Music: Blue Scholars – Fire for the People
12:08 am Pacific Time
March 30 2008
I’ve heard that you can take the temperature of Iranian social freedoms by a quick glance at how young women (teenagers, mid-20s) wear their hejab. In the early days of the Islamic Republic, the chador (large black cloak) was enforced. Nearly 30 years later, it’s migrated to a simple hejab (headscarf). Very religious women will have it tightly wrapped around their heads and will usually stick to very conservative colors, like dark blue or usually, midnight black. There’s a direct relationship between how much hair a woman shows and how religious she is. Some women will show a tuft or two up front (maybe bangs, on occasion), but others will push the limit pretty far.
Cousin Amir’s wife, Azadeh, for example, tends to wear her hejab basically in the middle of her head — directly above her ears, and is so loose to the point that it falls off sometimes, like when she’s driving. (Of course, most of the time, when women are indoors amongst family, the hejabs come off.) Most women I’ve seen tend to be somewhere in the middle, with maybe an inch or two showing up front.
The other night Amir and Azadeh took me out to a local mall, Golestan, before we went to to have dinner at her uncle’s house to get a taste of the local youth flavor. Many younger Iranians were out, some probably on “dates”, trying to avoid the prying eyes of the police and vice patrol (Basij). I saw one young woman, maybe 19 or 20 years old, who was wearing her hejab with maybe an inch of hair showing, and then had a big bundle of braids (dreadlocks?) bunched up in the back, tenting her scarf — something I’d never seen before.
While women push the limits with makeup and the height of their hejab, there are younger men that push the limits of fashion as well. Most Iranian men tend to wear slacks, a button-up shirt, and a sport coat (almost never a tie), and then younger, hipper crowd, might wear tighter t-shirts and perhaps jeans. Facial hair tends to be fairly conservative most of the time, either clean-shaven, or the more religious will have big beards, or sometimes a thinner, more closely-cropped variety as well. Old men might sport the simple mustache popular across the Middle East, but there’s probably more facial hair variety in the Iranian youth of Los Angeles than Tehran.
But the area where men usually tend to be able to speak volumes is with their hair. The cool kids might grow slightly longer hair and use gel or something to make their hair stand up a little bit. I haven’t seen anything quite on the level of mohawks or anything super-out there — having bigger hair with sort of a messed-up-but-trying-to-look-cool look seems to be the male equivalent of pushing the fashion envelope. Also, wearing a v-neck t-shirt or having the second button opened just a little bit, to reveal chest hair and perhaps a necklace appears popular as well.
It’s interesting that the US (or maybe it’s just California?) tend to be way more lax when it comes to fashion. Sure, you’ve got your classic business, high-powered look (suit and tie), and you’ve got your surfer bum look (shorts and sandals), and you’ve got the look somewhere in the middle (nice jeans and sandals), and every other possible combination. When I travel abroad I have the sense that in order to blend into the social order of things that I have to wear closed-toed shoes and pants besides jeans. In fact, I have two pairs of pants that I almost never wear at home and pretty much are my exclusive travel pants. Maybe that’s weird, I’m not sure. Also, when abroad I try not to wear things that scream American/foreigner, like a Senegalese soccer jersey, a Dodgers baseball jersey, or a t-shirt with English on it.
Anyway, I’m off to dinner at a relative’s house. I’m supposed to dress up for that too — read: suit pants, tucked-in button-up shirt. I’ve been better dressed for dinner parties more times on this trip than I have in the last year.
