Modesty
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The thought that runs through my head is, I didn't realize that I was part of an exclusive club until I got kicked out of it. So it's, you know, Avery, you belong to an exclusive club that I was once part of. This is something that I have been meaning to explore for a very long time.

which is what happens when an American like Shireen chooses to start wearing a hijab. That's the only thing I changed. I added a headscarf to my wardrobe. I still wore jeans. I still had my clothing, but all I did is I added one garment and that was the headscarf. And that changed how I was treated tremendously.

You know, people distanced themselves. People looked at me, didn't talk to me. You know, I don't like to stand out. I don't like attention. And I'm not doing it for attention. I'm doing it for my religious beliefs. Shireen used to belong to the Society of the Outwardly Secular, where people like me follow trends and show our hair and our shoulders and think nothing of it. We were not raised in a religious household. There were few things. Like, I knew I was Muslim because we didn't eat pork and we didn't drink alcohol. So that was Shireen's version of Islam growing up.

until, as an adult, three of her husband's grandparents died in a six-month period, and Shireen was confronted with a lot of loss and needed to be there for her husband and his family. That was the moment I became more religious. And it's funny because...

his dad at the same time became more religious. So his dad and me, we both became religious in our respective faiths. By the way, her husband's family is Christian. So this was Shireen's own need and her own journey. So I had to learn my own religion. Okay, now I need to learn how to pray. I don't know how to pray. I better learn how to pray. And you think about different aspects of practicing your faith.

Ramadan, okay, you have to start fasting. Like, oh my God, this is so hard. Well, I'm like, can I do this? And can I do the whole month? And, you know, they're just different aspects of your religiosity that you focus on. And so then the whole, like, the modest dress kind of started creeping in. In Islam, like in all of the religions I'm about to talk about in this story, everybody is supposed to dress modestly, regardless of gender.

But there are different rules for men and women. And on the whole, masculine fashion generally makes it easier to cover your body than feminine fashion. Like, you know, should I should I cover? Should I not cover? I don't feel comfortable covering. Shireen thought about this question for a very long time. She spent six months weighing the pros and cons. To be honest, the only reason I didn't want to cover early on is because I was afraid of what other people thought.

how they were going to react and treat me. So I resisted that. But just one day, I came out of the shower. I stepped out of the shower and I looked at myself in the mirror. I said, that's it. It's all covered up. From this moment forward, I don't want any other man to see this. And it was just cold turkey. And

I'm like, okay, now that I've just committed, how the heck am I going to get a headscarf? I have to leave the house to go buy a headscarf. Like, where do I go to buy hijab? So I just went to Joann's and just bought some fabric, cut it, and oh, this is nice, and just made a scarf out of it. Shireen fashioned a colorful wrap around her hair and leaves her neck exposed. When Muslim women do practice modesty, we have differences amongst ourselves. So for example, I don't cover my neck.

But other Muslim women are very, very traditional and they'll cover their hair and neck. So the way we practice modesty is different even amongst ourselves. But the cruel irony was when Shireen finally summoned the courage to make this choice. So I started covering, it was, I believe, August of 2001. Yeah.

which was a month before the terrorist attacks. Obviously one of the worst possible times for rampant Islamophobia, like even worse than usual. But this kind of modest dressing is not only a task for Muslims. We're not the only ones. We didn't invent the modest dress code. There are a lot of religious groups who practice a modest dress code. So where do these modest dress codes come from?

In a lot of these faiths, the tradition of modesty comes down to just a few lines of text that are filtered through decades and decades and decades of interpretation.

For example, in the case of Islam, a lot of it comes from two lines in the Quran. There are two main verses of hijab. Professor Fa'afet Shirazi taught an entire course about veiling at UT Austin, and this is one of the lines in the Quran. There is a verse that is about lowering down your gaze.

and his address is the man. So nobody is gazing at anyone. But that's not specifically saying that women have to cover their bodies and dress modestly. That's another passage. One verse that it says, oh, you wives of the Muhammad, okay? Cover your... The Arabic word that the Quran uses is zivar.

Zebar is jewels. Oh, you wives of the prophet, cover your jewels. This could mean any number of things. The first question I have, I am not the wife of the prophet. Okay? Okay. Here is what I hear from the clerk's side. Oh, yeah.

