RIYADH LETTER: Women's attempts to decorate their full-length black robes are angering Saudi's religious police
IN SAUDI Arabia they say you can tell a lot about a woman from the way she wears her abaya. The cut and fall of the floor-length, long-sleeved black robe she is obliged to wear over her clothes in public from the onset of puberty can be interpreted in several ways.
The kingdom’s religious police insist an abaya should be loose, attached to the head, and left to fall to the ground without outlining the contours of the body. The woman who wears her abaya like this, accessorising with a full face veil and black gloves, is deemed to be more conservative. Not so long ago, any deviation from what is known as abaya sada, Arabic for plain abaya, was considered an act of rebellion. “Nine years ago I had an abaya subtly decorated with little tassels,” remembers one Australian expat. “It was viewed as positively risqué.”
Today that has changed. The all-enveloping garment designed to comply with Islam’s emphasis on modest dress and eliminate any hint of the female form has become something of a fashion statement with many young Saudi women reinventing the abaya as a way of expressing themselves.
In shops, the racks of more traditional shapeless abayas are increasingly ignored by fully-veiled women whose footwear – which can range from Converse trainers to Birkenstocks and ballet flats to the red flash of a Louboutin sole – often provides the only clue to the tastes of the person underneath.
Instead they swoon over form-fitting abayas decorated with a swatch of crystals around the wrist, collar or hem; swirls of intricate embroidery and beading; or loud leopard skin and day-glo panels.
I saw one abaya decorated with Japanese characters picked out in blue sequins, and another which featured a large image of a tiger’s head rendered in crystals on the back. The variations seem endless, with ribbons, studs, glitter, buttons, lace, leather tassels, and even feathers used to adorn the abayas sold in one shop in Riyadh.
The most daring designs can be found in Jeddah, the port city which is by far Saudi Arabia’s most cosmopolitan and one which is considered dangerously “liberal” by many of those who live in the kingdom’s conservative heartland.
A popular style there is the double-layered abaya with dramatic bolts of vividly coloured silk visible underneath sheer black chiffon. Other abayas worn in the city look more like funky kimonos, while some women wear theirs open, often revealing jeans and a T-shirt underneath. At a wedding I attended in Jeddah, strictly segregated as is the custom in Saudi Arabia, the abayas the women scrambled for before the groom entered the banqueting hall with his bride were almost as lavish as the designer gowns they wore underneath.
Sales assistants in Riyadh say they cannot keep up with the demand for new abaya styles, but the trend has drawn criticism from more conservative Saudis who gripe that a piece of clothing intended to discourage male attention is now becoming a fashion item that risks having the opposite effect.
“Most abayas now need abayas to cover them,” declared a religious pamphlet distributed at shopping malls in Riyadh last year. “When some girls go out they [look] like prostitutes who invite people to carry out lewd acts.” The religious police have not been slow to respond. Staff at several abaya shops in Riyadh told me their premises had been raided in recent months, with the bearded men tasked with the “prevention of vice and the promotion of virtue” confiscating all ornamented abayas. “Most of all they hate anything shiny like crystals or sequins,” said one manager. “They say decorations like that draw the eyes of men.” Far from being a mere barometer of fashion, the increasing popularity of stylised abayas, despite the best efforts of the religious police, is a sign of a gradual loosening of rigid social norms in a country where change comes dropping slow. Women are becoming more visible in the workplace and in society generally. Last month the kingdom’s first female deputy minister was appointed.
Spend an hour watching the crowds milling around Ladies’ Kingdom, the women-only floor of Al Mamlaka shopping mall in Riyadh, and it becomes apparent that a new generation of Saudi women is pushing the boundaries of tradition more than ever before.
Here, away from prying male eyes, women can discard their face veils and open their abayas to show off the much-deliberated-over outfits underneath. There is much bling and glamour as couture-clad matrons sweep by, heady perfumes trailing in their wake. But there is also the young woman wearing a Sid Vicious T-shirt. Or the posse of girls in baggy skateboarder shorts. One teenager draws stares from passers-by with her nose-ring and hair that has been teased into short, peroxide-tipped spikes. All are Saudis, and all are redefining what it means to be Saudi in their own way.