Fashion Statements in a Site of Conflict

Abstract

This article is an analysis of critical fashion practices in Israel/Palestine based on interviews conducted with two design teams: Israeli-Palestinian brand ADISH and Palestinian brand tRASHY. These two brands share a commitment to fashion design and fashion image-making as tools of community building: a project that goes hand in hand with a rethinking of systems of production and labor. The aesthetic and political dimension of their practices, however, are inevitably marked by the different experiences and positionalities (as Israelis or Palestinians) of their respective founders. I situate their creative practices in the wake of the post-Oslo Accords and suggest that such practices should be understood as part of a broader creative solidarity movement that contests nationalism, oppression, and separation. The affective labor involved in the development of community-building design projects, the cooperative creative process, and the generation of capital used to support local female workers as well as refugee and/or LGBTQ populations in Palestine are the constituents of a larger grassroots mobilization aimed at fostering change. This article contributes to ongoing scholarly work on art practices of world-making and explores how fashion could provide a stage for rethinking both the aesthetic and the political in a contested sociopolitical landscape.

Keywords:

• Israel/Palestine
• creative activism
• political fashion
• queerness
• affect
• bootleg

Acknowledgements

For their time, kindness, and brilliance, my most sincere thanks go to Shukri Lawrence of tRASHY and to Amit Luzon of ADISH. Thank you also to Ryan O’Toole Collett, Michal Chelbin, Alon Shastel, and Baldvin Vernharðsson for allowing me to reproduce their photography here. I am grateful to Peter McNeil for inviting me to present this research, in its infant stages, at the University of Technology Sydney, to the engaged audience of the “Critical Fashion Studies” conference in Melbourne and, finally, to Valerie Steele and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful commentary.

Notes

1 This is the case, for instance, of London-based philanthropic-streetwear brands such as HYPEPEACE and Citizens of Nowhere, which use fashion as an instrument of social awareness on issues such as Palestinian, Syrian, and immigration rights. An ethos of social change and political commitment to collaborative fashion practices can also be seen in the widespread global increase in social fashion enterprises, which responds to a “broader global development agenda that privileges artistic and cultural production as a means to generate economic growth while sustaining local cultural practices” (McQuilten 2017, 70). There are currently several fashion-based social enterprises in Palestine and across the Middle East. To name a few: Darzah is a non-profit ethical fashion brand that celebrates Palestinian cultural heritage and promotes economic empowerment for low-income women artisans; INAASH is an organization that has been supporting women in the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon through embroidery for fifty years; SEP Jordan is another social enterprise start-up which involves Palestinian women refugees in Jordan in embroidery training programs; 81 Designs promotes the artistic work of Palestinian female refugees in South Lebanon by providing them with equipment, training, and local promotion; Taita Leila defines itself as a “feminist social enterprise” that revamps Palestine’s artisanal heritage by selling products that are hand-stitched by women in the West Bank, ensuring them a reliable income. For an overview of humanitarian and social entrepeneurship in Palestine, see Akella and Eid (2018). It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the politics of social enterprises, but it is crucial to at least highlight that while the intent of fashion-based social enterprises may be praiseworthy, they can often reinforce the refugee embroiderers’ positioning as “an unremarkable collective of labourers” (Farah 2021, 14), whose individual identities and creativity are obscured, and the greater material and social rewards are eventually acquired by the founders of the organizations themselves who commission the work.

2 As Walaa Alqaisiya has also explained, under Oslo “occupation became more entrenched, the process of Palestinian disposession intensified, and settlement construction grew exponentially, as did barriers, walls, and checkpoints” (2018, 30).

3 Especially in response to the second Palestinian uprising (2000–2005), which erupted to oppose the Israeli occupation and the failure of the Oslo Accords, Israel continued its expansion in the Palestinian territories by enforcing its permit system in 2001 (according to which people cannot move freely without a permit issued by the Israeli military) and building the West Bank Wall in 2002 (officially to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from entering Israel). As a result, Palestinian areas within the WBGS were increasingly isolated and their links with the outside world were severed, ultimately denying Palestinians any economic viability and sovereignty, considering that both border transit and access to resources are controlled by Israel (Farsakh 2005, 198–199; 204).