But it meant for all the Muslim women. All the Muslim men and women want to follow the Prophet Muhammad as an exemplary example in honesty, decency. Yes. So you need to follow his wives too. Okay. So what the heck this jewel is? Is that the jewel of chastity?

Most of the clerks have taken it as a jewel of chastity. Some of them go further covering your voice, keeping quiet. That's not in Quran. Not at all. Professor Shirazi says modesty is not about making women disappear or shutting them up. And in fact, the Quran encourages women to be intellectually active. The Quran invites everybody.

Read in the name of your God. Means read, all of you. Reading and understanding was encouraged. I don't know what the Hek Talibans Quran tells them, enforcing the women not to go to school.

This is totally against Quranic verses. So suffice it to say, a lot of different countries and a lot of different sects and a lot of different governments and a lot of different individuals interpret these directives in lots of different ways. And so when Shireen wanted to continue the longstanding tradition of covering up her hair...

She knew her own reasons why it was calling to her. It's not about being ashamed of your body. It's not about wanting to oppress another sex. It just, it dignifies the human being. So when we cover up in front of each other, we're dealing with each other personality to personality. A few women have told me this, that dressing modestly allows them to create their own space.

to carve out their own special separation between the public sphere and private life. And they get to determine it for themselves. I really felt liberated and empowered after I started covering. Why? How did it feel different? So one day I'm in the, I'm,

UCLA, you know, outside of the research lab. So I've just been calling her by her first name, but Dr. Shereen Sabbat is a biologist. And I'm talking to somebody. He was from another lab and we're talking about something. And I was covered, my hair's covered up. And I'm talking to him and he's looking at me and talking to me. And I realized I'm like, he doesn't know what I look like.

I mean, I'm standing right in front of him. He's talking, he's yapping at me. I'm like, "He doesn't know what I look like." Like, I could control that. Like, who sees me and who doesn't see me. I have that power. This strikes me as the ultimate luxury in the age of oversharing. And not to mention, like, very special and, dare I say, erotic for the intimacy of a marriage. But the question that I have is this: Why should God care?

Like, why should it matter to a heavenly body how much skin we mortals show? Especially when different faiths talk about covering entirely different body parts. Ultimately, so much of religion is so beautiful in scripture as an idea. But rubber meets the road when cloth meets skin. When each practitioner has to decide to what degree and at what risk they want to turn religious theory into practice. After the break.

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So sometimes wearing a hijab is empowering, and sometimes it is not. So I went to the Iranian embassy with a friend of mine, she's also Iranian, and we took out our hijabs that we still have in our closets, and we put fire to them. In 2022, women all over the world were burning hijabs in protest. But it was a weird thing to do because it also felt like, am I doing something Islamophobic?

And I know I wasn't because I was supporting the woman in Iran. Right. But if someone would see me do that here, they would think it was an act against every hijab, against Islam. This woman, who I'm going to call M, is not against the hijab itself and is not against Islam. She and her friend, who I'm going to call L,

L were protesting against specific government policies in Iran, which the hijab, unfortunately, became an emblem of. The hijab is not the main issue. It's the whole system. Both M and L are Iranian and currently live abroad in a country in Europe. I'm obviously trying to keep them anonymous because they faced real risk in talking to me.

But I feel like you absolutely cannot talk about the hijab without talking about Iran, because, again, hijabs are interpreted differently in every country, for every person, by every government. And Iran represents a particular abuse of the hijab that has become a worst case scenario. When you go out and you don't cover your hair, you risk your life. And that never happens in the West.

When you do not cover your hair or you do cover your hair, you don't risk being beaten or being killed by the state. When I spoke with M and with L, a 22-year-old woman in Iran named Gina Massa Amini had just been beaten to death by Tehran's morality police for not wearing a hijab. The name Massa Amini became a rallying cry. This is not the first time. Now it's Massa, but...

The next time is it somebody else. In Iran, the so-called morality police can round up and arrest women for improper coverage and quote-unquote bad hijabs. But really, women could be arrested for almost anything. Even if you are laughing too much or too loud, it's possible. If they want, they can arrest you. It's a list of maybe 70 things, yeah, the reasons why they can arrest you.

