Moroccan Fashion: Design, Culture and Tradition (Dress and Fashion Research)

164 Pages·2.697 MB·English

by  M. Angela Jansen

DRESS AND FASHION RESEARCH
Series Editor: Joanne B. Eicher, Regents’ Professor, University of Minnesota, USA
Advisory Board:
Vandana Bhandari, National Institute of Fashion Technology, India
Steeve Buckridge, Grand Valley State University, USA
Hazel Clark, Parsons The New School of Design New York, USA
Peter McNeil, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
Toby Slade, University of Tokyo, Japan
Bobbie Sumberg, International Museum of Folk Art Santa Fe, USA
Emma Tarlo, Goldsmiths University of London, UK
Lou Taylor, University of Brighton, UK
Karen Tranberg Hansen, Northwestern University, USA
Feng Zhao, The Silk Museum Hangzhou, China
The bold Dress and Fashion Research series is an outlet for high-quality, in-depth scholarly
research on previously overlooked topics and new approaches. Showcasing challenging and
courageous work on fashion and dress, each book in this interdisciplinary series focusses on
a specific theme or area of the world that has been hitherto under-researched, instigating new
debates and bringing new information and analysis to the fore. Dedicated to publishing the
best research from leading scholars and innovative rising stars, the works will be grounded in
fashion studies, history, anthropology, sociology, and gender studies.
ISSN: 2053-3926
Previously published in the series
Paul Jobling Advertising Menswear

CONTENTS
List of plates
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
Eurocentricity in fashion studies
Fashion, tradition and modernity
The Moroccan case study
2 Moroccan fashion as tradition
Moroccan fashion and politics
Moroccan fashion and emancipation
Moroccan fashion and Islam
3 Three generations of Moroccan fashion designers
The power of the 1960s
Generation Caftan
The misfits of the Moroccan fashion industry
4 Moroccan lifestyle media
Moroccan fashion in the press
Moroccan fashion in the ether
Moroccan fashion in cyberspace
5 The impact of foreign fashion brands
Moroccan fashion and economics
The commodification of Moroccan fashion
New markets
6 The consumption of Moroccan fashion
Constructing identity
Defining Moroccan fashion
Consuming Moroccan fashion
7 Conclusion
The dynamics of Moroccan fashion
The slippery concept of authenticity
National fashion identities
Transcription of Arabic
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PLATES
1 Lady wearing a caftan in Fez in the mid-1930s
2 A Moroccan bride in the 1950s wearing the characteristic wedding dress from Fez
3 Zina Guessous’ boutique Kenz in the Royal Mansour Hotel in Casablanca, featuring an
example of her mini qefṭan
4 Fashion show by Maison Fadéla at the Moroccan embassy in Teheran in 1970
5 Design by Tamy Tazi from the 1970s
6 Design by Karim Tassi presented during the special edition of the fashion event Caftan in
Paris in 2006
7 Design by Noureddine Amir presented during the fashion event Caftan in 2002
8 Design by Amina Agueznay from her ‘plastic bag’ collection in 2012
9 Design by Salima Abdel Wahab, 2012
10 Cover of Version Homme, November 2002
11 Cover of L’Officiel Maroc, April 2012, n. 22
12 Design by Simohamed Lakhdar presented during the fashion event Caftan in 2008
13 Design by Said Mahrouf presented during the fashion event FestiMode Casablanca
Fashion Week in 2010
14 Design by Sofia El Arabi from her collection Berberism for her online fashion brand
Bakchic, 2014
15 Design by Fadila El Gadi, 2012
16 Design by Ghizlaine Sahli for Alrazal
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the wonderful people I met along the way,
particularly during the challenging period of research, who have taught, supported, loved and
encouraged me. First, I would like to thank all my respondents and informants for sharing
their experiences and knowledge with me. In particular I would like to thank the family
Adadi from Fez for accepting me into their home and letting me document absolutely
everything about their daily lives. Mokhtsar Adadi was so kind to trust me and share thirty
years of experience as a Moroccan tailor with me (even if he never quite understood what I
was going to do with that knowledge since I made it clear I did not have an ambition to
become a tailor). In the hanout, Ali did everything to entertain me during those long hours
spent with needle and thread, including learning Dutch and teaching me how to gamble on
the horse races. My little sister Raja’ made the effort to accompany me when translation was
needed, although a sixteen year old has far more interesting things to do with her time. Lalla
Fatima never abandoned her efforts of introducing me into the secret wonders of fasi cuisine,
despite the fact that it is the equivalent of teaching a fish how to walk. I thank the girls from
the Ziatt neighbourhood, Sara and Hasna, for finding the time and patience to teach me the
techniques of couched plaited cord buttons (ʿaqaad) and needle lace (randa) in between
operating the phones of the téléboutique. In Marrakech, Noureddine Amir not only took me
into his home, but accepted me into the sanctuary of his atelier to witness the creative process
of his 2006 collection. Amina Agueznay considerably contributed to this unforgettable
experience with her fascinating personality and talent and I know now I can always count on
her for both inspiration and friendship. In Casablanca I will not forget the wonderful
afternoons I spent with Tamy Tazi and Zhor Sebti, who took the time to share their stories
with me and to tell me anecdotes about the period of my maternal grandmother. These
women are not only the living icons of Moroccan fashion but witnesses of a fascinating
period in Moroccan history. They were part of the first generation of Moroccan girls to go to
school. They were there when the first bourgeois women took down the face veil and adopted
European couture; and they contributed personally to the emancipation of Moroccan women
by setting up schools for girls and women’s associations.
