Page 99 - Allure - November 2016 USA

Muna AbuSulayman, a well-known Saudi philanthropist and media personality who is often referred to as the Oprah of the Arab world, told
me that she believes that young Saudi women “care a great deal about femininity.”
The sheer tonnage of makeup imports to
the kingdom may be the result of a long- standing “more is more” attitude. In general,
AbuSulayman explained, Arab Gulf women like to wear heavier makeup than their
European counterparts. “We say, ‘Wishik yohmoul’—it literally means your face and
coloring can take the more polished full- makeup look,” she said. “When you have light
skin and delicate features, you don’t look as good when you use a lot of makeup. It looks wrong. But for a Saudi girl, we say, ‘Wishik yohmoul’ because she can try all sorts of techniques and colors without looking unnatural or unstylish.”
I sometimes wondered whether, paradoxically, religious restrictions on the display of beauty only intensified women’s interest in it or heightened the senses somehow. The Saudi women I knew were alert to aspects of beauty and personal expression that
I had trouble even perceiving. Like many Western visitors to Saudi Arabia, I found it almost impossible at first to differentiate between any two women who covered their faces. But Saudis, I soon learned, had no such difficulty. A black niqab covering the entire face is often a part of the school uniform for Saudi girls in elementary school, and if you happen to pass a girls’ elementary school at the end of a day’s classes, you’ll likely see fathers and drivers waving and smiling and effortlessly picking out their own daughters and charges from the sea of black-swathed children rushing out into the sunshine. During a 2013 visit to the kingdom, I once stepped into the corridor of a Riyadh shopping mall alongside a saleswoman I’d been speaking to and watched as she called out a greeting to an old friend she’d spotted 50 paces away, standing in a throng of uniformly black-clad women. Until the friend turned and gave the saleswoman a wave in return, I hadn’t been sure, at that distance, which way she was facing.
These garments are designed to efface beauty or protect against objectification (depending on your perspective), and there is endless debate over how a woman should wear her head scarf: tied in such a way that the outline of her neck and shoulders is still
To say that
reality in Saudi
Arabia was more complicated
than I’d imagined is a gross
understatement.
discernible, or worn “over her head” in a looser style that is considered more modest. Among women who wear their face covering with a slit for the eyes, the precise width of the slit is a subject of passionate debate and mutual judgment. In Saudi Arabia, I often felt
I was constantly recalibrating, refining my powers of observation, readjusting my sense of what was appropriate. Sometimes, especially if I’d spent a few days in the public space, leaving my own face uncovered
felt a bit strange and vulgar. I began to feel awkward— there is no other way to put this—about showing so much skin, walking around with my whole face hanging out.
I never did wear the niqab; as an American and a non-Muslim, doing so would have felt absurd. But after several weeks in Riyadh, going down to the lobby of my hotel without it felt like wearing a bikini top to the Met.
In July, Condé Nast International announced the launch of a new magazine, Vogue Arabia, and hired Deena Aljuhani Abdulaziz as its editor in chief. I remember the trunk show Aljuhani Abdulaziz invited
me to at her boutique D’NA and her obvious pride in the young Saudi designers she promoted and encouraged. There were pieces by Western designers for sale at D’NA, too, and, thinking that those displays looked oddly sparse, I asked Aljuhani Abdulaziz whether it was difficult to import clothing into the kingdom. She explained
that no, fashion was so important to Saudi women that she often ordered only one of each piece. Occasions
for women to express themselves through fashion were especially precious to those who wore an abaya daily, and a customer buying an important piece liked to know that it was the only one of its kind in the whole kingdom. The thought of taking off your abaya at a women’s party and discovering that another woman was wearing
the same dress was a special source of dread for Saudi women, Aljuhani Abdulaziz said. To avoid such disasters, Saudi women took great care to stay current and buy
the latest collections, even when they had to stretch their budget in order to do so.
If there is a secret to understanding the tastes of women in the kingdom, it could be summed up quite succinctly.
Said Aljuhani Abdulaziz, “I think the word that Saudi women like is ‘exclusive.’”
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