‘PATIENCE’ IS THE GIGANTIC message scrawled on every Amish buggy plodding on modern highways.¹ ‘The horse is our pacer,’ as one Amish man puts it, ‘We can’t speed up like you can in a car.’² The slow-paced hymns in Amish church services linger for twenty minutes. The most traditional Amish do not set their clocks ahead an hour in the summer season as other Americans do. These traditionalists favour slow time, God’s time, established by the rising and setting of the sun. In the midst of a hyper-speed culture that wants more and more, faster and faster, from instant downloads, immediate tweets, express mail, and extreme sports to rushed everything, the Amish stubbornly resist the velocity of hypermodernity.

The Amish emerged in 1693 in the Bern area of Switzerland and the Alsace region of France. They migrated to the United States in several waves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the last European congregation closed in 1936. Jacob Amman, the founder of the Amish, was a tailor, which may account for some of the group’s interest in dress. Prior to arriving in North America, they rejected the use of buttons as ostentatious symbols of pride and instead used wire hooks and eyes to fasten clothing. Their critics taunted them saying, ‘Those with hooks and eyes, the Lord will save, those with buttons and pockets, the devil will snatch.’³

Today North America’s nearly 300,000 Amish live in thirty-one states. Their church is organised into 2120 congregations, each consisting of twenty to thirty-five families living in proximity yet interspersed among non-Amish neighbours. The life of each congregation is guided by its ordnung (order). This unwritten set of regulations governs the use of technology, dress styles, furniture and other practices. There are some forty different Amish affiliations, or tribes, with unique styles of dress, buggies, and technology that distinguish them from one another. Even within the same tribe, the bishop of each congregation has some latitude to interpret and enforce dress regulations. Although Amish people may appear as a homogeneous cluster from a distance, their dress styles vary between and within each tribe. One researcher found dozens of variations in women’s clothing across fifteen Amish communities.⁴ This essay, however, focuses on the dress practices of the large (30,000-member) Amish community in Lancaster County, ninety miles west of Philadelphia.

The Amish seek to follow the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament.⁵ Two pivotal religious values – separation from the world and self-­denial – regulate Amish wardrobes. Separation from the world means that their religious community seeks to maintain a cultural difference from the outside society even though they mingle with non-Amish neighbours and buy and sell products in the larger economy. Church elders believe that clothing should reflect biblical values of self-denial, simplicity, modesty, humility, and separation from the world.⁶ They cite Bible verses about dress practices such as the women’s prayer covering (kapp),⁷ but many of their customs, rooted in tradition, are symbolic expressions of separation from the world. When asked why they wear a certain article of clothing, a typical Amish reply is, ‘It’s just the way our people dress.’ Nonetheless, dress habits have a religious legitimation because the local congregation reaffirms them twice a year in members’ meetings. For instance, an Amish catechism manual devotes nine pages and forty-three questions and answers to dress – second only to the topic of heaven.⁸

Individualism is the sharpest wedge between Amish culture and modern life. Amish life accents communal obligations and loyalty, not individual freedom and choice. Amish culture values deference to others and uffgevva – giving up to the group. All cosmetics and jewellery, including wedding rings and wristwatches, are taboo. For the Amish, self-adornment calls attention to personal taste and preference. Clothing that shows off one’s individuality produces a proud, haughty person, and pride is considered an abomination in the eyes of God. The fashions of the outside world, in Amish eyes, are vain expressions of conceit and frivolity.

In hypermodernity, dress articulates individuality and personal taste.⁹ In Amish life, clothing expresses exactly the opposite meaning. When members wear Amish garb, they relinquish their right to self-expression and signal their commitment to communal authority. Amish dress styles have several important functions: to show conformity to the collective order, to restrain individual expression, to promote equality, and to erect symbolic boundaries around the community. Dress provides a distinctive uniform that declares without doubt who belongs and who does not. In short, dress signals group loyalty. It shows whether one is obedient or disobedient, humble or proud, modest or haughty, loyal or rebellious.

Amish women and men have a wardrobe for each of three occasions: work, dress up (public occasions), and church. The most traditional, plainest and most conforming garb is worn to church. Men who might, for example, wear jackets with buttons for dress-up occasions will wear suits with hooks and eyes for church services. Likewise, women wear darker colours and fasten their dresses with straight pins to attend church. Regardless of venue, men and women wear clothing made of solid, non-patterned fabrics.¹⁰

The wardrobe of an Amish woman includes a dress, an apron, a cape, a prayer kapp, and, in winter, a heavy shawl and a protective bonnet. For everyday work, she wears a scarf instead of a kapp and does not wear a cape. The degree of plainness is signaled by whether a woman wears a bib apron (a garment that drapes over the dress and is tied but not pinned in the back) or the more traditional waist-style pinned apron for everyday activities. The typical woman may own seven to ten dresses including two or three specifically styled for church services. Typical colours for the non-church dresses of married or older women are dark blue, light blue, hunter green, winter-green, olive green, light green, mahogany and chestnut brown, tan, deep mauve, and dark plum.

