Abstract
About a century ago, women in the US and western Europe looked to ‘Turkish pantaloons’ (shalwar) for freedom and were shamed, harassed, and even arrested for wearing them. Meanwhile, people of all genders in Turkey and Bulgaria moved freely in shalwar until modern nation-building projects imposed Western restrictive dress that rigidly delineated the boundaries of masculinity and femininity. Considering shalwar's recent elevated status as trendy global fashion attire, what is the public discourse of shalwar in Bulgaria and Turkey? Can clothing shunned as backward be recontextualized as modern? What can clothing illuminate about gender, modernity, and geopolitics? To answer these questions, I analyse over two hundred Turkish and Bulgarian primary sources through critical transculturalism and critical race theory.
About a century ago, women in the US and western Europe looked to ‘Turkish pantaloons’ for freedom. Amelia Bloomer, a writer and advocate for the right of American women to wear ‘Turkish pantaloons’, argued that women are ‘crippled, dragged-down creature[s] [their] slavery to clothes has made [them]. No law of God stands in the way of [their] freedom’ (Bloomer, 1895: 78). Shalwar, the baggy 'Turkish pantaloons' renamed ‘bloomers’ by American media, were championed by feminist activists in the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand (Stevenson, 2017). However, women quickly reverted to former restrictive and hazardous fashions because the ‘bloomers’ were a gender transgression that elicited widespread harassment. According to the rigid gender divide in sartorial style that had become fashionable in Europe since the 15th century (Hunt, 1996), bifurcated clothing was reserved for men, justified as a religious right (see Cressy, 1996). Thus, women of the enlightened West fought for the right to wear shalwar in vain. 1
Meanwhile, people of all genders in Turkey and Bulgaria moved freely in shalwar until modern nation-building projects dictated Western dress: restrictive clothing that rigidly delineated the boundaries of masculinity and femininity. About ten years after French haute couture designer Paul Poiret flaunted his shalwar-inspired ‘harem pants’, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's reforms imposed Western clothing (Atabaki and Zurcher, 2004; Sarisaman, 1998). Shalwar was banned in some regions of Turkey (Duman, 2018), and media representations of shalwar were consistent: shalwar is incompatible with modern life while Western fashion brings protagonists happy endings. 2 In Bulgarian historical movies, shalwar-clad terrible Turks relegated shalwar to history and the Other. 3 As part of Bulgaria's forced assimilation campaign that sought to homogenize Bulgarian citizenry, shalwar was banned from 1984 until the fall of socialism in 1989 (Neuburger, 2004), concurrently with the global popularity of MC Hammer's shalwar-inspired ‘hammer pants’ in the US – a popularity that persists in the 2020s (Kim, 2022).
In Bulgaria and Turkey shalwar retains its historic associations with backwardness and Islam. Ironically, although a signifier of backwardness, shalwar extends its semiotic potential as a global fashion trend even in Bulgaria and Turkey. Considering shalwar's recent elevated status to trendy global fashion attire, what is the public discourse of shalwar in Bulgaria and Turkey? Can clothing shunned as backward be recontextualized as modern? More generally, what can clothing illuminate about gender, modernity, and geopolitics? To answer these questions, I analyse over two hundred Turkish and Bulgarian primary sources through critical transculturalism (Kraidy, 2005) and critical race theory (Snorton, 2017).
Critical transculturalism (Kraidy, 2005) allows for a reading of hybrid, transnational, and fluid cultural signs such as shalwar beyond domination and resistance, and instead as contraptions of structural and discursive power. All cultures are hybrid, but this fact should not deter researchers from undertaking granular investigations of hybridity, argues Kraidy (2005). Of potent analytic potential is the hierarchy of elements perceived as foreign, and the structures and discourses that shape them, revealing hegemony and its limits. Translocal and intercontextual social practice is privileged as the site of agency, where the West is decentred ‘to pave the way for the construction of alternative perspectives on hybridity and locality that are not confined to global-to-local links that reinscribe dependency’ (Kraidy, 2005: 155). Intercontextual social practice recognizes context beyond a social or natural environment, as a ‘constitutive and constituting force’ (Kraidy, 2005: 155) in which hybrid identities and forms may or may not result in dominance.
