Hoda Katebi on the Politics of Fashion
Written by Hibah Ansari
Photography by Aida Ebrahimi
Lit Fest 2018 at the University of Wisconsin brought together literature enthusiasts from a variety of interests — whether it be food, travel, poetry or fashion. But the incredible thing about “literature” is its vastness. Literature resonates widely amongst both writers and readers. It would be silly to assume that such a sphere would not include writers and readers with intersecting, complex, diverse identities — we demand the literature we read and the culture we consume is just as complex as we are.These complexities are not just found in literature though. Fashion blogger, activist and all-round baddie Hoda Katebi discussed how fashion plays a huge role in representing — or misrepresenting — identities at a workshop and lecture April 24. We see before we speak, so how someone is visually represented can be either uplifting or demeaning. There’s something quite unedited and raw in how we form judgments about a person — simply by what they’re wearing.Fashion can even lead to military intervention — a black-and-white photo of Afghan women wearing mini skirts definitely peaked interest and nostalgia of a “once-modern” Afghanistan within the Trump administration. Katebi attributed this instinct to orientalism — the West must intervene in the East to restore a so-called progressive society by eradicating whatever it is that “forces” women in Afghanistan to dress a certain way.It may seem easy to think fashion couldn’t possibly have this much power. But Katebi deconstructed this criticism with a feminist lens. Fashion (in practice and production) is considered to be part of the women’s sphere. As a result, it’s not an art form that is taken as seriously and is considered quite frivolous in the patriarchal society we live in. But to defy that fashion inherently holds political power dismisses the experiences of those who are forced to feel the repercussions of what they wear — like a Muslim woman living in the U.S. who is harassed for wearing the hijab, for example.We literally have a personally felt relationship with what we wear, Katebi said, and the personal choice a woman may make to, say, wear a scarf around her neck instead of on her head has political implications. To ignore that fashion, or any kind of art form, holds such power is a bit of a missed opportunity. From creating the Refugee Women’s Sewing Co-operative to criticizing the fast fashion industry, Katebi is continually seizing new opportunities to systemically change the fashion-game.In 2016, Katebi published Tehran Streetstyle, a fashion photography book celebrating illegal fashion in Iran that defies both the Iranian government regulations and Western misconceptions of Iran. Katebi encouraged the audience to not ignore the political implications of fashion, but to instead think about them in different contexts. For example, her streestyle photos operate under a certain context: a modern-day Iran with a flourishing underground fashion scene — despite policing from the very-real fashion police, Gashte Ershad. On the other hand, the photo of the Afghan women in miniskirts was instead removed from such a vital context. The images of some of Iran’s flyest people don’t just speak for themselves — they scream at centuries of orientalized imagery that has essentialized their identities to fit in a Western narrative.And if fashion is so frivolous or powerless somebody might want to remind the U.S. military of that before they use it to justify foreign intervention in a country we’ve already spent 16 years destroying.