Amish men grow beards but shave their upper lips because moustaches have traditionally been associated with European military officers. They wear shirts without pockets, suspenders, and black zipperless trousers with a ‘broad fall’ flap across the front that is fastened by a button. A suit coat is worn for dress-up and for church. Zippers, belts and ties are prohibited. These items as well as pockets on shirts are considered ornamental and frivolous. The size and style of men’s broadbrim hats (straw for summer and felt for winter) are regulated by the church, and commonly the wider the brim, the plainer the man is understood to be. It is rare to see a boy or man without a hat when he is outside a building. Typical colours for men’s shirts include light pink, sky blue, baby blue, lime green (very common), royal blue, tan, blue/green, olive green, emerald green, burnt sienna (for teenagers), deep purple (for young boys), light purple, brown and other colours similar to those worn by women.

Although undergarments are typically purchased, most Amish clothing is homemade. A few Amish seamstresses make suits and overcoats for men and organdy prayer kapps for women, which require special skill. Mothers typically sew most of the clothing for their family, including their own dresses. They purchase fabrics from Amish-owned shops and spend much time perusing the aisles filled with dark hues, holding the fabrics up to the light, inspecting the slightly different textures and fabric compositions. In the past, women wore one hundred percent cotton fabrics primarily, which required ironing. Recently, more women wear cotton/polyester blends, which wrinkle less. Mothers occasionally purchase some of their sons’ and husbands’ work shirts from thrift shops.

The Amish value thrift and frugality. They frequently repair, recycle and reuse clothing. As one woman commented when asked, ‘If the clothes are patched and if the patch needs to be patched, then I know it needs to be replaced.’¹¹ Another woman said wistfully, ‘I feel a bit badly for my youngest son [of four boys] because he has never had anything new, but he hasn’t minded, either.’¹² Amish children wear their clothes hard, given all their chores and their frequently long walks to school. Families share children’s clothing among one another. Occasionally, mothers purchase contemporary-looking jackets (without hoods) for their sons and then painstakingly remove the zippers.

From the age of sixteen to the early twenties, Amish youth experience rumspringa, a time for socialising and courtship with their peers. During this period, they are not accountable to church regulations because they are not yet baptised and official members of the church. Many continue to dress in fairly traditional ways, while others rebel more openly and wear some non-Amish clothing to youth parties. Teenage boys, for example, may wear blue jeans and fashionable shirts and cut their hair according to contemporary styles, all of which is prohibited for adult church members. During rum­springa, some young women wear dresses in non-traditional colours and complement their dress choices by painting their toenails with brightly coloured polish and wearing sandals or flip-flops, or by wearing coloured socks, which they call ‘anklets,’ with other non-traditional footwear. Many youths try to respect their families’ preferences even though their dress violates the church code. Such violations may elicit gossip but are not punished because the young people have not yet pledged to obey the ordnung.

In the Amish mind, fashion is a bad word that is associated with the vanity of popular culture. An Amish manual says, ‘We know that worldly fashions have their origin in the most wicked cities on earth, that their foundation is not modesty and godliness but lust and pride.’¹³

Amish dress practices are slow to change because they are viewed as religious precepts. But change they do, and not only for utilitarian reasons. Amish fashion – change for the sake of change – exists, but it is subtle, slow, and miniscule. For instance, for many years baby boys typically wore dresses until they were toilet trained, but that practice is changing, as some parents worry that a dress on a baby boy may lead to gender confusion when he grows up. A more progressive mother, with a wink to tradition, may take her baby boy to church in a dress one time and thereafter dress him in trousers and shirt. Individual signs of rebellion or boundary testing include, for women, wearing prayer kapps that are smaller and thus expose more of the ear, kapps with untied strings, kapps with pronounced heart-shaped designs on the back, dresses in brighter colours, decorative pins on jacket lapels, and small frills and ruffles on sleeves. In addition, women’s dresses are now longer than they were in the past. The waistbands, which had been dropped toward the hips, are now at the waist. The pleats on the sleeves of short-sleeved summer dresses have changed and, occasionally, teenage girls add decorative buttons to those sleeves. To circumvent the prohibition of pockets on shirts, some men wear a leather pouch on their suspenders to hold pens, and more progressive men are likely to wear short-sleeved shirts. Occasionally, they may wear a window-pane patterned shirt or a cherry red shirt, both of which exceed traditional patterns of decorum. Other widely accepted changes in the last decade involve more and brighter colour choices, athletic shoes worn in work settings and Velcro, which, in a nod of respect to the taboo on buttons, is frequently used to fasten coats and other clothing items instead of hooks and eyes and straight pins. However, none of these glimmers of fashion would ever appear in a Sunday worship service, where conformity to the dress code is paramount.

