“What’s the deal with fashion?”
Years ago, especially in our teenage years, mothers always kept an eye on our appearance and the way we dressed. Often the warning came directly from the father to the children, or with a wink from him to the mother, who, if she had overlooked it, would hurry to remind her daughters to dress modestly before their father saw them. A whole generation grew up with the idea that clothes are meant to cover the body with order and beauty and to give a first impression of one’s personality, not to show off one’s charms.
Back then we did not understand why our parents cared so much about clothing, or why every occasion and every place called for the right colour, the right kind and the right style. Today we understand it well.
Today we know.
We have never seen such immodesty in clothing as we see today, among celebrities and ordinary people alike. What we see is strange, and strange is this moral looseness in the name of freedom, modernity, civilization and progress. What we see is closer to decline than to progress and, forgive me for saying so, it is the furthest thing from civilization. Modesty has always been one of the finest signs of civilization.
Clothes were made to cover the body and its charms, not to display them so provocatively that the body loses its sacredness and a person loses respect in their own eyes and in the eyes of others.
In the name of modernity, young women have put on (or rather taken off) clothes that expose the chest, the back, the stomach… all with their parents’ blessing and approval, or at least their surrender to what the new generation calls “fashion.”
Girls, office workers, TV presenters, brides, performers and even some mothers wear inappropriate clothes everywhere: at work, at home, in the street, in church, at parties; revealing clothes that uncover more than they cover. And what is the goal? The answer is always the same: “It’s the fashion,” “That’s the only kind of clothes you can find,” and “What’s wrong with it? Why pick on me?”
As for young men’s clothes, don’t get me started: their underwear has to be seen before their outer clothes. And the young men defend it by saying, “If this underwear wasn’t made to be seen, the manufacturers wouldn’t have decorated it with colours, pictures and slogans.”
My friends, young people of today, it is not fashion that controls the clothing of this age, but moral looseness and the loss of values; it is a mistaken understanding of sexuality. Sexual suggestion lives today in every film, magazine and song. It lives in the way we dress, talk and relate to one another. But if people knew the truth about sexuality, its beauty and its holiness, they would remove everything that hints at it from every magazine, film and song, and of course from shop windows.
Dear young people of today, change begins with you. Give sexuality its true value: it is sacred, created by God for us to live fully within its right setting, and then it gives us complete joy. Do not let fashion control you; be the ones who create the fashion that suits you.
Samar El Hajj Bou Zardan
