In a small but eloquent display at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, "Sartorial Sanctuary: Clothing and Tradition in the Eastern Islamic World" examines both the restraint and the sumptuousness of customary Islamic dress.
The exhibition, organized by assistant curator of textiles and costumes Kate Irvin, begins and ends with two stereotypical items of clothing. The first, which kicks off the half of the exhibition devoted to men's clothing, is a red-and-white checked headcloth, of the kind lately associated with the slur "towelhead."
Worn all over the Arabian peninsula, it's a style of headwear that predates Islam: The red and white pattern is an abstraction of Mesopotamian motifs for fishing nets and wheat, while the "agal," or rope, used to keep the cloth in place evolved from camel hobbles used by the Bedouins. It may be ubiquitous now, but it only replaced the turban as the dominant form of Arab headdress in the mid-19th century, and for reasons more to do with national identity than religion.
Ending the section devoted to women, meanwhile, is a full-length dress overlaid by a face-covering veil that extends to the waist. It was bought in Afghanistan shortly before the Taliban came to power. Designed to cover as much of the body and face as possible, it is typical of the outfits many Westerners perceive as grossly repressive to women.
How strange, then, that the outfit is in a shade of purple that would put a Roman cardinal to shame, and that the dress is pleated in a way that Issey Miyake might admire.
It turns out that these two garments were bought in 1977 at the Kabul Intercontinental Hotel by Dr. John N. Loomis, who donated them to the RISD Museum. Loomis estimates that 90 to 95 percent of the women he saw in Kabul that year were heavily veiled and that, of these, most wore black, brown, and beige. However, about a quarter of them wore bright colors such as this, and many of the garments were fancily pleated.