Unlike moderns who welcome change and applaud the endless arrival of new gadgets and gizmos, the Amish prize patience and slowness, and are averse to change – especially change simply for the sake of it. Such deference to durable traditions might make Amish life appear drab to the outsider. Yet Amish life has many benefits for those who have chosen to abide by its rules. In a culture where abundant choice frequently spikes anxiety and where the emphasis placed on individuality is often at odds with our desire to fit in with the group,¹⁴ the demure and self-effacing nature of the Amish is arguably not just a way to rebel against the stresses of the modern world, but also a deft manner of finding personal satisfaction in acquiescence to the group. Perhaps then, the Amish know what the rest of us are still struggling to accept: slowness no doubt brings its own kind of joy.

Dr Donald Kraybill grew up milking cows on a Mennonite dairy farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and is today the world’s foremost expert on the Old Order Amish. He is a Senior Fellow at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elisabethtown College in Pennsylvania, and lectures widely on Anabaptist faiths. 

This article was originally published in Vestoj ‘On Slowness.’

1. I am grateful for the kindness of Judy Stavisky for granting permission to use her observations of Amish dress and for the editorial assistance of Cynthia Nolt ↩

2. Author interview with Ohio Amish man, October 10, 2012 ↩

3. For details on Amish history and an overview of Amish communities in North America, see D B Kraybill, K M Johnson-Weiner, and S M Nolt, The Amish, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2013 ↩

4. S Scott, Why Do They Dress That Way?, Good Books, Intercourse, PA, 1986, pp.122–123 ↩

5. For an introduction to Amish spirituality and beliefs, consult D B Kraybill, S M Nolt, and D L Weaver-Zercher, The Amish Way, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2010 ↩

6. I Timothy 2:9–10; I Peter 3:3–4 ↩

7. I Corinthians 11:2–16 ↩

8. 1001 Questions and Answers on the Christian Life, Pathway Publishers, Aylmer, Ontario, 1992, pp.129–137 ↩

9. R Sennett, ‘Foreword’, in G Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1994, pp.viii–x ↩

10. I am indebted to Judy Stavisky’s unpublished research notes, July 2014, and Louise Stoltzfus’s unpublished ‘Treatise on Lancaster Amish Dress Practices’, July 2000, for many of these observations. For a lengthy discussion of dress, consult D B Kraybill, K M Johnson-Weiner, and S M Nolt, The Amish, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2013, pp.125–130 ↩

11. Judy Stavisky interview with Pennsylvania Amish woman, July 24, 2014 ↩

12. Judy Stavisky interview with Pennsylvania Amish woman, July 23, 2014 ↩

13. 1001 Questions and Answers on the Christian Life, Pathway Publishers, Aylmer, Ontario, 1992, p.131 ↩

14. See, for example, B Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, HarperCollins, New York, 2004 ↩

EXACTLY A DECADE BEFORE France’s recent wave of ‘burkini’ bans garnered international attention, a new bathing suit designed for Muslim women became a media sensation for the first time.  The burkini, whose cheeky name is a portmanteau of burka and bikini, did not attract headlines because it represented any particularly special new silhouette or technology, however. Made of water-repellent, quick-drying synthetic material that covers the body and hair, the two-piece garments looked very much like wetsuits routinely donned by surfers, divers and swimmers for decades. Adapted to fulfil the needs of women who practice hijab, they were made available in a few different styles and colours, and designed to ensure modesty, UV-protection and freedom of movement in the water. Most women who bought these suits intended to use them for exercise and leisure purposes at public pools and beaches as they went about their daily lives or on holiday. But quickly, the burkini became a lightning rod for press coverage, public scrutiny, cultural commentary and political manoeuvring, particularly in and among nations with minority-Muslim populations.

Australia played a central role in this story. The name ‘Burqini’ was trademarked by Aheda Zanetti, a Lebanese-born Australian fashion designer and self-described ‘Aussie chick,’ whose company Ahiida began selling modest swimsuits in 2004. The following December, violence broke out on Sydney’s Cronulla Beach during a protest when a mob of white, native-born Australians shouted xenophobic, racist chants and viciously attacked beachgoers whom they believed to be Arab. A series of bloody confrontations between white and Muslim Australians ensued. The Cronulla Riots, as these events were dubbed, coincided with a broader wave of xenophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe and the United States, and they were reported on widely by the international press. In response, Australian officials, working with the non-profit Surf Life Saving Australia, staged an intervention called ‘On the Same Wave.’ The program sought to recruit young people from Middle Eastern (mostly Lebanese) family backgrounds into surf lifesaving programs, established bastions ‘of white Australian culture and still a heartland of the country’s sun-bronzed, heroic self-myth.’¹ The central figure that emerged in subsequent media coverage of On the Same Wave was Mecca Laalaa, a twenty-year old student who became Australia’s first Muslim female life-saver – in a burkini.