I view hybridity as intimately related to Snorton's (2017) fungibility/fugitivity. Hybridity is a precondition and qualifier of fungibility and fugitivity, as cultural hybridity enables alternate conditions of possibility. Snorton (2017) refers to fungibility and fugitivity as ‘two sides of a Janus-faced coin’ (Snorton, 2017: 84), and argues that captivity and the ungendering of blackness absolved people of the dominant semiotics of gender and race. Fungibility and fugitivity transformed ‘black’ and ‘trans’ into conditions of possibility, ‘fungible, thingified, and interchangeable’ (Snorton, 2017: 6), not as ‘privilege, being and distinction’ (Snorton, 2017: 70). To be fungible, identity categories such as race and gender, and specifically categories positioned as binary, are mutually constitutive hybrid elements, and thus, inversely, the construction and representation of hybrid cultural elements that signify particular identity categories depends on fungibility. Fungibility, when deployed as agency against structural impositions of identity categories, can metamorphose into fugitivity; oppositely, when fungibility is structurally manipulated, it can be used as subterfuge or liberation. This is related to Snorton’s (2017) definition of ‘passing’ as performing an alternate identity, hierarchically formed, encompassing binary thinking: ‘Like a vertical line with arrows on either end, passing is figuratively represented by moving up or down hierarchized identificatory formations’ (Snorton, 2017: 70). Snorton (2017) defines transitivity as moving from the fungible to the fugitive and transversality as when fugitivity intersects with fungibility.
Further, Snorton posits that in fugitive slave narratives, cross-dressing and cross-gender escape ‘engenders a way of seeing fungible flesh as a mode for fugitive action’ (Snorton, 2017: 84). Historically women's fungible flesh also enabled fugitive action and the possibility of redefining their gender through cross-dressing (Gubar, 1981; Hotchkiss, 2012), especially since rigid sartorial gender differentiation began in Europe in the Middle Ages (Hunt, 1996). Notably, the pivotal moment of Western women's foray toward bifurcated clothing that symbolized the feminist movement and gradually normalized women's trousers was enabled by fugitive cross-cultural dressing, with the unisex shalwar. Concurrently, in Turkey and Bulgaria, people of all genders gradually abandoned the unisex shalwar as hegemonic Western dress and sartorial gender differentiation was imposed on their fungible bodies.
Shalwar as oppressor and liberator of fungible/fugitive women
Shalwar are baggy trousers worn by people of all genders, all ethnicities and races, all socioeconomic classes and all ages, spanning the region from North India to the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and the Balkans, for thousands of years. According to its etymology and first depiction in Iran from around the 5th–6th century
In Bulgaria and Turkey, modernizers attacked the shalwar in a bout of self-orientalism based on a nationalist yearning for a monolithic populace to serve the Western gaze. Western feminist rhetoric against dresses and for the shalwar was inverted: this time, dresses were touted as progressive, light, clean and imbued with promises of liberation, while the shalwar was castigated as oppressive, backward, and impeding movement and progress. Fungibility and hybridity facilitated this sartorial hegemony. Though Victorian fashion influences appeared in Ottoman palaces as early as the 19th century (Tezcan, 2011), dress reform on a massive scale was brought by Kemal Ataturk's modernization campaigns in Turkey. Ataturk’s speeches during the early years of the Turkish Republic inscribed Turkish clothing as backward, of foreign origin, and particular to Turkey (Kilic, 1995), and sweeping shalwar and other ‘traditional’ clothing away from cities was prioritized (Arig, 2006), leading to regional bans of shalwar (Duman, 2018).
In Bulgaria, there was a national ban on shalwar, where independence from Ottoman rule instigated nation-building and self-orientalism inflected modernization (Amnesty International, 1986; Crampton, 1997; Neuburger, 2004). Women in Bulgaria were directed to emulate European women (Neuburger, 2004) and the official discourse on shalwar was that it is backward and expensive; dresses are cheaper, light, comfortable, hygienic and ‘free [women] from the veil and shalwars’ (Yeni Işık ad, cited in Neuburger, 2004: 132). Women in shalwar were fugitive and subversive, keeping their shalwar but camouflaging it with long skirts during the ban in Bulgaria. Meanwhile, state-mandated cross-cultural dressing validated and extended fungible women's hybrid cultural practices, as many left their villages and shalwar for arguably empowered urban lifestyles, albeit in more restrictive and gendered/sexualized clothing. Shalwar in cities was marked and fugitive, as it was for fungible American adopters of ‘bloomers’ some years earlier, who zealously advocated for shalwar, but could not escape harassment and denigration as cross-cultural cross-dressers.