And Elle knows this because once when she was visiting family in Iran, she turned a corner and saw the green bus of the morality police and she immediately froze. It's pure shock. You can't comprehend it. You can't even comprehend it. It's the biggest nightmare every girl knows. There will come a day that it happens to me, but then it's the day it happens to me. Elle was in disbelief because...

That day of all days, she thought she wasn't doing anything wrong. She was fully covered. I had everything, like from the checklist. I wanted to feel safe, so I accept the rules. So my hair was good covered and loose clothes. But apparently not loose enough. An agent of the morality police approached her. Yeah, she came to me and said, you are fat and apart between your niece and your uncles.

This agent told her to step into the bus. But as soon as she got on board...

She knew it was over. They really lied because they say to every girl, we want only check your information, etc., etc. But if you are already inside the bus, you are not coming out again. They were rounding up almost every woman on the street. Also with good hijab, really good hijab. More than 90% of girls walk by, we're arrested and we all sit in the bus.

Wow. Yeah. It's totally arbitrary. Yeah. But everybody has a problem because they can't go to their exams and their works. To all the women on the bus, it was very clear that this was not about their clothes. It was about control. And here they were, trapped inside.

And then the ignition started. The bus started and everybody was screaming like, yeah. Elle couldn't stop laughing because what else can you do? Where does the bus go to? Yeah, to the police station where Massa also was.

The same police station? Yeah, same police station. It's a really location for re-education. It was literally like a classroom. Everyone's phones were taken away and around 300 women were rounded into a room with little desks. And then they repeat all the rules and how many sins we did and...

how bad we were and yeah. And then how long did this whole thing take? Seven hours. What?! Yeah, and I was very lucky. Yeah. Did they feed you? No, nothing. Not even water. Not even telephone. Nobody knew where I was. And you didn't know when it was gonna be over? No, no, no. But my strategy was just being calm and just look around because I was the only girl there.

that knew that I am able to step into the plane and fly away. But this is the reality for them every day.

One of the tragedies, on top of everything, is that El and the women who are directly impacted by Iran's veiling policy can't really talk about it because the consequences are extremely dire. I didn't tell my story in public, never. Mostly I'm scared, like, yeah, your family getting in trouble or you can't go back. And it's very difficult.

But I think who is more scared, you or us? Because international feminists have been hesitant to speak out for another reason. They are scared to be seen as Islamophobes. So that's why they don't speak out against these women in Iran fighting for the right for freedom to take off their hijab and for other freedoms. I can understand when people say,

Everyone should have the right to cover their head or not, but the contexts differ so much. To reiterate: in Iran, the hijab is just the most visual symbol of a political problem. This is about the government of Iran and not something inherently religious. And it has a historical precedent.

This veil mandate is, in fact, an equal and opposite backlash. With the Iranian government, they have an issue with this veiling and veiling, forceful veiling, forceful and veiling. In 1936, hijabs were actually illegal in Iran. Professor Shirazi says the prime minister, the first Pahlavi Reza Khan, was determined to westernize Iran to make women look modern and free and

In the 30s, he came up first with

with the idea of if you remove the veil from the women, you free them. In other words, make them look like European women. And Iran wasn't alone in this, by the way. Because he was a very good friend of Kemal Ataturk. Turkey had also banned headscarves. And later in the 80s, Indonesia would also mandate secularism. So this is a thing that happens sometimes. But back in Iran in the 30s,

It was painful to force women to unveil. That is not going to work because you are bringing somebody else's cultural norm to an ancient culture that the people didn't

have a different opinion of being emancipated. Like, remember what Dr. Shireen Sabbat said about why she wears her headscarf? I could control that. Who sees me and who doesn't see me. I have that power. And Pahlavi Reza Khan took it away by force. It wasn't optional. That is the problem. When he mandated the police to attack women,

and removing their head cover.

It was so devastating for many women, traditional women, that they thought, first of all, an estranged man is touching them and removing their body coverage. It's like being naked in the public. Do you think that he emancipated women by forcefully removing their hijab? No, it was not actual emancipation. The government wanted women to look liberally.

emancipation for a woman is to be equal to men, which they were not. Emancipation for a woman is to be able to walk, travel, go anywhere without any male chaperone. That is emancipation.