Young, well-spoken, attractive, studious and dedicated to improving her fitness in a mixed-sex space so that she could contribute to public safety, Laalaa presented a model minority citizen and a perfect poster girl for Surf Life Saving Australia’s centenary in 2007. Laalaa’s success in On the Same Wave, and her ability to complete its rigorous program wearing a swimsuit designed by a successful Lebanese-Australian entrepreneur made for good press and public relations. Images of her on the beach in her special Ahiida-designed Surf Life Saving Australia uniform circulated in Australia and throughout the world, with the burkini itself eventually drawing as much (or more) attention and analysis than the riots that spurred its global debut in the first place.

The burkini’s rapid ascent to media celebrity was shaped by contemporary geopolitics as well as longstanding historical discourses about the relationship between women’s bodies, women’s clothing and what many political theorists since Plato have called ‘the body politic.’ Because women have persistently been identified and read as natural repositories of cultural identity, their bodies (including what they wear) tend to take on additional salience in national crises, intercultural encounters and periods of social change. Before this pattern was exemplified by the burkini, it was manifested in the histories of the two garments from which Ahida’s swimsuit derived its name. The burka and the bikini, though possessing different sartorial histories and geographies of origin, set a precedent and provided scripts for how the burkini would be mediated.

During the second half of the twentieth century, the forms and meanings of the bikini and the burka were produced in tandem with each other and with wider debates about religion, gender roles, national identity and international relations. The bikini was introduced in July of 1946 by the French designer Louis Réard, at a time when Europe was still reeling from the Second World War, and the Cold War had just begun. Réard named his creation after the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, where that summer the United States held a huge nuclear testing program. Operation Crossroads, as it was called, detonated more than twenty atomic devices, resulting in widespread environmental destruction and contamination as well as the long-term displacement of the island’s residents. Just as US personnel stencilled the names ‘Gilda’ (after Rita Hayworth’s femme fatale character in the movie of the same time) and ‘Helen’ (of Troy) on the bombs they dropped on Bikini, Réard picked a name for his bathing suit that reflected the potentially explosive and even destructive powers of female sexuality unleashed in the postwar world. When he showed the bikini at a poolside fashion show in Paris, the designer was forced to hire exotic dancers to model the risqué garment, which was small enough to ‘be pulled through a wedding ring.’ In its early years, the bikini was banned on some European beaches (including sites on the French Atlantic Coast) even as it was on its way to becoming a national and global wardrobe staple.² 

The modern history of the burka, though it is a much older and more varied garment than the bikini, has also been marked by military encounters, dispersion, debates about gender relations and of course controversy in and beyond the Islamic World. As Leila Ahmed has shown in her book A Quiet Revolution, practises of covering and veiling among Muslim women experienced a resurgence in the second half of the twentieth century, related in part to the rise of Islamist movements, but also to changes in cultural expression, producing new aesthetics and even garment industries.³ Burkas and other veiling garments acquired national and regional associations, but also circulated widely through channels of travel, commerce and migration. Their spread was continually characterised by attempts to regulate their use, form and public visibility, as well as by seemingly endless streams of cultural, academic and political commentary. Discussions about nationhood, international relations and modernity have all cohered around the burka and the bikini, with each being variously deemed revolutionary and regressive, liberating and confining, dangerous and harmless, dirty and pure, desirable and prohibited.

When the burkini appeared in the news a decade ago, it thus carried with it a dense web of historical associations, political connotations and moral valences. The histories of the bikini and the burka – including the ways that each garment has been framed as the other’s antithesis – played an important role, along with the initial Australian context, in shaping how the burkini was represented and interpreted in the new century. While the new swimsuit attracted limited notice and commentary in many places, in Europe and the Anglophone World, modest swimsuits and the figure of the burkini-clad women (in actuality, often Mecca Laalaa) were appropriated as catalysts for contemporary debates about the possibilities and limits of cultural pluralism in an era of economic globalisation, mass migrations, war and terrorism and ethnic nationalist movements.

The wave of media coverage that appeared in the burkini’s wake converged around a few dominant narratives, which echoed earlier discussions of the bikini and burka and still remain in circulation today. In the first, the bathing suit was framed as a foreign fashion incongruous with modern ‘Western’ lifestyles and political values (often signified by the bikini or young women wearing bikinis). Predictably, some commentators recycled shopworn Orientalist narratives about the ‘backwardness’ and ‘foreignness’ of Islam and its contributions to an ongoing ‘Clash of Civilisations.’ For example, during the opening monologue of his television show Late Night with Conan O’Brien, the American comedian quipped that the burkini was ‘perfect for the Muslim woman who loves to swim, but hates being stoned to death.’ A related vein of media coverage depicted the practice of hijab and its associated garments as visible markers of foreignness and even alienation from the modern world. In its regular series on ‘extreme fashion trends,’ Marie Claire magazine dressed a non-Muslim editor in a bright blue burkini and sent her on a ‘Fashion Road Test’ around Los Angeles. In a multipage photo spread, she posed on bench next to a display of wrinkly plastic alien dolls, one of which grasped an American flag. ‘Alien nation: Wear a burkini and worlds collide,’ the caption declared. Another image showed her feeling ‘at home in her burkini’ outside of the Venice Beach Freak Show. In a corresponding video feature on Marie Claire’s Youtube channel, the editor inexplicably tested the burkini by walking around Midtown Manhattan, no swimming pool in sight.⁴ 