In the United States, shalwar presented a possibility for women's liberation and a healthy, natural, and functional alternative to heavy dresses and corsets, but was ridiculed as masculine (Mas, 2017). The ‘Turkish pantaloons’ were advocated by women's rights and health advocates during the dress reform movement in the 19th century and recognized for their key role in the gradual normalization of trousers as women's wear (Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d.).
Amelia Bloomer, whose name inspired the renaming of shalwar as ‘bloomers’, emphasized the unisex nature of clothing in ancient times, arguing that wearing trousers is not an inherent male right, and that women do not sin by wearing shalwar (Bloomer, 1895: 77). Shalwar thus allowed women to bypass a ‘direct appropriation of Western men's wear…. In backing away from male trousers, women's rights advocates attempted to distance themselves from the image of power conveyed by the garment’ (Fischer, 1997: 124). Nevertheless, construed as an inadmissible gender and (inferior) cultural transgression, women were shamed, harassed, and even arrested for wearing them (Brucculieri, 2019). Although Western women were coerced to abandon the shalwar, their temporary gender fugitivity brought the wearing of bifurcated attire within the realm of possibility. 4
A French journalist who travelled to the US described Bloomers as ‘despite being American – nothing but Europeans dressed in the Turkish style’ (Grand-Carteret, 1899: 53, cited in Ballesteros, 2017). This statement reveals the hierarchies of cultural hybridity: from high expectations of Americanness, to a disappointed ‘nothing but European’, to the pejorative ‘Turkish style’. He further described them as: ‘Neutral gender. Half-man, half-woman …’ (Grand-Carteret, 1899: 103, cited in Ballesteros, 2017), illuminating the fungibility of women who can perform a ‘neutral gender’. This fungibility was fugitive as it destabilized and trampled on essentialized notions of gender and sartorial culture. No doubt to the French journalist's dismay, the shalwar made its French debut about a decade later.
Shalwar was an orientalist fetish of French couturier Paul Poiret, known in the US as the ‘King of Fashion’. Besides his reputation in dress history for freeing women from corsets and appropriating shalwar, known as his ‘harem pantaloons’ , Poiret's ‘modernity, expressed through the structural simplicity of his clothing, signifies a pivotal moment in the emergence of modernism’ (The Met, 2007). The shalwar came to symbolize modernity and, for Poiret, ‘the imagery of Eastern cultures offered freedom from the traditions and conventions of the West’ 5 (The Met, 2007). Poiret also emphasized linear evolution in fashion: ‘As with evolution in the natural world, changes in fashion happen according to a straight and continual line, and not in great leaps’ (Parkins, 2012: 69). According to Poiret, then, the shalwar is a sign of progress that the West had evolved enough to accept at the turn of the 20th century. This reveals the fungible nature of binary concepts such as modernity/tradition, East/West, and linear/cyclical, and highlights the structural imposition of hybridity, as the same material signifies opposite meanings based on particular translocal and intercontextual practices.
Additionally, the hegemony of French culture in the US and the fashion world is also evident, as Poiret aimed not to liberate, but to colonize women through fashion. His view of women as fungible is evident in the following quote, where he states that he wished to ‘colonize this disorderly whimsy: without appearing to, you impose your taste on these superficial and changeable beings’ (Parkins, 2012: 61). However, yet again, women's fungibility and fugitivity through consuming Poiret's orientalist haute couture brought the wearing of bifurcated garments by women within the realm of possibility. Thus, shalwar was a polysemous signifier that broadly signified freedom for Western women, and oppression for Turkish and Bulgarian women. So how do Bulgarian and Turkish public spheres react to contemporary fashion runways and storefronts that exhibit shalwar? To answer these questions, I deploy a multidisciplinary methodology which I delineate along with method in the following section.
