors of the Avenue Montaigne atelier.
In his own collection, John Galliano traveled to the shores of North Africa but more in time than in space. Galliano always keeps moving but never leaves his own comfortable personal history. So, this time, the Galliano man was a French soldier, a Napoleon Bonaparte, visiting Egypt and sending home beautiful memories.
In the same day, Kris Van Assche raided the Arab wardrobe too and borrowed the djellabas, the long shirts and the roomy pants for a light-headed pastiche of voile and mussoline, losing along the way that strong masculinity that makes the Arab world so intense and opposite to our Western, almost unisex fashion.
Stefano Pilati at YSL and Rick Owens had their own deeply personal take on the trend. Rick Owens is not new to layering long T-shirts, shirts and jackets over pants of different lengths. His men always look like fashion soldiers, draped in mad, greige jerseys over heavy military boots. Pilati’s take is part of his ongoing research into redefining the canons of contemporary men’s wear outside the French tradition. Starting with the fabrics and following with his reshaping of the jacket, short and lean, and the pants, wide and high-waisted, he layered each garment on top of each other to create a metropolitan time traveler much in synch with the mood of the season.
Behind the surface of men’s fashion something is changing and, as different ethnicities melt into every neighborhood, so wardrobe elements from different cultures mix into our way of dressing. It is not only in President Obama’s Cairo speech that the change is showing but also in our attitudes and our clothes.
