I love visiting the San Francisco museums when I get a chance. Recently, I took a trip out to the de Young museum to see the Contemporary Muslim Fashions exhibit. According to the de Young website, the Contemporary Muslim Fashions exhibit is the first major museum exhibition to explore “the complex, diverse nature of Muslim dress code worldwide.”
It certainly was complex, diverse, and intriguing! The exhibition examined how Muslim women (whether covered or not) have become “arbiters of style within and beyond their communities,” and have drawn media attention by doing so. It further goes on to explain that this exhibition “considers how Muslims define themselves-and are defined-by their dress.”
You can see in my pictures in this blog how parts of the exhibit looked. It was so cool to visit and learn more about a major culture in the world, especially through this lens of fashion. It is an especially powerful exhibit, given how Muslim fashion has entered the news in politically-charged ways in recent years – Switzerland is one of the most recent countries to consider outlawing (or to outright ban) the burka, for instance, and there have been contentious debates over “burkinis” on French beaches.
Overall, it was a very powerful day at the de Young and I’d highly encourage anyone with an open mind to go visit the museum and see this particular exhibit. It was something I learned a lot from and found very aesthetically-pleasing, to boot.