Method
For the broadest possible reach of cultural meaning from an in-depth qualitative purview, the study design centres on the public discourse of Turkey and Bulgaria. As there are no bibliographic databases in Turkish and Bulgarian, data is from an early-to-mid October 2019 Google search. For Turkey, a Google.com.tr News section search for the Turkish şalvar [shalwar] resulted in 136 articles over 16 pages. The earliest article is dated 25 January 2010; the most recent article at the time of data collection is from 16 October 2019.
Likewise, I searched Bulgarian Google.bg News for the Bulgarian шалвари [shalwar] and saved all articles up to and including page 10 of the Google News search. However, after determining that most results were not articles about shalwar but reader comments on unrelated articles, for the rest of the search I selected only those with шалвари in the body of the article, which yielded 126 articles from 29 pages of search results. The earliest article from the search was published on 10 June 2009, and the most recent 23 July 2019. There were two overlapping categories in both countries that were within the scope of this study, which I selected for analysis: articles about people who wore shalwar, which I coded ‘Shalwar Wearer’; and articles about shalwar and fashion, which I coded ‘Fashion Industry’. In addition, I analysed the ‘Comments on Articles’ category from Bulgarian data because it was significant in number and promising for what shalwar signifies in Bulgaria. Article categories and numbers are outlined in Table 1 and Table 2.
Turkey – article categories and numbers
Bulgaria – article categories and numbers
Data analysis is based on a combination of traditions, including hermeneutics, semiotics, and discourse analysis. I view every element present in the articles as a meaningful sign (Eco, 1979) and scrutinize ‘common sense’ through mythological analysis (Barthes, 1972). Additionally, I engage in a dialectic of explanation and understanding (Ricoeur, 1976), by studying the meaning of the text as a whole; studying it on its own terms, almost as a unique genre; and finding horizons of meaning, such as metaphorical and symbolic language. A horizon of meaning also includes history, and understanding entails the fusion of historical horizons with the horizon of the present (Gadamer, 2004), which is why I began the study with the history of shalwar, situating it in its various historical, cultural, geopolitical, and social contexts. I now turn to the findings.
Shalwar fashion in Bulgaria: ‘Fashion from the East’
Shalwar fashion in Bulgaria is positioned as foreign, and the communities who wear them now and historically are rendered invisible. The shalwar trend is an integral part of global fashion design that ‘makes us feel the spirit of the Orient’ (Fashion.bg, 2009) and ‘Shalwar – Fashion from the East’ is the title of a photo gallery that defines the shalwar and states that: ‘They are typical of Eastern cultures, but today we see them in the fashion shows of famous designers’ (Rozali, 2013). By positioning shalwar as a foreign element from ‘the East’, defining it, and exhibiting shalwar from European and American haute couture instead of local designers, Bulgarian authors discursively distance Bulgaria from Turkey and from Bulgarian history and its Ottoman past, during which Bulgarians also wore shalwar. Fears of a neo-Ottoman invasion, self-orientalism, and Western hegemony render invisible both Bulgarian folk costumes and communities where shalwar continue to be worn (such as the Roma, Pomak and Turks) while lauding Western ‘ethno-style’ (Fashion.bg, 2009). This clearly manifests the structural dynamics shaping Bulgarian hybridity.
Besides catering to the Western gaze, shalwar fashion discourse comments on the male gaze. In articles warning women of clothing of which men do not approve, a subheading reads ‘Tights and Shalwar’, explaining that, ‘Contrary to popular belief, men have nothing against women’s trousers [except] shalwar and tights. The first type violates the proportions of the figure, and the second deprives it of all mystery’ (24 Chasa, 2019; Kanal 3, 2019). Women's fungibility in this kind of sartorial policing is revealing, as is the spectrum of possibility for women's dress, which ranges from skintight to baggy trousers. Certainly, with the unisex shalwar, women's proportions and body shapes would have been a non-issue. ‘In general, trousers were unisex in Eastern nations. Think of women’s shalwars, which are not very different from men’s’, reads an article that outlines ancient sartorial history (Darik News, 2014) and rightfully credits women from ‘the East’ with initiating the adoption of trousers by women elsewhere. Even so, urban-dwelling Turkish women require Western approval to wear shalwar, as is evident from the Turkish fashion discourse discussed in the next section.