4 On the need for a postcolonial revision of fashion discourses, see Gaugele and Titton (2019a). See also the special issue of Fashion Theory (24: 6) on “Decoloniality and Fashion.”

5 The clothing industry in Palestine was established in the late 1920s, when wealthy Jewish immigrants of Austrian and German descent arrived in Palestine and set up the first textile plants. As a result of the British mandate’s takeover of Palestine (1922) following the occupation by the British army in World War I, numerous textile factories were set up to supply the demand of the British Army for underwear, socks, and other textiles for military equipment such as tents.

6 For an overview of the offshoring of fashion manufacturing, see Pouillard (2018).

7 For an impassioned critical account of the problematic misuses and appropriations of Tatreez by Western artists and NGOs, see Farah (2021).

8 The modern history of fashion bootleg can be traced to the atelier of Dapper Dan in Harlem in the 1980s. Bootlegging swiftly acquired an important cultural valence in queer contexts, from the inventive DIY self-fashioning techniques enlisted by black and brown queers in the New York underground ballroom scene to the activism of Queer Nation in 1990. Today, in addition to tRASHY, London-based collectives like B.O.S.S. and Nite Dykez are using bootleg as a DIY vehicle for queer political expression. A recent exhibition on fashion bootleg, titled The Real Thing, featuring imagery by tRASHY, was held at London College of Fashion’s “Fashion Space Gallery” (February–May 2020). An earlier, important exhibition on counterfeit in the history of fashion was Faking It: Originals, Copies, and Counterfeits, hosted by The Museum at The Fashion Institute of Technology New York in 2015.

9 There is currently no research on the counterfeit industry in Palestine. On design piracy from a historical perspective, see Pouillard (2011). For anthropological work on counterfeit aesthetics, see Nakassis (2012). On high-end counterfeit industry in Turkey and the Emirates, see, respectively, Toklu and Baran (2017) and Fernandes (2013).

10 The editorial spread, shot by Shukri Lawrence and Marineh Yacoubian, can be accessed here: https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/7xe3wa/to-deny-my-people-is-to-deny-peace-itself-period-reem-kawasmi; or by searching “to deny my people is to deny peace itself” on the web.

11 In this “intersectionality of struggles” (Maira 174), young queer activist groups––such as “Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” (PQBDS) and “Al Qaws”––have been fighting simultaneously the Israeli occupation and Israel’s “pinkwashing” (Schulman 2011) and “homonationalism” (Puar 2007).

12 The connection between the occupation and the LGBTQ struggle was first emphasized at the turn of the twenty-first century when, in the wake of the second Palestinian uprising, LGBTQ activist organizations began to problematize the nationalist and assimilationist logic (expressed, for instance, in the fights for the ending of discrimination in the Israeli Defense Forces and the right to same-sex parenthood) of Israeli gay activism (Ziv 2010). Feminist anti-occupation activist groups, such as “Black Laundry,” which were located at the margins of the gay struggle, articulated a new political vision based on the conviction that “the oppression of different minorities in the state of Israel feeds on the same racism, chauvinism, and militarism that causes the oppression and dispossession of the Palestinians to continue” (Stein 2010, 530–531). Amalia Ziv argues that it is precisely in the context of the anti-occupation movement that “queer, as an identity formation and a politics appeared” and “the emergence of the queer moment […] needs to be read for the way that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict inflects local identities and politics and at the same time provides a symbolic terrain in which dramas of identity, belonging, and disidentification are played out” (2010, 538).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roberto Filippello

Roberto Filippello is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia. He specializes in queer-feminist fashion cultures. His work looks at how aesthetic practices such as fashion image-making and design have been used by LGBTQ+ individuals across various historical contexts to shape spaces of political expression and community formation. His writing has been published in various journals, including Criticism, Third Text, Fashion Theory, and Australian Feminist Studies. [email protected]