Abaya Fashion Show

(Or, “That abaya would look great with your hotpants, sweetie.”)

Last night, I went to Dubai with A for dinner, and he decided to we should meet up with a friend of his, a British-Kahmiri fashion designer named H, who had a bunch of Ramadan exhibitions, at one of her shows. I was massively undressed for any fashion event in any place, but on principle I try not to whine about things like that, so we went. This was my first (and only) encounter with glitzy Dubai life. The show had three exhibitions along the stretch from Jumeriah beach to the Burj Al Arab hotel (if you’ve ever seen pictures of Dubai, you’ve probably seen these hotels. They’re the ones that made the city famous as a tourist destination. One of them is a built like a wave and the other like a tall ship. It costs over 700 hundred dollars a night to stay in either. While we waited for H, A and I walked out along an artificial causeway and I was amazed that a place could be so clearly man-made and still look so pretty). The shows were typically in Ramadan tents, along with tables at which people elegantly broke their fast, and carpet and jewelry stands.

At first, A’s friend mistook me for a prospective customer (designer abayas, beautiful as they were, aren’t a great fit for my lifestyle or budget). It was clear H was both very talented and successful and had been able to tap into a market—conservative and glamorous Muslim fashion—that was entirely new to me. I was fascinated by the pieces—gauzy and airy, some far too low-necked or slit-sided for Abu Dhabi, an occasional dark green among all the blacks. My favorite had a silver serpent stitched in sequins snaking its way up the back. H dressed me in it. “In the UAE, women wear their Abayas entirely buttoned up,” she explained. “But in London, the girls wear them open. This Abaya would look great with your hot pants and some knee high stockings to go to the theatre, sweetie.” I think I may actually be more likely to own an abaya than a pair of hotpants, even though I've always liked my legs. I wondered what girls wore such racy apparel under their Abayas. Were they Muslim teenagers who buttoned up at home? WASPs hankering for a more exotic air?

Three of H’s friends joined us after the show, a Somali runway model who grew up in the UAE and two siblings from Kashmir, a girl in her late twenties who was a makeup artist and a boy my age who was in university in Dubai but did TV commercials. They were a very put-together, black-wearing, smokey-eyed (Islamochic?) crowd, and I felt douty in my jeans and flats. A didn’t seem at all self-conscious, but I’d wished I’d put on a dress or makeup. I was grateful to be tall and to have the sort of hair that can pass for deliberate.

They were also more or less the highest maintenance people I’d ever hung out with. We went to one restaurant, but the minium fee was over 200 dirhams per person (about 60 dollars—a lot for any dinner, especially when the diners don’t drink). We took a ‘buggy’ (a glamorized, super-sized golf-cart) through hotel-land to get to another set of restaurants. The next restaurant was too hot, the one after that too noisy. We discussed going into a bar, but the Somali girl didn’t want to be seen anywhere where alcohol was served. H offered to put her hijab up too in solidarity, but we ultimately decided to drive into central Dubai for dinner (it was around midnight at this point).

A and I wrote in the Somali girl’s car, and they fought about her driving, which was terrifying. She yelled at me for not trusting her when I attempted to buckle my seat belt; I glibly explained that it was the law in Vermont, so buckling was just a habit. On the way, she pointed out a main road that everyone went to “to flirt.”

Q: How do you flirt in a car?

A: You drive a very nice car and wear extreme makeup and roll down all your windows and play cool music, so people know that you are there to flirt.

Rachel added further detail to this explanation when I told her about it later. She said that repeat numbers (such as 333) are considered especially lucky in the UAE, to the extent that people will pay extra for a repeating cell phone number. They are sold at auctions for thousands of dollars. One way men ‘flirt’ is to drive up to women and flash them their cell number. Hey baby, look how many digits I can buy.

Eventually, we pulled into an Emirati restaurant where we sat on curtained low couches around a table. I ordered mint lemonade, which was the consistency of a smoothie and so good I ordered a second one. We also had a variety of mezzes, including really delicious cheese-basil cigar pastries.

Everyone talked about their childhoods, the pranks they played on their siblings and those their siblings played on them, bad exes, failed marriages and mean teachers. I’m gaining more of a sense of which stories transcend cultural and minor linguistic barriers. I’m tempted to invent more dramatic bad breakup stories but I think this imaginative leap would do my exes too much of a disservice.

The Kashmiri makeup artist (who’s father is a financier) discussed meeting a relative of Osama bin Laden’s, and described his desire to distance himself from his family. “I told him I thought bin Laden was kind of cool” she said. This made me a little nervous, and I probably should have fought with her on this point, but I was too curious what she was going to say next/amazed she had so forgotten my Americanness (or didn’t care). I felt sort of undercover. Unfortunately, she didn’t elaborate, so it was a moot point.

Interesting items: I learned that some wealthy Islamic families shave their children’s head and give the weight of the hair in gold to charity several time while the children are old enough to let them.

H and A are both very political in sort of a Pan-Islam, common identity kind of way. H won’t drink coke because she says coke gives money to companies that make weapons that are used to fight against Arabs. (Maybe Lockheed Martin/other defense contractors supplying weapons to Israel?) I’d never heard this before (maybe fabricated, maybe just not a persuasive argument back home and want to get the skinny on it from my Kick Coke friends. The other people made derogatory comments about Palestinians and Jordanians and H and A gently reprimanded them.

I got back to my hotel at four in the morning, vaguely triumphant because I’d finally figured out what people in the UAE did so late at night.