Shalwar fashion in Turkey: Western endorsement necessary
As in Bulgaria, public discourse in Turkey rationalizes shalwar fashion through Western endorsement to account for its newfound visibility in a prestigious domain. ‘It is not easy to dress Turkish women in the shalwar. First the stars in Hollywood must wear it. Joking aside, that is what happened,’ reports an article entitled ‘The shalwar descended to town from the village’ (Izmir, 2015). With this idiomatic expression used to denigrate village migrants living in cities, the article reminds readers that villages are the true realm of shalwar and ‘real’ Turkish women do not wear them. Izmir (2015) and Pinzuti (2018) elucidate the geographic and temporal travels of shalwar to the US and Europe. Izmir (2015) explains that Justin Bieber, Rihanna, and Cate Blanchett wore shalwar, sold by Zara, Armani, Mango, and local retailers De Facto, Koton, BNG. Ebru painting designs (Hurriyet, 2018c) and ‘modern shalwar styles’ (Kimse Duymasin, 2019) are also deployed in service of cleansing shalwar from its peasant reputation. The popularity of streetwear is also adduced to justify that of shalwar, as Brav (2018) explains that analogous to sportswear and athletic shoes, shalwar is also popular in music festivals such as Coachella. Most ironically, in ‘Shalwar, bicycles and fancy women’, Pinzuti (2018) explains the shalwar inspiration of the American dress reform movement at length in promoting the ‘Fancy Women Bike Ride’, in which women are encouraged to dress as they like while celebrating the freedom of cycling. Even though Ottoman women were free to wear shalwar and inspired the American women's dress reform movement, the latter is nevertheless harnessed as a mobilizing symbol for the Turkish women's bicycle activity. The depth of self-orientalism and the vestiges of the hegemonic imposition of Western norms and cultural hierarchy following the founding of the Turkish republic is transparent.
There is no tinge of pride that wearing shalwar is now a global trend; instead, authors are flabbergasted that it is trendy and express shame that is rationalized through Western endorsement. Further, although shalwar is still worn over vast territories as well as in Turkey, musicians and actors from the West are credited with its global popularity, because of the privileged position of the West in the hierarchy of Turkish cultural hybridity (Haberler.com, 2013, 2015). It was known that especially dancers, athletes, and hip-hoppers regularly wore shalwar, but no one thought it would be so popular on the street. Shalwar became a favourite because like sneakers, it is both trendy and comfortable. Once people get used to the comfort, they go to the movies, shopping, restaurants, even gala, award ceremonies and weddings wearing the shalwar. Shalwar addiction is increasing daily, and it appears that a very serious competition with denim jeans has begun. (Haberler.com, 2015)
Thus, the comfortable, unisex shalwar is rediscovered in urban Turkey only after Western fanfare. Though preferred by women, men also began to yield to it following singer Halil Sezai, according to Izmir (2015) and Brav (2018), who are unaware or dismissive of the unisex use of shalwar. Likewise, Izmir (2015) reports that shalwar is popular with foreign tourists, but that it is recently trendy in Turkish city streets as well (Izmir, 2015). Here again, the people who historically and currently continue to wear the shalwar in Turkey are not worthy of mention, as in Bulgaria.
The shalwar is newsworthy only because it has the attention of the West and Western tourists. The shalwar ‘worn in East and Southeast Anatolia by people working in agriculture’ is now a favourite of tourists (Haberler.com, 2015) some of whom, including urban women and tourists from the US, Russia, and Germany, participate in ‘shalwar tourism’. They wear shalwar and pick olives and cherries (Memurlar.net, 2019) or prepare gozleme – filled (cheese, potato, etc.) and folded filo pastries (Timeturk, 2019). ‘Now Europeans also wear shalwar’ reads a headline, and the article explains that Turkish shalwars are shipped to Germany, Holland, Belgium, and the UK (Detay Kibris, 2018), as well as to the US and Australia (Yozoglu, 2017). Additionally, a German resident in Turkey made news for wearing ‘a shalwar like villager women’ (Milliyet, 2017). Meanwhile, Mardin locals are increasingly interested in ‘traditional’ clothing (Mardin Life, 2019).
