Saturday, December 15, 2012

Men in Dresses

Thobes are the white dress worn by many Gulf Arabs. Thobes are a costume in the same sense that an actor on the stage wears a costume. The efforts of many people (usually not including the actor or the wearer) are required to construct them and maintain them. In business and social settings, these garments by design and intent create a significant barrier between Saudis and westerners. 

I have worked with Saudis who wore thobes to work every day but at some point and for some reason decided to switch to western clothes. To my eye, the difference was dramatic. Instead of mannequins wearing costumes, they became real people. I had to stop myself on more than on occasion from telling them how nice they looked--worried that they would think that I meant that they didn't look nice before and that I was thus impugning their "traditional" costume (more on this at the end). Pissing off the wrong Saudi can get you fired around here.

Thobes are usually made from a cotton-polyester blend. Linen, silk, and pure cotton all wrinkle during normal wear. But through the magic of blended fibers and lots of starch, Saudi men look like ambulatory, stiff, white, perfectly unwrinkled pipes. The collars can range from a western-style pointed collar to a stand-up “Nehru”-type collar. Thobes are always long sleeved and many have heavy cuffs that require old-fashioned cuff links. The garments are usually pulled over the head and closed at the neck with just a few buttons or snaps although I've seen some with fastenings all the way up. There are a couple of layers under the thobe including pajama-type pants but thankfully I know nothing more than that. Thobes are usually dry cleaned or else housemaids spend hours ironing and starching them.

While thobes are predominantly white, in the cooler months many Saudis switch to dark colored dresses made from heavier fabric resembling that used to make suit jackets.

Saudi thobes are nearly always accompanied by a white or red and white gutra or head scarf and a black iqal, the rope-like device that rests on the wearer’s head (it isn’t a headband and doesn’t hold the gutra in place; it mainly acts as a weight). Saudi men spend an inordinate amount of time fussing around with their gutras, constantly flipping them up and back in various elaborate folds. All of this preening and costume adjusting is strongly reminiscent of 12-year old girls flipping their hair around. (Saudi women also constantly readjust their head scarves so when looking at a group of them you see a sea of flipping motions. It can be quite annoying if you think about it too much.) In a strong wind, men have to hold the two front ends of the gutra down to keep the thing on their heads. The gutras are made from very light cotton sometimes blended with silk. These items are also dry cleaned or require a lot of handwork to maintain. Gutras are thin and serve little practical purpose in protecting the wearer from the sun or dust or wind.

Thobes are constructed in panels with capacious pockets built into the sides (abayas most emphatically do not have pockets; I suspect the sexual innuendo is far too horrific to be contemplated). Thin men have their thobes made with princess seams to emphasize their figure (I am absolutely serious about this). Fat Saudis (plenty of those to go around, Americans have nothing on the Saudis for obesity) have extra material in their thobes so there is no constriction or narrowing to interrupt the straight line of material from shoulder to ground. As an aside, did you know that the waddling ass of a fat man in a dress looks just like the ass of a fat woman in a dress?

Thobes are most often floor length. I always get a laugh watching thobe-clad Saudi men delicately pick up their skirts to cross a wet parking lot or to walk by an area where sprinklers are running. They would of course have to pick up their skirts to climb stairs but no thobe-clad Saudi man would ever do that.

Unlike a woman trying to accessorize a gown, the choice of footwear for Saudi men is simple: leather sandals that resemble gigantic, gold-embossed, fungus-y toenails wrapped around their feet (don’t even get me started on basic foot hygiene; callus smoothing and nail clipping isn’t part of the package) or black or dark brown leather dress shoes and dark dress socks. It looks as ridiculous as it sounds.

Every so often you see a mutawah with a high-water thobe hemmed to around mid-calf (you get a good view of those dress socks). Even the mutawahs who wear western clothes usually wear high-water pants. This is to keep their clothing from becoming dusty or dirty from the ground contaminated by all of us non-believers walking around.

Sadly, you often see very young boys decked out in thobes and gutra and fungus sandals. I say sadly because I don’t view it as an endearing attempt to copy their elders but a display of early indoctrination. 

Even more pathetic are the handful of westerners who attempt to wear thobes. This is usually strongly discouraged by Saudis because we are told that we (westerners) don’t know how to wear thobes and abayas “correctly.” Whatever. They can have the fucking things.

Saudis will quickly inform you that the thobe is a “traditional” garment for Saudi men. Perhaps it is traditional in the sense that in many cultures spanning South Asia, Middle East, and North Africa, men have worn some variant of a robe, skirt, or dress-like garment for centuries. This is of course not what the Saudis mean by "traditional" because they do have a strong cultural exceptionalism. But old Aramco photos do not show the pristine, crisp garments that you see today. Instead, in the photos many Saudi men are wearing dark colored, knee-length tunics, long pants, and sandals, and have cloths tied around their heads in a turban style. Frequently the men also top off their ensemble with western-style suit jackets. In other words, they are wearing clothing suitable for herding goats and camels in a desert climate, which is what the Saudis were doing before the Americans found oil and gas here back then.

(Check back in a couple of days. I have some of these photos but I forgot to bring them home.)

There is nothing traditional about men in a desert-herding culture wearing white dresses and delicate head covers that blow away at the first puff of a shamal. So it is ironic to see poor, rural Saudis who still herd goats and camels for a living today wearing grubby, dusty thobes. But I suppose maintaining the myth of tradition is more important than practical wardrobes.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I had another friend that did some time in TMK. He came back with a thobe. He wore it on a Grand Canyon trip in 1999, but he went commando underneath, which was not unnoticed by others in our group. Eewwwww. Count your blessings.