by Tim Bonyhady
Abracadabra, Manhattan’s first psychedelic boutique, soon followed. Its interior was lit by fluorescent tubes set on a flicker-flash sequence, which had particular impact since Abracadabra was filled with mirrors like a penny arcade. Its shop window featured a motorised hanger that made the clothes on it ‘rock ’n’ roll’. When a hippie returned from Afghanistan with five pustinchas at the start of 1968, Ira Seret of Abracadabra put them in its window where they were spotted by designer Anne Klein, who had just made leather fashionable for the New York outfitter Mallory’s. When Klein asked Seret to secure more and his original provider failed to deliver, Seret went to Afghanistan himself.
That summer and autumn, pustinchas were in Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s and all the glossies. Vogue reported that Afghan ‘coats and weskits beautifully embroidered in silk floss colours’ were being ‘shovelled out the door’ by Limbo, a boutique in New York’s East Village. Life featured pustinchas sent by Ira Seret to Mallory’s, worn by five female models ‘over bright silk jump suits and slung about with yards of Mideast jewellery’. Harper’s Bazaar devoted two pages to Mallory’s embroidered and braided vests, again presented as womenswear. Eye included more of Mallory’s coats, worn by male and female models. Look featured a fashion shoot in Afghanistan by Fred Maroon, one of its regular photographers, who pictured a Belgian model on the hills of Kunduz wearing a pustincha and sheepskin boots.
Americans responded, the New York Times observed, by going ‘ga-ga…for embroidered Afghanistan lamb’. Such is the place of pustinchas in the collective memory, one might wonder how they sold. Most recollections of them fix on how they stank. The problem was that the traditional Afghan method of treating sheepskins with salt flour was a form of pickling, not tanning. As long as the processed skin was dry, it behaved like leather, but it smelled foul when wet. In response, a few producers bought skins from a shoe manufacturer, tanned using chromium and aluminium, the standard process in many countries. Kabul’s first drycleaners also began treating pustinchas. But while every vendor claimed to have ‘the exclusive no-smell treatment’, visitors to their stores were sometimes shocked by the odour, and the ‘deodorised’ exported coats were generally no different. As many continued to be pickled even after a tannery opened in Ghazni in 1971, the Guardian declared that anyone who bought an Afghan should expect to ‘smell like a race horse’.
Their floral embroidery was a prime attraction—ripe for the era of Flower Power, just as the lush floral decoration on many of Afghanistan’s painted trucks fitted the Zeitgeist. American artist Michael Lawrence, who encountered pustinchas in Paris in 1967, attributed their appeal to their ‘beautiful embroidered floral patterns’ and ‘lush fur, thick and seductive’. America’s fashion writers cast the pustinchas as primitive and exotic, part of a new ‘gypsy’ look, integral to the beauty of the ‘nomad’. That Afghanistan’s nomads did not wear pustinchas was irrelevant. These writers invoked nomadic life because it was imbued with mystique in the West, celebrated as enticingly free.
The pustinchas were also cheap compared to most fashionable western clothes, even after Afghan makers more than doubled their prices in response to international demand. While an embroidered pigskin coat from the designer Chester Weinberg that featured in Fred Maroon’s shoot for Look retailed for $415 and a dress with glimmering lamé pants from Oscar de la Renta was $1100, the pustincha sold for under $20 in Kabul. Small boutiques in Manhattan sold them for $40. Those imported by Mallory’s retailed for $75 at Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue, while thigh-length sheepskins sold for $145 and knee-length ones were $215.
Such was demand that American fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert declared the pustincha the ‘most sweeping’ fashion of the hippie era. As the northern winter approached in 1968, it was promoted as ski-wear in Canada and Europe because it was stylish and warm. As summer approached in Sydney, the Australian Women’s Weekly pictured one brought back by Anne Weatherley. In 1969 the American magazine Ebony, which had a black middle-class readership, promoted the pustincha as a ‘warm riding vest’.
For some, these coats were just a fad, starting with John Lennon. He soon gave his to American singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson, who, in turn, gave it to his sister. In 1997 she had it auctioned in Tokyo as part of an ‘All Beatles’ sale because of Japanese interest in the Beatles. There it set a record for a piece of rock star’s clothing and for a piece of modern Afghan clothing—bought for £30,000 by Lennon’s son, Julian, who put it on show in the Beatles’ hometown of Liverpool.
