Kufiya Kraze: Pissing off daddy?

Jonathan Goldberg in London would like to know, "Why is my teenage daughter dressing like Yasser Arafat?" The Guardian's Hadley Freeman has answers:

I assume that you mean she has taken to wearing a keffiyeh as opposed to, I don't know, a military uniform or carefully cultivated, if multicolour, facial hair. And the reason I presumptuously assume this is because keffiyehs have become what the young kids call "trendy", particularly so in the past few months. Isn't that just the jolliest thing you have ever heard?

Now, before I sweepingly dismiss your daughter's dabblings in Yasser chic, there is a chance that she is merely showing her unflagging support for Palestinian nationalism, this being a particularly canny cause for a north-west London girl with the surname of "Goldberg" to light upon should she want to annoy her father. But assuming that your daughter is more fashion-conscious than cheekily provocative, then she is doing this because she would like to be fashionable.

Fashion designers - God bless their benevolent ways! True, they might often be depicted as shallow, superficial, even perilous to world peace if one takes too many lessons from Zoolander, in which the fashion designer is trying to knock off the prime minister of Malaysia - and I don't mean "knock off" as in, "to make a cheap copy". Obviously.

In fact, designers love other nationalities! Well, not on the runways, of course (she must be Caucasian and she must be, um, Caucasian), but in terms of providing plenty of ideas for them to rip off. I mean, pay homage to. The keffiyeh has been circling around designer collections for the past few years - an inopportune time, those of a narrow bent might have thought, for such an homage, but these people lack the blue-sky thinking of their designer counterparts, achievable only by those who maintain a blithe ignorance of international events, and are therefore able to see items of national dress purely on an aesthetic level and divorced from any political context.

There is, mind, a motive to the trend. The appeal of keffiyehs in the west grew in the 70s, when they became proof of one's recent travels down the hippy path in the east and Middle East. They still retain a kind of cool quotient today, mainly among the youth sector, as the only people who tend to have the time to follow any trails these days are gap-year students, who would bring back their keffiyehs as souvenirs but, like, real ones. So then Balenciaga marched right on in there last season, picked up these real souvenirs, wizzed them up on its own sewing machines, and slapped a £750 price tag on them, thereby staying true to the scarf's original spirit. Really, it's just a damned shame Yasser couldn't have waited out three more years because God knows that the one thing this man longed for in life was a scarf that would have set him back three-quarters of a grand, liberation schmiberation. And the fact that the accessory sold out before it even reached the shops proves that the scarf's original authenticity was always its USP.