However, there were also limited reports of a steady decrease in use of shalwar, stagnant sales, and a near-extinct shalwar sector due to a preference for ‘modern clothing’, such as jeans and shorts, among young people, and a belief that it is not appropriate to wear shalwar outside of villages (Haberler.com, 2011; Isledici and Bay, 2017; Ihlas News Agency, 2015). However, the shalwar will not disappear because of nostalgia, which will compel young people to wear them: ‘as young people become older, they will remember that their father, uncle and grandfather wore these clothes’ (Ihlas News Agency, 2015). Further, some municipalities are offering courses in sewing shalwar (Milliyet, 2018). Yet, wearing shalwar in Bulgaria and Turkey continues to make news as a shocking act.
Fugitive/fungible shalwar spectacle
In both Bulgaria and Turkey, a plethora of news headlines revealed celebrities, politicians, and ordinary citizens caught in the fugitive act of wearing shalwar in public. In Bulgaria, Kim Kardashian, ‘dumbfounded her fans’ (Kanal 3, 2016) after wearing shalwar, and dressing her children in them. Meanwhile, Bulgarian tennis player Grigor Dimitrov's girlfriend, American singer Nicole Scherzinger, ‘shocked with her appearance’ after she wore shalwar at a party, likened to rapper MC Hammer's shalwar (Stoinev, 2017). The cross-cultural dressing of American celebrities, read as fugitive by Bulgarian media, muddled the fungible modern/backward East/West binaries as the Bloomers had done about a century before. Further fugitive action was documented of Bulgarian celebrities such as Adelina Radeva, who ‘shocked her fans’ by wearing shalwar (Marica, 2018). Similarly, actress and producer Elena Petrova ‘on top of [all of her woes] wears wide shalwar-style pants’ (Varna 24, 2019). Meanwhile, it was not shocking that American fashion designer Rachel Roy did not like the 2015 shalwar trend (Eva.bg, 2015), albeit wearing shalwar to a movie premiere in 2016 (Style Bistro, 2016).
Wearing shalwar by celebrities in Turkey was also portrayed as a shocking fugitive act. Turkish male celebrities caught in shalwar by paparazzi were singer Seda Sayan's son Ogulcan Engin (Hurriyet, 2018b), singer Koray Avci (Milliyet, 2019), singer Hakan Peker (Ensonhaber.com, 2014), and soccer players Arda Turan (Hurriyet, 2018a) and Volkan Demirel (Takvim, 2019). Sartorial maverick, singer Halil Sezai, made headlines for opting for a tuxedo over his characteristic shalwar, because he wanted to wear ‘something special’ to a particular concert (Cumhuriyet, 2014). The hierarchy of imposed Western dress is evident in Sezai's choice of a tuxedo as ‘special’. Meanwhile, among Turkish female celebrities who garnered paparazzi attention with their shalwar was singer Demet Akalin (Hamza, 2017), and actors Cigdem Batur (Baris, 2019), Yasemin Ozilhan (Sabah, 2019), and Ayca Varlier (Gokduman, 2018). The peculiar popularity of shalwar in Hollywood (Haberler.com, 2012) and Halle Berry's shalwar (NTV, 2016) was also newsworthy in Turkish media.
As a signifier for backwardness, the shalwar is also transgressive in academic settings and for ‘modern’ activities, such as women participating in sports. Thus, it was newsworthy that shalwar-clad academic Canan Karatay harvested olives (Talay, 2015), and that preschool students (Urer, 2015), a teacher (Sengezer, 2018), and mothers wore shalwar in schools (Memurlar.net, 2013). Wearing shalwar and working out (Haberler.com, 2019), doing yoga (Yenigun, 2017), and playing soccer (Ulusal Kanal, 2017) were also well-documented transgressive acts.
Shalwar was also harnessed as a populist political spectacle. Male and female politicians wore shalwar and harvested lemons (Milliyet, 2015a), olives (Timeturk, 2016), and peppers (Oner, 2019), cooked (En Kocaeli, 2019), operated tractors (Haberler.com, 2017), commemorated holidays (Superhaber, 2019), and commenced election work (Haber 7, 2015). Though arguably an effective performance of nationalism, shalwar was also racialized when associated with certain communities.