For many others, the Afghans were a personal—and political—statement. ‘I wear one not because I need to in this mild climate’, an Australian university student explained. ‘I wear it because it is gorgeous and brings a change in fashion and gets our isolated and cut-off society going.’ As many westerners became deeply attached to their pustinchas, they wore them at home and travelled with them around the world. When they eventually fell apart, a few would keep their tattered remains as a reminder of the people they had been, extending the pustinchas’ lives by placing them in their children’s and grandchildren’s dress-up boxes.
By 1969, many more pustinchas were being worn outside Afghanistan than within it, as they maintained their appeal with the most ‘beautiful people’ and became part of ‘youth’s uniform’. That November Vogue noted with surprise that pustinchas were ‘still around’ despite being ‘old’ in Vogue’s terms, having already been the height of fashion the year before. It identified one of the ‘happy, lucky gypsies’ wearing a pustincha in the exclusive Swiss alpine resort Zermatt as Baroness Thierry van Zuylen who otherwise moved between a family castle in the Netherlands, a boat in the Mediterranean and Parisian and New York apartments. Where many of the pustinchas worn by the young were ‘slightly battered’, the Baroness’s coat was ‘scrumptious’.
It did not last. ‘Women have enough styles from Afghanistan in their wardrobe—when they open their closet, they pick something they can look pretty in tonight,’ sniffed the owner of an American clothing chain in 1970. Afghanistan had been ‘done to death’ wrote a fashion journalist. The enduring audience for the pustincha became downmarket—their iconic status confirmed in 1971 by artist Ronald Searle in a cover drawing for the New Yorker of a long-haired, bearded, barefoot hippie with flared trousers, shoulderbag, headband and pustincha.
Their international embrace fuelled new enthusiasm for Afghan clothing among some of Kabul’s elite who accepted that women should unveil but wanted Afghans to ‘fight against foreign influences’ and ‘keep Afghan customs alive’. They urged the wearing of ‘national dress’ as a means of boosting national unity and assisting the economy. The problem was that Afghanistan had a rich array of regional and ethnic costumes but no national one. In response, the daily Islah called on artists and designers to create a costume incorporating ‘the major features of all types of garment worn in the country’. In parliament, deputies called for this costume, whatever form it took, to be enshrined in law.
Ariana Airlines was a barometer of change. Having been at the forefront of the embrace of western dress in 1959, it devised a new uniform for its stewardesses with a headscarf instead of a hat and a more traditional embroidered blouse. Ariana did so because the frisson for foreigners of finding Afghan women in western clothes had largely gone. Instead, they preferred a touch of the indigenous. Renewed pride in local dress was also patent when Judy Agnew, wife of the American vice-president, visited Kabul in 1969. Following the Agnew’s torrid reception by leftist students, her entertainment included a fashion show of traditional Afghan clothes.
On national days, Queen Humaira wore ‘improved’ tribal costume consisting of ‘a richly embroidered, fully skirted dress…over long full trousers caught in at the ankle’, which was usually combined with a light head veil and heavy silver necklaces and bracelets. When she became the first Afghan woman whose portrait appeared on a postage stamp—released in 1968 to mark Mother’s Day, which Humaira initiated—she wore a variant of this costum
e including a light chiffon scarf rather than a veil. A year later, when she appeared on another stamp, pictured watching the military parade on the first day of Jeshyn with Zahir Shah, Humaira again wore a scarf draped loosely over her hair.
Safia Tarzi, a niece of Queen Soruya, was a barometer and an exploiter of the international taste for Afghan clothing and jewellery. She came to public notice in New York in 1957 after a cosmopolitan upbringing spread across five countries and a brief marriage to one of her cousins. Princess Tarzi, as she styled herself, was said to have ‘fled a life of royal leisure in her native land to become an American-type working girl’, but, with wealth of her own, ordinary employment was not for her. Instead, she studied acting, secured a small part in a radio show and occasionally appeared on television. Gossip columnists reported how she turned heads in Manhattan’s most fashionable restaurants and appeared smitten with the playboy Tom Corbally despite pronouncing ‘the American male is unromantic’.