Behind the scenes, I want to thank Frieda Sorber, who remained by my side for the entire
time. Not only is she a living encyclopaedia when it comes to dress and production
techniques, but she is also a talented artist and a true friend who never stopped believing in
my abilities. I thank Paolo De Mas – former director of the Netherlands Institute in Rabat—
for his precious advice when things got rough. His successor, Jan Hoogland, was kind
enough to put his expertise at my use in correcting the Arabic transcription; it certainly made
the trip to Al Hoceima considerably shorter. Also, I want to thank Fadila El Gadi for granting
me permission to use one of her designs for the cover.
Furthermore, there are two people that I will never be able to thank enough for their
dedication and determination. First there is Claire Nicholas – PhD student in anthropology at
Princeton University – who certainly did not know what was awaiting her when she offered
her help. She accepted the painful task of reading several versions of my thesis, providing
comments and bearing my complaints as a patient listener when things got hard. Thank you.
Second, I want to thank Kate Kealvik for accepting to save me when my graphic designer
stood me up at the last minute. Not only did she spend day and night ‘adding size to the
pictures’ for my thesis, but she also let me stay in the most beautiful room of Dar Seffarine
(which I was planning to spend my honeymoon in one day, but this was just as much an
unforgettable experience).
Just as important, I want to thank the people who (unconsciously) supported this project
with their endless love and friendship. There is Aniko Beuhler – anthropologist and dear
friend—who not only provided me with a roof on numerous occasions, but also with an
endless repertoire of contacts and words of wisdom and encouragement in time of need.
There are my friends in Casablanca, who each started out as respondents but who have
become indispensable in my life. I thank them for their forgiveness and patience for every
time I could not hang out because I had to write. I would like to thank my ‘adoptive
grandfather’, Wouter Hazelhoff Roelfzema, for being such an inspirational friend with a
profound love for Morocco. And finally, I would like to thank my family and partner for their
unconditional love and support. They bore with me, through good and through bad times.
Especially, I would like to thank Diana Ritchie Jansen, who may or may not have given me
my love for Morocco, but who certainly gave me my sense of determination and the ability to
believe in myself. Thank you.
1
INTRODUCTION
As a cultural anthropologist, my interest in fashion of so-called traditional dress started
during my MA research in 1999–2000 on the adat dress of the Minangkabau (West Sumatra,
Indonesia). Before going into the field, I had read every book available on their distinctive
goldthread weaving and characteristic gold jewellery, but when I arrived in my research
village, I found hardly any of these ‘traditional’ objects. It soon became clear that most of
them had found their way into museum collections and antique shops while most of the
garments worn were ‘modern’ and industrially produced in China or Taiwan. However, after
overcoming my initial disappointment that there were no ‘authentic’ objects left, it was my
host-mother who made me reconsider my conclusion that the Minangkabau no longer value
their vestimentary heritage. It was she who explained to me that, even though the garments
change, they continue to play important socio-cultural roles in contemporary society. It was
only when she showed me some garments that used to belong to her mother, and that were
left to the mercy of nature, that I realized she considered them old-fashioned and no longer
desirable to wear. It made me understand that I had become biased by the literature into
thinking that not only so-called traditional dress by definition does not change, is local and
hand-made, but also that everything that is old is by definition ‘authentic’ and therefore of
more (anthropological) value.