In framing the burkini as a symbol of alien-ness, ‘extreme fashion’ and gender oppression, much mainstream media coverage resonated with contemporary political movements that aimed to restrict immigration and introduce bans on visible markers of Islamic identity or Islamist politics in the name of national security and public health. These include the transnational growth of immigration bureaucracy and surveillance regimes directed at Muslim migrants and citizens, as well as growing political movements framed around defining ‘national values’ and selectively enforcing their application among minority communities. For example, in Australia in 2007, the government of Prime Minister John Howard, who argued publicly that burkas were irreconcilable with national values, introduced a citizenship test for immigrants and renamed the Department of Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous affairs as the Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

Coverage of the burkini that emphasised the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ and the importance of rescuing women meshed with media tropes that structured the ongoing ‘War on Terror’ waged by the United States and its allies (including the UK and Australia) in the wake of the September 11th attacks and subsequent ones in Europe, Indonesia and the Middle East. Notably, the surge of burkini media coverage in 2007 coincided with President George W. Bush’s announcement of a massive troop surge for Operation Iraqi Freedom, an intervention often framed by policy makers as a humanitarian mission that would rescue and liberate women in particular. For as one historian reminds us, in this war and in others, the bodies of women and girls tend to ‘make cameo appearances as emblems whose symbols of oppression (the burka, for example) can rally sentimentalised, self-congratulatory support’ for controversial policies.⁵

On the Same Wave’s public relations campaign, including the program’s adoption of Zanetti’s design for its uniforms, centred on the notion of rescue as well. Through teaching swimming and life-saving skills to immigrant communities, Surf Life Saving Australia contended, it was protecting immigrant and ethnic residents from the ocean’s dangers – even though the original danger to Arab-appearing beachgoers had actually been white Australian rioters waving national flags and using broken beer bottles to preserve their control over public space and resources.

However, perhaps because Mecca Laalaa and Aheda Zanetti, two poised and successful Australian women, remained the primary figures attached to the burkini, much mainstream international media reportage focused on the swimsuit’s ability to bridge cultural differences and accelerate integration. This strain of burkini coverage, divergent but in some ways structurally similar to those outlined above, depicted the suit as a laudable symbol of (and technology that brought about) assimilatory multiculturalism through compromise. Many reporters framed the garment as one that mediated between poles encoded by the burka and bikini. One Tasmanian paper described the swimsuit as ‘middle ground,’ while the Hindustan Times succinctly computed, ‘Burka+Bikini=Burkini.’ In this narrative, readers were encouraged to see the burkini not as a static marker of difference, but as technology through which difference was being managed – and lessened – via the realms of athletics, leisure and consumer culture.

Many articles in this vein depicted two poles of bodily coverage and non-coverage, represented by the bikini and the burka, as competing – but not temporally or geographically coeval – value systems and aesthetic regimes. Here, the burka represents the past and the foreign, while the bikini signifies the present and the norm. This can be seen in Newsweek’s story on the proliferation of modest swimwear, which explained, ‘American Muslims, especially those in the second generation, say they live in two worlds–the traditional, religious world of their parents and the world of the rest of us.’⁶ A similar sentiment characterised public relations materials for the On the Same Wave program, which referred to the Cronulla Riots as ‘a clash between locals and visitors.’⁷ Much of the commentary that framed the burkini as a laudable marker of cultural pluralism did so within a rhetorical framework that judged assimilation to dominant cultural norms as progress, with the burden for enacting progress placed squarely on the bodies of women. When Laalaa zipped up her Surf Life Saver burkini, according the Sydney Morning Herald she somehow ‘unzipp[ed] racial tensions’ which had previously ‘divided parts of Sydney.’ 

Importantly, the ways in which media outlets and public relations material framed the burkini as a symbol and mode of assimilatory multiculturalism often involved deliberately ignoring and recasting the words and actions of its wearers as well as the modern history of hijab fashions. Most obviously, Anglophone and European-language coverage of the burkini ignored preexisting incarnations of modest swimwear sold in predominantly Muslim countries, preferring to emphasise a sartorial genealogy that framed the garment in a relationship to the West and especially to the bikini. However, depictions of burkini-clad women as outsiders caught between worlds or engaged in acts of compromise explicitly ignored how individuals such as Zanetti and Laalaa explained their own motivations and experiences. This can perhaps best be seen in the 2007 BBC documentary Race for the Beach.

