Culture vs. fashion

RICHMOND — The assignment for Virginia Commonwealth University fashion students was to design an abaya — a head-to-toe women’s overgarment that is stylish yet acceptable to wear in many Arab countries.

The results included elaborately beaded designs; a flamenco-influenced version; a punk-rock abaya; and perhaps a better understanding of fashion and cultural norms in the oil-and-gas rich Persian Gulf nation Qatar, where the university has had a campus for 10 years.

“We were trying to make a feeling of youth — but still be true to their culture,” said Kendra Palin, a fashion-design major who partnered with classmate Shelby Day to design an abaya with looped buttonholes, princess seams and a high waist.

“Everything else had to be black, but the embellishment could be any color, and we used silver and blue,” she said.

The 10 abayas were shown recently in the university’s annual student fashion-design show and are being shipped to Qatar’s capital, Doha, to be displayed in the annual fashion show at the university’s School of the Arts in Qatar.

The project is one of many collaborations between students and faculty at U.S. colleges and their overseas campuses. In Doha, the university’s art-and-design program is part of a local higher-education consortium, largely funded by the Qatar Foundation, which is run by the country’s ruling family.

The consortium, called Education City, has a 2,500-acre campus that also includes Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell and Texas A&M universities.

In designing their abayas, the Richmond-based students worked with the Qatari fashion-design students and graphic designers in a cultural exchange.

The U.S. students did their first sketches and sent them to Qatar for initial critiques. They then assembled their revised sketches, instructions and sample garments and shipped them to Doha. The Qatar team critiqued and tweaked the designs, then had a tailor construct the abayas and had locals do the beading and embroidery. The garments were returned to Richmond for finishing and final embellishments.

The project was part of Kim Guthrie’s “Give Me Shelter” class, during which her students discussed the idea of clothing as shelter and how different cultures address the concept of clothing.

“The students talked about why girls ’cover’ — is it cultural or religious?” said Miss Guthrie, who traveled to Doha this spring to oversee the abayas’ production. “There’s a huge spectrum of how covered or uncovered they are, dependent on family and tradition.”

Abayas are the traditional overgarment in the Persian Gulf nations of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. They also are worn in Iraq. Women and girls wear the black abaya, a lightweight crepe garment that includes a head covering called a shayla, in the presence of men and boys.

In some Gulf nations, abayas are becoming more decorated and embellished as the women who wear them want to express their sense of style — sometimes to the dismay of hard-line Muslim critics. Wealthy women in the region are paying top dollar for elaborate designer abayas, trimmed with precious stones and intricate embroidery.

However, in Saudi Arabia, which follows strict Islamic codes, officials warn that women should not wear unapproved abayas — including those with ornamentation.

Miss Palin said the abaya she designed isn’t completely Westernized but is “fun and fashionable” for her intended wearer: a 20-something woman. She said she found it interesting that women can wear “pants and cute little tops” underneath — and shed their abayas in women-only gatherings.

Miss Guthrie said the practice of covering up might be rooted in Islam’s requirement of female modesty, and can be subject to Western preconceptions.

But for many young women the abaya has become more a reflection of cultural tradition, something that isn’t impervious to fashion trends.

“Hopefully, if nothing else, those 20 people in my class have gained a more neutral approach to what goes on in the world,” she said. “Just because the women wear this doesn’t mean they’re oppressed.”