A decade later, when Tarzi was living mostly in Paris but regularly visiting Kabul for extended periods, she became the first Afghan to feature in Vogue. It pictured her at a riding school in the Swiss ski resort of St Moriz in 1967 wearing a black turtleneck skivvy and a beige sweater under a black riding jacket. In 1969 she featured again after attending a buzkashi game in northern Afghanistan. While permitted to mount one of the horses on the assumption that she wanted simply to be photographed on it, she rode onto the field. Then she recounted her experience for Vogue accompanied by one of her own photographs of the game—perhaps the first photograph by an Afghan woman to reach an international audience.
In between, Tarzi appeared in Vogue in 1968 in ‘one of her native Afghan costumes’ which she wore when giving dinner parties in Paris. It was a ‘three-quarter dress of emerald green silk gallooned in bold brocade, tiny silk tassles, over black silk harem pants’, further embellished by ‘necklaces of silver, gold, and strings of cloves’, which, Vogue declared, were ‘all exactly the 100 per cent right mood for fashion now’. A year later, when Tarzi was spending more time in Kabul, she favoured spectacular European outfits which, the local Times suggested, made her look like ‘a French mannequin or an Italian prima donna’. She had also established her own business as a clothes designer with a workshop in Kabul, a boutique in its new Intercontinental Hotel, and American distribution. Her speciality was modifying and westernising Afghan designs, often transforming traditional men’s clothes into womenswear.
Kabul also became the Afghan centre of the pustincha trade. Some dealers there sold coats made in Ghazni and the village of Istalif north of Kabul. Others made their own in Kabul. In 1968, the biggest sweatshop employed thirty workers. Unusually, it was mechanised, including a suite of dyeing, tanning, cleaning and sewing machines from West Germany. But its owner, reluctantly, still had women decorate the coats by hand because ‘such designs can’t be embroidered by machine’. Before long, production was on an even bigger scale and, while a glut in 1969 bankrupted some manufacturers, demand surged in 1970 not only in the United States and Europe but also, for the first time, in Japan. One company employed 160 embroiderers who completed thirty to forty coats each day. Another company built a hostel for its 250–300 embroiderers, who were primarily widows and young women from the provinces where there were many skilled needleworkers.
The purchasers of pustinchas were attracted by their apparent authenticity, but many also wanted coats that conformed to the latest western fashions, leading them to prefer new forms of embroidery, colours and cuts. As choice grew, buyers in late 1968 could select coats with black, brown or white fur; have just the seams of their coat embroidered or the entire surface; and opt for ‘the strong, contrasting colours of the East or the subdued, harmonious colour coordinates of Western influence’. A key figure was Masoumi Noorzad, whom the Kabul Times described as ‘one of those few Afghan women who helps her husband in his business’ and the ‘real brain’ behind the company’s pustinchas. While some of these coats were embroidered with designs from Ghazni, Istalif, Kandahar and Kabul, Masoumi Noorzad ‘of course’ also drew on the latest magazines and catalogues from Europe and the United States.
By 1971, the biggest pustincha factory in Kabul had four hundred workers, and the coats were for sale across the Shahr-e Naw district where most westerners stayed. By one count, two hundred dealers were selling them and more than 50,000 pustinchas had been imported into the United States. Production was also booming again in Ghazni to supply dealers not only in Kabul but also Kandahar and Herat, where many westerners bought them. As these coats spread round the world, awareness of Afghanistan grew, even if not quite as much as one Kabuli dealer boasted to the New York Times: ‘Before no one remembered Afghanistan. Now everybody remembers.’
CHAPTER 9
The Miniskirt Craze
In the summer of 1968, as pustinchas were taking Manhattan, miniskirts reached Kabul. Most were modest by western standards. All skirts that exposed the knees were considered ‘real miniskirts’ in Kabul. But some were shorter. A university lecturer combined one sewn by her mother with white, high-heeled Courrèges boots from Paris. Other women bought new miniskirts at new boutiques in the Shahr-e Naw or acquired them second-hand at the Johnson Bazaar. Safia Tarzi, who had just opened her boutique in the Intercontinental Hotel, wore one of the shortest for a Kabul Times photograph in December 1968.