An investigation of the Cronulla Riots and the On the Wave program, Race for the Beach focuses on Laalaa and her attempts to become a surf lifesaver. Throughout, the documentary portrays Laalaa’s actions as that of a cultural diplomat promoting assimilation amidst ‘political pressure’ to ease inter-ethnic tensions in Australia and provide an example of modern Muslim womanhood. To a careful observer, however, the documentary’s narration frequently contradicts what Laalaa herself says about her identity and actions. For instance, she does not describe herself as any type of ambassador; instead, she clearly states that she is participating in On the Same Wave in order to achieve goals she has set for herself. In a telling scene, the reporters follow Laalaa out shopping, where she looks at handbags and brightly coloured headscarves in a store. They ask whether these garments qualify as hijab, and Mecca replies that covering, to her, means dressing modestly without drawing attention, and these items allow her to do so. Apparently ignoring her words, the narrator states ‘If she’s to become a lifesaver Mecca must further compromise her religion’ by donning beach attire, patrolling beaches full of scantily-clad bodies, and even potentially saving drowning men. This is after she has clearly explained hijab and stated that saving a drowning man would not contravene her religion because it would be wrong to not take-on the responsibility of saving him if one could. This externally-imposed emphasis on ‘compromise,’ which persists throughout the program, illustrates the rhetorical paucity of assimilation and progress, as well depictions of the burka and bikini as indices of identity poles, in understanding what the burkini means to its wearers. It also indicates how easily journalism focused on interpreting women’s bodies and clothing, even coverage framed as investigatory or justice-oriented, tends to recapitulate gendered tropes about female bodies being malleable repositories of culture rather than fully-formed citizens and political actors.

In the decade since it debuted, the burkini, along with the original publicity photos of Mecca Laalaa, have resurfaced in the limelight at frequent intervals. At first, news outlets traced the growth of the burkini industry, charting the emergence of new designers, markets and wearers. With increasing frequency, however, the burkini appeared at the centre of stories about women in modest swimwear being excluded from public and private pools and beaches in England, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Morocco and Egypt. Officials have justified these bans by citing fears about aquatic contamination, the erosion of secular values, the spread of extremism and the potential loss of tourist dollars. The proliferation of burkini bans in France this summer, along with photos of police forcing women to remove their modest swimsuits – on beaches that directly face the nation’s former colonial holdings, no less – have ignited international controversy. Meanwhile, according to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, 2016 became the deadliest year ever recorded for migrant deaths on the Mediterranean Sea.  

In this context, memories of the burkini’s debut a decade ago, in addition to anxieties about terrorism and the global refugee crisis, have begun to inspire impassioned responses to the current wave of bans on modest swimwear. Several articles have recommended that France learn from ‘Australia’s Lesson in Burkini Politics’ and embrace the bathing suit ‘as part of the solution’ to promoting integration. Meanwhile, the French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has argued that Marianne’s exposed breast, depicted in some artistic renderings of the allegorical feminine figure, symbolises the incommensurability of the burkini and the modern nation. Both responses carry forward a long tradition of not only imagining the body politic in the shape of a woman, but also believing that the violence and inequalities wrought by war, globalisation, colonialism and ethnic nationalism can be managed through constantly surveilling, interpreting and disciplining what women wear by the water.

Shanon Fitzpatrick is a Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University in Montreal.

Image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art (www.moma.org).

1. R Taylor, ‘Not So Teenie Burqini Brings Beach Shift,’ Reuters, 17 January 2007 ↩

2. For a larger understanding of Operation Crossroads and its cultural meanings, see Sasha Davis, The Empire’s Edge: Militarization, Resistance, and Transcending Hegemony in the Pacific (University of Georgia Press, 2015). For an investigative report on the use of Rita Hayworth’s image, see the blog Conelrad Adjacent’s story at http://conelrad.blogspot.ca/2013/08/atomic-goddess-revisited-rita-hayworths.html ↩

3. L Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America, Yale University Press, 2011. An introduction to Ahmed’s work can be read in the Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/content/efc25b9c-81ba-11e0-8a54-00144feabdc0#axzz1d7g75MIm  ↩

4. C Glyde, “Are You Ready for the Burkini?” Marie Claire, http://www.marieclaire.com/fashion/advice/g126/fashion-burkini/?slide=8. ↩

5. E Rosenberg, ‘Rescuing Women and Children,’ Journal of American History 89.2, September 2002, p. 20 ↩

6. L Miller, ‘Surf’s Up!’ Newsweek, 29 January 2007, p. 15. ↩

7. See Surf Life Saving Australia’s centennial report: http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/bb8db737e2af84b8ca2571780015701e/845def90bfdc637aca257235007e7501!OpenDocument  ↩

Following their delayed admittance into the church in a leadership capacity, female priests inherited a relatively masculine-looking uniform – one that offers little variation where body types and sartorial taste are concerned. Upon their ordination, women in Warde’s position must adopt a standard code of dress. When leading services, clergy members don more formal, distinctive garments known as vestments alongside their ankle-length, long-sleeved robes, which oftentimes reflect the liturgical colour of the day or season of the religious celebration. Outside of church services, clergy people wear what they call clericals – essentially, their ‘street clothes.’ Along with a detachable white clerical collar, a black shirt, pants or a conservative pencil skirt for women are generally acceptable; these modest, non-distracting garments turn the focus away from materialism, thereby illustrating the wearer’s commitment to serving God and their communities as selflessly as possible, even in quotidian life.

