Scarf first, politics later: Has the Keffiyeh become more fashion than function? 

In 2001, Raf Simons adorned the runway with keffiyehs for his “Riot! Riot! Riot!” Autumn/Winter collection. Nicolas Ghesquière incorporated a keffiyeh in his Balenciaga’s 2007 Fall/Winter “Traveller” collection. That same year, Urban Outfitters pioneered a loving-hipster trend, which, for one reason or another, saw keffiyehs lining its shelves and, as a result, had Tumblr dashboards flooded with the indie drift. Givenchy was inspired by the keffiyeh for its Spring 2010 ad campaign, and in 2021, Louis Vuitton introduced the “Louis Vuitton Monogram Keffieh Stole” for $705. A multitude of renditions transformed the keffiyeh from a cultural signifier to a sellable product, and none hit the mark; none were necessarily landing. 

For the most part, these “fashion choices” were controversial, to say the least, with criticism ranging from cultural appropriation and commodification on one side, to accusations of antisemitism and pro-terrorism on the other. Half the time, these products were eventually pulled from the market, with PR crisis teams scrambling to draft yet another apology…

Today, signals of representation and solidarity are framed as radical, welcomed with applause and unsuspecting admiration—a flag on a red carpet, a keffiyeh at a rave, a watermelon sticker on an iPhone case, soothing guilt, barely changing nothing. The keffiyeh, for example, once a banner of anti-colonial resistance with a long and charged history, has become an accessory, an aesthetic and a product: flattened, divorced from its context, and rebranded for a consumer base that craves “edginess” but never the burden of political clarity. It’s politics by proxy, not practice.

This is what can be called ‘the representation trap’, where political symbols are emptied of meaning and refilled with marketable optics and mere gestures. In other words, we are celebrating symbols while the systems those symbols resisted remain untouched. We are celebrating pacification, diluted radicalism. 

This wasn’t always the case. When fedayeen walked into a battlefield, they didn’t walk keffiyeh first or in the case of Black liberation, dashiki first. It was the barrel that made the grand entrance. The cloth wasn’t the movement; it was purely an accompaniment, a function (tear gas protection in the intifada), a camouflage (for anonymity), and a code (for each political party, a colour). A keffiyeh wasn’t the principal, nor the centrepiece, nor the chef’s best, and with it or without, the main course was to be served. If I, standing next to a military jeep with nothing but a stone to my side, I will not go around looking for a scarf, no matter its colours and signifiers, I will hurl the stone with all my might. As Fred Hampton said back in 1969: “political power does not flow from the sleeve of a dashiki.”

Dressed for the cause, absent from the fight. We are dressed for revolution with nowhere to go, no ground to revolt. “Representation” has become the ceiling. We are trading political power for performance. Streetwear chic has become the endpoint, and solidarity is staged through styling, not sacrifice, and it becomes easier to wear a symbol than to actually stand for what it means. 

The keffiyeh on the runway, or a stage, or a red carpet for that matter, isn’t dangerous—it’s safe. It’s palatable. It’s priced. It is sold in boutiques far from checkpoints, far from bulldozers and rubble, far from the daily humiliations it once, and still, signifies. To turn a keffiyeh into an accessory is to neuter it, to turn rebellion into a lookbook spread. Political power doesn’t flow from the fabric of a keffiyeh. It never has. And as keffiyehs are being sold in stores, Palestinians are still paying the price.

This transformation from struggle to style is not evolution, it is erasure framed as a win. The reality is that recognition by way of fashion accessory isn’t justice, and being included in the system that flattens you isn’t liberation. It’s assimilation. And assimilation asks you to strip away what made you dangerous to begin with. This is ‘rebellion’ that capitalism doesn’t fear, but profits from, it pats itself on the back in the name of inclusivity and free speech on the weekend, while funding weapon manufacturers come Monday morning. They are lying whoever tells you a keffiyeh, or a flag, or worse, a flag abstracted into a watermelon when no need be, is revolutionary. Anybody who knows anything about revolution knows it is subverting nothing; it is allowed, controlled, and in some cases, even welcomed, for that welcoming illusion replaces real, urgent, and needed revolutionary work. The revolution will not be styled, “for the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. 

It’s why the keffiyeh can hang from the neck of a pop star or an influencer while the child wearing it in the West Bank is branded a threat. Even further, why in the West Bank and Gaza, the crowds (except for the occasional expat) are not strolling around in keffiyehs, and only an outsider clings to this orientalist, idealistic, and tired idea of Palestinians in their ‘arab scarf’ when reality is, times have changed and Palestinian revolutionaries are martyred in bootleg Versace shirts. It’s why the dashiki can strut down the runway while Black organisers are surveilled and silenced, and why our black brothers and sisters in the US are not walking around in dashikis in Louisiana or Atlanta or New York, but in the freshest fits from Saks. Not only does the Keffiyeh trend commercialise, desensitise, and depoliticise, but it is reeking of a whitewashed saviorism ideology that overlooks the nuance and messy on-the-ground-truth and is stuck in a comfortable, long-gone imagery of what once was.

It’s because real solidarity doesn’t wear well. It mobilises. It risks. It remembers. And above all, it refuses to be bought at a concept store. Revolution is not ready-to-wear. And it won’t happen in front rows or photo ops. It will happen where the system cracks, and not where the scarf hangs; where the people organise, not accessorise.