Clothes and a French debate

Sarkozy's rant against the burkha brings back attention to fashion and what it really stands for. The naive theory is that weather determine fashion. Really a burkha that an Arab woman wears is not that different from what an Arab man traditionally wears except that the face is covered. Perhaps this dress is what best suits the harsh desert weather. But then why do women across the globe wear the burkha? Here comes the role fashion plays. Dominant cultures leave their memory of their dominance in what the people they once dominated wear. Islam was once the dominant religion of the world and hence you see the islamic wardrobe all around. It is the same as why men wear suits and pants all around the world regardless of the weather. The lungi is much laughed at in India and that is laughable. The women are usually subjected to uncomfortable fashion a lot more than men. Men usually prefer to identify themselves with dominant, current, and most importantly comfortable fashion whereas women in many parts of the world hang out in comfort zones and it does not matter what they wear. And their clothes get ridiculous.

Interestingly, the British when they ruled the world did not influence fashion as much as after world war 2 when they began to tend to their own business. So you saw African women dressed for the weather in early National Geographic magazines. The cameras and coverage expedited the covering of the African woman as much as it did the uncovering of her European counterpart. Hence fashion is imitation at a subconscious level and spreads more by words than swords.

Turn back the clock a few decades and we see a french politician raving about the state of undress of savages in Africa like Sarkozy now does about the state of over dressing in the middle east. No wonder French are leaders in fashion for their politicians are overtly interested in it.