Twenty-nine-year-old Rev. Warde has chosen to take an active stance against the stuffiness she saw in most clericals on offer. Instead of succumbing to years of dreary, ill-fitting garments for the sake of fitting in, Rev. Warde aims to modernise her wardrobe through a mix of DIY-alterations, thrift store hunting, and subtle – if liturgically appropriate – colour accents. In the process, she’s proved that dressing with a sense of moral responsibility and religious devotion need not imply a lack of style.

Rev. Warde has not been alone in this effort. Across the pond, Rev. Sandra Sykes, her friend Mandy Strevens and their daughters Sarah and Melissa founded what is thought to be Britain’s first retailer for ‘clergy couture.’ Rev. Sykes, an Anglican curate, points out, ‘So often all you can find is badly adapted shirts and women have been in the ministry for over twenty-five years. It almost seems like we are hidden as women rather than being celebrated…There’s a deeper theological thing to this. Women need to be recognised fully as women in ministry.’² 

As Rev. Warde tells it, the decision-making process required of dressing for work and leisure as a woman of faith occasionally feels like a curse – but she’s warming up to the idea that it might just be a daily blessing in disguise.

I love fashion generally – I’ve always loved it. On my Sabbath, I read InStyle sometimes. I mean, I read the Bible as well, but I do love a good InStyle. I follow Project Runway and I love What Not to Wear and all those sorts of things. I already had this teenage interest in fashion. Then I realised I would be given my work uniform, and my work uniform has a lot behind it – it carries a lot of weight when you walk into a room. That can either be a really good thing or it can be a really challenging thing.

I was trying to figure out what it was going to carry when I wore it and what it was going to say when I walked into a room – I think that matters. I kept looking at these [catalogue] pictures, and there was nothing wrong with them, but I just realised that I couldn’t imagine ever putting that [uniform] on and feeling beautiful. I don’t think that the priesthood requires that we trade feeling beautiful in order to serve God. Full disclaimer: I will say that my relationship to my own body has been a rollercoaster of just figuring out how to love the skin I’m in in the first place, much less adding a collar to it. I wanted to figure out how I could do this thing that I feel like God asked me to do with my life and that I want to very joyously do, but also hold up this interior feeling of beauty. I didn’t want to lose that feeling of beauty – a beauty that I believe God gave me – just because no one decided to give the girl in the catalogue a belt. I also saw all these ways that the clerical uniform could have been better. I just thought, it doesn’t have to be this way.

It’s typical to wear a black clerical shirt, some form of pants or a pencil skirt, maybe a blazer over it and heels. That to me would be the expected outfit to wear. And there’s nothing wrong with that – there are some people who make that exact wardrobe look amazing. But my body isn’t such that that actually looks good on me; it looks like I’m dressed up in my mom’s clothes when I wear an outfit like that. I’m 4’11” and curvy, so my figure doesn’t lend itself toward some of those lines that are a little bit more common … It wouldn’t surprise you that the priesthood – a male-dominated workforce – would have a more expected, masculine dress profile. But I don’t fall into that profile, so I’ve had to figure out how to wear clothes that I think flatter my body in an appropriate way, while also wearing this collar.

I’ll go to a boutique and find a black dress with scalloped edges on the bottom and on the sleeve, and I just put that over the collar. They have this thing called a ‘janie’ – it’s basically a ‘dickey,’ but it’s a ‘janie’ for women – and it hooks down right under your bra basically, and you can connect your collar to it. You would typically wear your undergarment, your janie, and something over it as long as it covers the janie. I take dresses from boutiques – like maybe a houndstooth dress, but it’s black-and-white – and I throw that over the janie and go. But that would not necessarily be something that most people have seen with a collar attached to it. The typical colour for clergy wear is black, but if you go to Women Spirit or Almy – companies that make clergy attire – you’ll see that now you can get clericals in myriad colours.

For my first ordination, I went to a Goodwill in Austin, Texas, and found this black, button-up shirt-dress. It was really cute and it was the appropriate length and everything; hitting right at or just above the knee is best. Why do I care about the length? I think when you meet with the priest, the greatest presence you should feel in the room is the presence of God. Sure, I want to teach and preach from a place of confidence that is sometimes enhanced by my clothing: but the thing of the greatest importance to me is that the people I care for feel God’s presence. I don’t want a hemline to distract from that. I’d rather break every fashion rule in the book than challenge that.