You give them the right to be free, but you are ordering them to do something and they are not emancipated. So it's kind of the same story now. What was their reasoning for compulsory hijab? The Islamic Republic? Exactly the same argument.

We want to emancipate women. Nowadays, Iranian leaders say they want to free women from the gaze of men, from the focus on their appearance, and from the materialism of the West. Okay, so no women ever had any hand in

And this is really what it comes down to. Letting someone choose modesty, if they would like to practice it, in their way, for themselves, however they would like to do it, to whatever degree, in whatever style they would like. Because there's a range of choices.

And here what we look at are designs by Western high fashion designers or couturiers who are creating specifically for a Muslim clientele. One by Jean Galliano and then another by Jean-Louis Cher.

In 2018, the de Young Museum in San Francisco put on a show called Contemporary Muslim Fashions. In the back, there's a long, hot pink and richly embellished kaftan, which was actually made by Oscar de la Renta. It's a special collection from Ramadan. That's Laura Camerlingo, the co-curator of Contemporary Muslim Fashions. In 2017,

2017 Nike launched the Nike Pro Hijab. The state of Muslim fashion and modest clothing is constantly changing and expanding, especially as Muslim women find new ways to stay covered while doing all the things they want to do, even if not everyone approves. Is this the burkini? Yes, we have a burkini on view in black by Ahedda Zanetti.

Remember in 2016 when parts of France tried to ban the burkini? It's that big black covering that allows modest women to go swimming. And it was designed by a Muslim woman to let her be active.

But in France, not unlike in Iran in the 1930s, this assumed that modesty was backwards and fundamentalist and had to be removed. And it was interesting. We spoke to Ahida and she had said that, you know, she never dreamed it would be this sort of controversial thing. For her, it was really about a design problem that needed to be solved.

And the burkini was not the only attempt to solve this problem. We paired it with an ensemble by Splash Gear. Splash Gear is another modest swimwear company.

But it looks very different from the burkini. It's blue and pink with hibiscus flowers all over it. Much more California surfer looking. It's kind of like a long, loose rash guard that's more of a tunic with a detachable hood that goes over long, loose pants. Modest, yes. And clearly for the active California swimmer. I was a certified scuba diver. Loved scuba diving. Loved snorkeling. And when I became religious...

I thought, well, now that I'm covered up, like how do I go scuba diving? Because here in Southern California, you basically dress and undress on the boat. - Splash Gear is the company of none other than Dr. Shireen Sabbat. - I'm a scientist. I have to think of these things to make it function the way I want it to function.

She wanted swimwear that would cover her, but not cling to the body when wet. You can see it right now, right? You can see? Oh yeah, it builds a bit. Just a little bit, but it doesn't ride up. No. Splash gear has layers of material at the chest that don't stick to each other if you sort of burp it. And the cuffs of the pants are stiff. There's this interface to keep the leg open so it won't cling. So you see how like the bottom stays open? Yeah.

Oh yeah. Yeah, you see that? It doesn't cling at all. It's still like swinging in the wind. Splash Gear swimwear is sold as separates so customers can mix and match. You can choose a longer shirt or shorter sleeves or no head cover. Because again, the Muslim community is not a monolith. We have Muslim women who don't cover completely. They don't cover their hair. So they wouldn't need a swim cap or a hood. They would just need the shirt and the bottoms. And then I have non-Muslim customers who just, they just want one or the other for sun protection.

For anyone who wants to practice their faith or stay out of the sun, or anyone who would just like to enjoy the water without having to show off their whole body, modesty should be a more viable option for everyone. There was a time when I was looking at the swim hijabs, actually. Zahava Stadler practices modern Orthodox Judaism. Generally speaking...

By the way, I'm not trying to paint modesty with entirely rose-colored glasses. It's a challenge.