Racialized shalwar
In Bulgaria and Turkey, shalwar, once a universal garment, is a racialized signifier of Islam. Wearing shalwar was not rendered as a shocking fugitive act when articles were about Turks, Pomaks, Roma, and foreign-born Muslims (Marinova, 2017; Pavlova, 2016; Stoilova, 2016; Tahov, 2019). An opinion piece in a French broadcast comparing rose picking in Bulgaria and France and, arguing for French superiority, described rose pickers in Bulgaria as ‘Gypsies and Turks dressed in shalwar and muddy clothes’ while their French counterparts are in ‘official clothes [sterile] as though in an operating room’ (Fakti.bg, 2018). This resonates with the comments by readers on news articles about Muslims in Bulgaria, Turkey, other countries of the Middle East, and a soccer team from a Turkish-majority region in Bulgaria that, in unison, characterize shalwar – and by association those who wear shalwar – as backward, dirty, and Muslim, echoing racialized anti-shalwar rhetoric from decades prior.
Shalwar is conflated with, and a sign of, dirtiness and Islam in Turkey as well. A well-circulated op-ed haranguing a Fethullah Gulen follower complicit in the coup attempt of 2016 referred to Gulen's shalwar as ‘urine-stained’ (Ramoglu, 2017). Another headline prominently declared that boys living in an Islamic sect dormitory were beaten for not wearing shalwar (Ileri Haber, 2019). Meanwhile, the ‘Ministry of Education scandals continue: misogyny, shalwar, takke’, reads the headline of an article that criticizes new textbooks for spreading Arab, Ottoman, and Islamic propaganda (Yurt Gazetesi, 2019). With a similar inflammatory tone, another headline alleged that the Presidency of Religious Affairs dictates that men wear shalwar and other clothing signifying Islam (Sol.org, 2019). Also, soccer player Aykut Demir ‘shocked’ with his shalwar after joining an Islamic sect (Milliyet, 2015b). The conflation of gender, shalwar and Islam is pronounced, as all the articles that chastise shalwar-wearers and shalwar-imposers in relation to Islam are about boys and men.
Considering that shalwar are unisex, fungible, and come in multiple styles and under many names dictated translocally and intercontextually, the extent to which Western discursive hegemony permeates Turkey leaves one flabbergasted. Turkey, a Muslim-majority country with a rich shalwar past, has internalized shalwar worn by men as backward and Islamic; not because shalwar fail ‘to conform to the gendered norms of intelligibility by which persons are defined’ (Butler, 1990: 23) but because they fail to conform to secular sartorial norms instituted by modernization policies, and thus only become admissible if promoted by Western fashion industries. Thus, even if shalwar enjoys worldwide fame on fashion runways and in storefronts, the public discourse of shalwar in Bulgaria and Turkey denigrates communities that continue to wear them, read as a fugitive anti-modernization manoeuvre that undermines social and economic progress. In other words, wearing shalwar outside the village is a fugitive manoeuvre based on hegemonic calibrators of the fungible ‘modern/backward’ hierarchized identificatory formations, which almost echo apartheid language of ‘separate development’ (Minh-ha, 1989: 80); that is, keeping ‘traditions’ in their assigned spaces. Village residents can eschew shalwar and ‘pass’ as modern or, alternatively, engage in fugitive fungibility by wearing shalwar outside their assigned space, but risk discrimination and the loss of social capital.
From shalwar to uniforms of modernity
This comparative investigation of shalwar allows for the granular disentanglement of gender, modernity, and geopolitics. Taking shalwar as an analytic pivot and navigating through spatial, temporal, and discursive constructions and media representations is enriching in a number of ways. First, these findings overturn the idea of Western fashion as a sign of liberation. From harassing and jailing women in the US and western Europe for wearing shalwar, to corsets that never went away (Steele, 2001), to the extreme sexualization of the female body, the oppressive nature of Western beauty ideals is well documented (Bordo, 2003; Mas, 2017). Meanwhile, their counterparts in Bulgaria and Turkey continue to suffer in similar ways, because the Western gaze dictates a homogeneous nation based on Western hegemonic notions of gender and fashion, directed by patriarchy, capitalism, and consumerism.