One of my seminary classmates was a former tailor and she was about to get ordained as well, and I said, ‘Would you mind tailoring this for me?’ She tailored it, so I wore the black dress, leggings and black wedges. The colour for an ordination is red, so I put on a red scarf; I thought it would be appropriate for the liturgical season, but I also thought it would be fun and offer some colour. I have a red pair of cowboy boots and since I’m a priest in Texas I always wear them on Pentecost. The only reason I can even remember what I was wearing is because I did get some comments, but they were all positive. People were commenting on how they’d never seen such a fashionable priest.

That said, I was serving in a diocese when I was ordained a priest that considered white to be the appropriate colour for the vestments for ordinations, which was new to me, but I went with it. White is how we recognise the majesty of resurrection: it’s how we celebrate All Saints, Easter, baptism Sundays, and funerals, because white celebrates the resurrection of Christ and how we share in that via our own resurrecting acts and our final resurrection in death.  Ordination could also be seen as a resurrecting act, because we take on a new way of life with new vows, new beauties, new challenges and new eternal joys. My colours change based on context.

The ironic thing about the clerical uniform is that one of the early significances of it was to make a clergy person be in the background. It was worn as an act of humility, so they wouldn’t be flamboyant; they wouldn’t be outwardly dressed in a way that would call attention to themselves. It’s ironic in a postmodern world, because I can’t walk into any place in a collar and not have a million people staring at me, like, ‘What on earth? Did a priest just walk into this coffee shop? And she’s also a woman? I don’t know what to do with that right now.’ That’s a whole other layer. The fashion aspect is constantly also being confronted with the reality that there are people who believe that women should not be ordained. And I have a physical manifestation of my ordination that goes with me when I walk into those places – that’s another challenge that just comes with it. Now the joy of it is that you also end up having conversations that you otherwise wouldn’t have had. People can see your collar and sometimes they have needed a sign for years that they could talk to someone, that they could have a prayer – you walk in, and you’re just trying to get your groceries, but they see this opportunity and there’s a really holy moment that is offered to me because of the fact that they can see on my neck an opportunity for a prayer or maybe hope or someone that they can trust. 

As far as negative feedback I’ve received, I think that every good has a shadow side. And the shadow side of adding fashion as a thing that I’m thinking about in my ministry is the idea that it might become self-centred – that putting on this collar might be about me. And to some degree, yes, by adding aspects of my personality to it, it is becoming about me. But my belief around that is that I’m not trying to take God out of it. God is the focus of my life and I want my life to be a ministry to God – I just think that God called me, Erin Jean Warde, to be a priest. And so I’m going to bring who God created me to be into that ministry. I think I want to honour the worry – that it then becomes self-centred and it’s no longer about God, it’s about you and your ego, and all of that Freudian, terrible stuff that we don’t want to show up in our priesthood – but at the same time, I think it’s okay to say, ‘I want to feel good about myself. I want to feel beautiful, because I believe that God desires that I would feel beautiful.’ That’s part of this abundant life that I believe the ministry is calling me into. 

If you know me personally, you know that I am comedic, I am extroverted, and I think that laughter is the best accessory to any outfit. But I’m also outspoken and I like to talk and I’m curious, so for me, I wanted those parts of my personality to be reflected in my fashion, even from before I was a priest. There is a connection for me between when I look my best and I feel like I look my best, in being able to more confidently walk into a room that might otherwise be intimidating. The life of being a priest, at least in my setting, involves standing in front of a lot of people. And it’s not necessarily four hundred people, but it’s a congregation of people. I think for me, it’s not so much appearance for the sake of anyone else, but I want to be able to feel self-confident, because that’s when I believe I do my best – for God and for the church.

My exploration is wrapped up in the fact that I am a very feminine person. I have really long hair, and I like to curl it, and I like red lipstick and I just went to a gala at my church in a black midi-dress with my collar and my red heels and a red lip. And it was fantastic. I loved every minute of it. That’s who I am. If you didn’t put me in a career where I would wear a collar, I would wear the same thing. It just wouldn’t have a collar on it. As I get older, and as I go through this journey of self-exploration, I’m just trying to figure out how to be the same person in every room I stand in.

Rev. Erin Jean Warde is the Associate Rector for Christian Formation at the Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration in Dallas, Texas.

Olivia Aylmer is a New York-based writer, editor and graduate of Barnard College at Columbia University.

1. B Tammeus, ‘Episcopal church celebrates 40 years of women in the priesthood.’ National Catholic Reporter, 28 July 2014 https://www.ncronline.org/news/faith-parish/episcopal-church-celebrates-40-years-women-priesthood ↩

2. J Bingham, ‘“Clergy couture” range launched for fashion-conscious female priests.’ The Telegraph, 21 May 2016 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/21/clergy-couture-range-launched-for-fashion-conscious-female-pries/ ↩