Short hair was part of the fashion, as it was in the 1920s. When Kathleen Trautman arrived from the United States in 1967, she was shocked to see a young woman enter one of Kabul’s many new beauty salons to have her long hair cut. On asking why, Trautman was told the woman ‘had a new job in a downtown office and wanted to cut her hair so she would look more chic and western’. Trautman concluded that such cuts were symbolic of something more: ‘equality for women’. When a visiting press agency photographer produced a series in 1968, ‘Kabul—Trying Hard to Catch up with the Times’, he photographed four short-haired young women in stylish western outfits outside the airport. A visiting Indian journalist was amazed to discover that this ‘smart set’ of young women was Afghan, not French.
The embrace of the miniskirt—three years after Mary Quant and Andre Courrèges brought it to catwalks in London and Paris—occurred as political activism intensified in Kabul, especially among high-school and university students. Inspired by Berkeley and Paris, public protests multiplied. Political parties, all bitterly opposed to each other, and all illegal, proliferated. While ideology was significant, so were ethnicity, class and the gulf between urban and rural Afghans. Marxist-Leninists from the People’s Democratic Party sundered. Nur Mohammad Taraki formed Khalq, meaning Masses. Babrak Karmal established Parcham, meaning Banner. Maoists established Eternal Flame to pursue revolutionary armed struggle. Islamists established Muslim Youth.
For many young women, miniskirts were the most visible assertion of their liberation. For traditionalists, these skirts exemplified the West’s corruption of Afghan society, violating the general Islamic requirement of modest dress and the interpretation of the Qur’an that allowed at most only the feet and hands of women to be seen. Other expressions of the modern were also divisive, including Kabul’s first nightclubs, with their invitations to ‘drink and dance…to up-to-date stereophonic music and live bands’, and the screening of many more foreign movies in new privately built cinemas. But the miniskirt provided the prime instance of how modernity in Afghanistan was a Pandora’s Box, releasing the unexpected and uncontrollable.
The conservative weeklies Afghan Millat and Gahiz were at the forefront of an informal ‘anti-miniskirt league’. But some liberals also denounced the miniskirt as ‘indecent’ and ‘incompatible’ with Afghan tradition and society because they knew the ‘fanatical element’ would use it to fuel antipathy to all modernisation. The university responded in 1968 with yet another uniform—a blue-and-white dress of French design, with winter and summer variants—to be worn on campus by all female students. They had to be stopped, the university maintained
, from competing to be fashionable in ways that many of their parents could not afford. But the university also wanted to prevent students wearing clothes that would ‘cause anxiety and misgivings among other segments of the population’.
Outraged students branded this uniform a denial of their individuality. They argued that, far from being cheaper, the uniform was much more expensive than second-hand dresses from the Johnson Bazaar. Students also warned they would modify the uniform so it was as revealing as their other clothes. Some did so by sporting them ‘tight and well above the knee’. Most wore whatever they wanted as the university did not enforce its new dress code. It failed to do so because, just as unveiling began in Kabul with the elite, miniskirts were worn by the daughters of cabinet ministers and senior officials. Suraya Sadeed, whose father headed Zahir Shah’s secret police, was one of these daughters of the powerful who made the campus a ‘fashion parade’. As a student, she rode pillion on the motorcycle of her long-haired, goateed boyfriend, wearing a red leather miniskirt.
Mahbuba Musa, who had been among the first women to appear unveiled in 1959 when she attended the cinema with her brother, was described by Associated Press as ‘a spectacular, dark-haired, liquid-eyed, 5-foot, 10-inch example of the liberated Afghan woman’. Having married in 1960, then moved with her husband to Los Angeles where she worked as a model, Musa and her husband returned in 1964 to Kabul where they lived in a modern house with a bar, went out dancing and listened to tapes of Peter, Paul and Mary in an Alfa Romeo acquired through his car dealership. Occasionally, she donned traditional Kandahari outfits, including one with a veil, for fashion parades for international visitors. When French stylist Jean d’Estreés visited to promote his new salon at the Intercontinental Hotel, Musa had her hair dyed red and cut in a bob, in a nod to the Kabul flapper of the 1920s. Otherwise, she dressed much as she did in California, whether wearing a revealing swimsuit at Lake Qargha outside Kabul or a thigh-length miniskirt in the city.
