Dress Codes and Double Standards: The Reality Behind 'Neutral' Clothing

 Clothing carries meaning everywhere: signals of religion, class, gender, region, occupation, rebellion, belonging. What's happened is that one particular set of styles — trousers, button-down shirts, suits, trainers — got globalised through colonialism, trade, industrialisation, and media, to the point where it can feel like the default, like "just clothes" rather than a costume with a history. That feeling of neutrality is itself doing work: it often just means "unmarked by the dominant gaze," a residue of whose norms got exported and enforced.

The hijab is a good place to see this clearly, because it rarely gets to just be clothing — it's constantly recruited to stand for something, depending on who's looking:

As religious/personal practice. For many who wear it, it's modesty, faith, identity — not a political statement, just Tuesday. The insistence that it must mean something loaded is itself an imposition.

As a marker in Western secular contexts. It often gets read as a sign of oppression, foreignness, or (especially post-9/11) a proxy for danger — a reading that says more about Orientalist assumptions than about the woman wearing it. "Orientalism," a concept developed by literary critic Edward Said in his 1978 book of the same name, describes a long-standing pattern in Western scholarship, art, and media of representing "the East" — particularly the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Asia — through recurring stereotypes: exotic, backward, irrational, despotic, sexually mysterious, in contrast to a West imagined as rational and modern. Said's argument was that this was never neutral description but a form of power — the West didn't just study the East, it constructed an image that justified colonial rule and still shapes media coverage and policy today. In the hijab's case, that means reading the headscarf through a pre-existing script of "the oppressed Eastern woman needing rescue," rather than engaging with what she herself says it means. This is also the flip side of "Western dress = neutral": the hijab becomes hyper-visible precisely because it deviates from that unmarked default.

As a marker within Muslim-majority contexts. Meanings multiply again — piety, tradition, resistance to Westernisation, or, in places like Iran, compelled state control. The same headscarf can be a personal choice in one country and a legal mandate (or a banned item) in another.

As contested by feminism(s), plural. Some feminists see it as inherently patriarchal; others see that framing as itself colonial, arguing that choice and agency can exist within religious dress, and that Western feminism has a long history of "saving" women who didn't ask to be saved (Lila Abu-Lughod's work is the classic reference here).

As legislated. France's laïcité bans, Turkey's historical restrictions under Atatürk — himself a secularising reformer heavily influenced by French laïcité — and Iran's mandates going the opposite direction: governments across the ideological spectrum have tried to control it, which is itself evidence it's never just fabric.

The bikini, inverted. On a Western beach, it's treated as neutral, even trivial — swimwear, nothing to see. But move it out of that context — into a bank, a courtroom, a village in a more conservative region, even certain religious sites — and suddenly it's hyper-visible, inappropriate, sometimes literally banned. The same two triangles of fabric go from "unmarked default" to "matter requiring regulation" purely on location. It's the hijab's mechanism run in reverse: context decides what counts as immodest, provocative, or in need of covering — the garment itself is inert.

So neither the hijab nor the bikini is an exception to "dressing is never neutral" — together they're a magnifying glass on it, showing that "neutral" was never a property of the fabric. It's a verdict handed down by context, and it can flip entirely depending on which side of the beach, border, or bank door you're standing on.