USA HISTORY

Ataturk’s Fashion PoliceTurkey’s restrictions on wearing overtly religious-oriented attire are rooted in the founding of the modern, secular Turkish state, when the republic’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, introduced a series of clothing regulations designed to keep religious symbolism out of the civil service. The regulations were part of a sweeping series of reforms that altered virtually every aspect of Turkish life-from the civil code to the alphabet to education to social integration of the sexes. The Western dress code at that time, though, was aimed at men. The fez-the short, conical, red-felt cap that had been in vogue [fashion] in Turkey since the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II made it part of the official national attire in 1826-was banished. Atatürk himself famously adopted a Panama hat to accent his Westernstyle gray linen suit, shirt, and tie when he toured the country in the summer of 1925 to sell his new ideas to a deeply conservative population. That autumn, the Hat Law of 1925 was passed, making European-style men’s headwear de rigueur [fashionable] and punishing fez-wearers with lengthy sentences of imprisonment at hard labor, and even a few hangings. . . .The phrases “deeply conservative population, “ “lengthy sentences of imprisonment, “ and “a few hangings” suggest that