Gucci #VII

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Gucci #VII

Artist Wesaam Al-Badry Iraqi-American, born 1984

Date2018

Dimensions20 × 16 in. (50.8 × 40.6 cm)

MediumArchival pigment print

ClassificationPhotographs

Credit LineFrederick B. and Kate L. Shoemaker Fund

Object number

2018.57

Not on View

Comparative ReferencesSee also D’Alessandro, Jill and Reina Lewis, eds., Contemporary Muslim Fashions, New York: Delmonico Books, Prestel, 2018, cat no. 129, repr. col., p. 7 (full page), p. 275.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.