Gucci #VII
Artist: Wesaam Al-Badry (Iraqi-American, born 1984)
Date: 2018
Dimensions:
20 × 16 in. (50.8 × 40.6 cm)
Medium: Archival pigment print
Classification: Photographs
Credit Line: Frederick B. and Kate L. Shoemaker Fund
Object number: 2018.57
Label Text:"Nobody thinks Muslims have fashion; everybody thinks Muslims wear burqas. They seem to forget Muslim culture extends from the tip of North Africa all the way to Southeast Asia."
Iraq-born photographer Wesaam Al-Badry was a refugee of the first Gulf War, who as a young boy lived with his family in a Saudi Arabian refugee camp for four years before immigrating to the United States. His Al-Kouture project investigates the tensions between Western consumerism and economic globalization and their impact on Arab-Islamic cultural traditions. In Gucci #VII and his larger series, European couture silk scarves are fashioned into niqābs, the traditional covering that some Muslim women wear in public, to examine stereotypical assumptions about Muslim fashion and its wearers. In this photo, the Gucci scarf’s depiction of female warriors as a symbolic expression of strength becomes cultural critique.
Al-Badry’s approach also calls attention to the relationship between the commodity fetish object as a symbol of modernity and women as targets of male desire and consumer marketing. By raising issues of objectification, consumerism, and cultural identity, the Al-Kouture series questions the politics of high fashion and cultural appropriation.
Iraq-born photographer Wesaam Al-Badry was a refugee of the first Gulf War, who as a young boy lived with his family in a Saudi Arabian refugee camp for four years before immigrating to the United States. His Al-Kouture project investigates the tensions between Western consumerism and economic globalization and their impact on Arab-Islamic cultural traditions. In Gucci #VII and his larger series, European couture silk scarves are fashioned into niqābs, the traditional covering that some Muslim women wear in public, to examine stereotypical assumptions about Muslim fashion and its wearers. In this photo, the Gucci scarf’s depiction of female warriors as a symbolic expression of strength becomes cultural critique.
Al-Badry’s approach also calls attention to the relationship between the commodity fetish object as a symbol of modernity and women as targets of male desire and consumer marketing. By raising issues of objectification, consumerism, and cultural identity, the Al-Kouture series questions the politics of high fashion and cultural appropriation.
Not on view