Besides enacting symbolic violence on women through clothing that insists on a sexualized appearance to serve the male gaze, sartorial modernization reforms imposed rigidly delineated gender norms. Prior to Western norms of modernization, sartorial styles were universal, not categorically different: that is, all races, all genders, and all ages wore shalwar in Bulgaria and Turkey, as well as in vast areas of Central and South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and the Balkans. Analogous to its imposition of heteronormativity, the West, with its modernization underscored by consumerism-driven capitalism and the imposition of ‘male’ and ‘female’ sartorial signs, constructed a visible gender differentiation. Performing modern citizenship also required a gender costume underscored by the sexualization of the female body. The demands of Western patriarchy and the male gaze amalgamated in a Western gaze that harassed, imprisoned, and shamed women out of their clothing in service of the male gaze and capitalism. The Western male gaze forbid women to wear clothing designated as masculine lest women become empowered by this. Wearing shalwar when they should be wearing skirts in urban domains was particularly deviant, fugitive. Cross-cultural dressing gave women a choice, a possibility, an escape from hazardous, impractical clothing designed for the male gaze. The Bloomers were short-lived because the bodies of elite white women in the West were not fungible; they were privileged and distinct, and captive within Western patriarchy.
Meanwhile, women's fungibility allowed them to resist, like women in Bulgaria who wore long skirts over shalwar, and American women who wore shalwar under dresses. Women's fungible flesh was a mode for fugitive action, as cross-cultural dressing and ‘harem pants’ created the possibility for women in the US and western Europe to stretch the boundaries of their gender by wearing bifurcated clothing, which was perceived as a strictly masculine right at the time. As cross-dressing enabled fugitive action, cross-cultural dressing by women in the West ultimately contributed to their freedom from rigid patriarchal norms and the possibility of bifurcated dress. On the other hand, cross-cultural dressing in Bulgaria and Turkey, though hegemonic, jostled women toward more possibilities of womanhood, such as the possibility of urban living, albeit in the service of the state, as workers and symbols of modernity. Sartorial style could be fungible and fugitive, as women were interpellated between patriarchy and the state, as in Central Asia (Kamp, 2011). Women in Bulgaria and Turkey also benefited from cross-cultural dressing as possibility and expression of their forming hybrid identities, though nonetheless complying with state-mandated hegemonic notions of modernity.
But why did modernization require changing clothes? Hegemony requires uniforms of modernity. Imposing Western fashion norms not only offers a visual rendition of colonial and/or capitalist success, it also enacts hegemonic power. Following the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the new ruling powers of Bulgaria and Turkey were compelled to become ‘civilized’ like the West. This entailed mobilizing the formerly self-sustaining populace into ‘the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment… of [the] population to economic processes’ (Foucault, 1980: 140–1). Taking charge of life was central in this project, with an end goal of a normalizing, homogeneous society. Nation-building instruments such as constitutions – and clothing – ‘were the forms that made an essentially normalizing power acceptable’ (Foucault, 1980: 144). A complete uprooting of lifestyles as they had known them until then was required to secure the docility of the populace and to normalize power at all levels of society. Homogenizing and binarizing the gender-fluid attire mosaic of the new countries was deemed critical. Enter, uniforms of modernity: a visual affirmation to ruling powers and a tangible object of surveillance, as to who is on board and who is lagging in joining the others in the production machinery. Those who refuse the uniforms of modernity are assigned to the lowest levels of society, as in Bulgaria and Turkey to this day. Meanwhile, Western women who attempted to reject their uniforms received harsh reprimands, until about one hundred years ago, when Poiret blessed the shalwar as modern and wartime warranted women's work and provided them with alternate uniforms. This also accounts for the shalwar's global appeal to Westerners and others who identify as modern yet wish to declare their ephemeral liberty from the uniforms of modernity, including Bulgarian and Turkish celebrities who also opt to express their distinctiveness by donning shalwar, even as it remains a part of everyday life in their countries.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Dean John L. Jackson Jr. (Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania) for his valuable comments on an early draft of this manuscript.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Author biography
Yasemin Y. Celikkol, Ph.D. is the inaugural Global Postdoctoral Scholar at Northwestern University in Qatar, affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South. Celikkol pursued her education in Bulgaria, Japan, and the US. She earned her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 2021. She tweets @yaseminyusufoff.