After graduation, circumstances led me to focus on Moroccan fashion for my PhD research
and it became even more obvious that so-called traditional dress is not only susceptible to
change/fashion trends, but can even be subject to a thriving fashion industry. In its turn, the
Moroccan case study confronted me with yet another misconception I had developed through
the literature, which is that the arrival of foreign (European) fashion on a large scale does not
automatically result in the disappearing of local fashion, but on the contrary, can boost its
development through the introduction of new consumption patterns and marketing strategies
(see Chapter 5). I came to realize that the interaction between local and foreign fashions is
not necessarily conflicting, but can be a powerful tool in redefining notions of tradition and
modernity as well as localness and globalness, and that these concepts are neither static nor
mutually exclusive.
From that moment onwards my research took a completely different direction. The main
aim of my research became to contest misconceptions concerning traditional dress as being
static, authentic, symbolic rather than aesthetic and incompatible with (Euro)modernity. I
started to profoundly question a prevailing dichotomy in current scholarship between so-
called static traditional dress believed to prevail in the non–West and dynamic fashionable
dress associated with the West. I came to realize that this dichotomy is mainly the result of a
largely artificial disciplinary divide between anthropology of dress on the one hand and
fashion studies on the other, as well as a Eurocentric hegemonic fashion discourse that aims
to preserve the boundary between the West/Rest to both protect its position of power and to
ensure the maintenance of a conceptual Other for self-definitional purposes (Niessen 2003). I
became subject to Sandra Niessen’s (2003) ideas formulated in her chapter ‘Afterword: Re-
Orienting Fashion Theory’, where she argues that on the two sides of fashion’s conventional
divide, those who protect the exclusiveness of western fashion and those who defend the
purity of traditional dress, are speaking high and low dialects of the same global fashion
language (2003: 258). The more I tried to understand what differentiates the two, the more I
found striking similarities. I came to realize that distinguishing these categories based on
dynamics was reproducing a Eurocentric approach whereby Euromodernity is believed to be
progressive whereas ‘everything else’ is depicted as static and without identifiable cultural
histories of its own (independently from Europe) (Kaiser 2012: 176).
Eurocentricity in fashion studies
It is only in the past fifteen years that ‘fashion of traditional dress’ gained the attention of
social scientists, simply because it was considered a contradictio in terminis. It was probably
John Flügel (1950 [1930]: 129–30) who set the trend in the 1930s by introducing his
dichotomy ‘fixed’ versus ‘modish’ costume, whereby ‘fixed costume changes slowly in time,
and its whole value depends, to some extent, upon its permanence’. Modish costume, on the
other hand, he explains, ‘changes very rapidly in time, this rapidity of change belonging to its
very essence’. Any change or innovation in ‘fixed’ costume, he adds, is unwelcome since it is
considered a break with ‘tradition’. The psychology of ‘fixed’ costumes, he continues, is
exactly the opposite of ‘modish’ costumes, whose value lies mostly in its newness, and which
is despised at the slightest sign of becoming ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘out of date’. Modish
costume, he says, predominates in the western world and is even ‘one of the most
characteristic features of modern European civilization’, while outside the sphere of western
influence, he argues, dress changes more slowly, is more closely connected with racial and
local circumstances, or with social or occupational standing and therefore qualifies as fixed
costume. Almost fifty years later, Ted Polhemus and Lynn Procter (1978: 15) introduced the
dichotomy ‘fashion’ versus ‘anti-fashion’ based on Flügel’s ideas. The way they formulated
it, ‘the essence of fashionable attire [is] its function as a symbol of change, progress and
movement through time (…) Anti-fashion adornment, on the other hand, is concerned with
time in the form of continuity and the maintenance of the status quo’ (1978: 13). They add
that ‘while anti-fashions most certainly do occur within the context of western and
westernized societies, the most readily identifiable forms are the folk costumes of primitive
and peasant peoples’ (1978: 16). In primitive societies, they say, anti-fashion costume plays
an important part as one means whereby a society’s way of life – its culture – can be handed
down intact from one generation to the next (1978: 16).
Although their terminology might be considered politically incorrect today, their ideas are