It's hard to look young and fun in modest clothing because you're supposed to pair the long skirt with the tank top. You're supposed to pair the loose blouson top with really skinny jeans or the combination of modest on top, modest on bottom. And now that I'm married and I cover my hair for that reason with a headscarf, it's that every element in and of itself is unremarkable, but together it's a lot of coverage.

and doesn't add up to an expected aesthetic. Right. So what do you swim in? I don't really, but I have a big complex about it. You just don't swim? I basically just don't swim. I mean, I wear like a full coverage, actually marketed to the Orthodox community swimsuit to the beach, but it's not also the most practical thing to swim in. Have you heard of splash gear? No, I don't think so. Wait, can you look it up?

Splash gear swimwear would not work for Zahava. Right, see it's like a mid-thigh skirt. Because modesty means different things in different faiths. The thing about modesty for most Muslim women in the West is that the tunic stop mid-thigh. So it doesn't actually meet my skirt requirements usually. So what is modesty? Is it a matter of covering the legs or the neck or the elbows?

Or is modesty something that transcends specific body parts and even transcends clothing? After the break, other religions chime in. My time, I think I was in Japan for like nine weeks. It was a really tense nine weeks because the agency that contracted to have me come out and work for them in Japan had kind of penciled me in as like their lingerie person.

model for that season. Rosemary Card was a model, a very successful one, like the kind who gets sent off to Japan to do runway shows and photo shoots. And they were planning on sending me to all their lingerie clients. But she did not do lingerie. And then they were like, what do you mean by you don't do lingerie? And I was like, oh, it's part of my thing. It's like I don't do it. Rosemary is Mormon and part of Mormon faith, not unlike Judaism or Islam, is modest dress.

It's just that Mormonism, relatively, is the new religion on the block. And just like a younger language, like Esperanto has fewer rules and exceptions and less wonky vestigial parts, a newer faith has figured out a relatively streamlined way to make modesty less open to interpretation.

Mormons wear a religious like underwear, we call it garments. Garments are under your clothes. The top is a t-shirt with cap sleeves, the bottoms are mid-thigh shorts, and in a way, they make modesty simple, right? Just make sure you cover the garment.

The rule of thumb is right there. And it's not something to outwardly display. It's just something to guide your dress. We're always taught that this is a private thing between you and your creator. And that's why we don't wear it on the outside of our clothing because it's not supposed to be public. But the very interesting thing is within Mormon culture, it is so public.

Mormon adults are supposed to commit to wearing the garment throughout their life. But life has a lot of parts to it, including swimming and working out. Exercise is usually one where they say you don't have to, but there's some people who are like, no, you should wear while you're exercising. And so it's a very hot topic in the Mormon community to discuss the moments when one chooses to wear the garment or not.

or not wear it someone might say like did you know that like jane some friend in the group she's no longer wearing her garment like very very private things but it's very much like a point of public comment

Back when Rosemary was working as a model, she was still a teenager. She wasn't yet given the garments. That's usually something that Mormons get before they go on a mission or before they get married. It's a rite of passage and it comes because you've been a good Mormon and you've been faithful to the teachings.

And so Rosemary was very anxious about this because she knew in her job that she wouldn't always be able to dress modestly. Yeah, so I was super stressed about that. It was kind of like, oh, something I just came to figure out. But the line that I would use was professional ballerinas or swimmers, right?

wearing leotards and swimsuits. And that's part of their job. It's not something that they would wear down the street, but it's what they do at work. And so I might wear things while modeling that I wouldn't wear in my personal life, but that's okay. So I would wear bikinis, but I was very cautious of what is the vibe. Like if it was fun, surfer, beach, age appropriate, then I would be okay with that. And there are definitely some shoots where it was

didn't fall in line with it. Actually, a lot of shoots. So I was modeling back in 2005 to like 2007 or 8. And when I was modeling, models were not included in child actor laws. And so if I was modeling with a puppy, the puppy had more rights than me as far as like hours they could work and food and water. Now it's really improved and there's age limits and shots.

chaperone requirements, and there are laws about what models can and can't do at certain ages. So it really has improved, but were there inappropriate and weird things going on back then? 100%. In the absence of any actual legislation or protection, Rosemary's religion was her guardrail.

For example, she told me about a photographer who later admitted to her that he usually slipped something in models' drinks to help them relax. But he didn't with Rosemary because he knew Mormons don't do drugs. And I was like, did you just tell me that you drug children that come...

It was a seedy world out there. And in Japan, alone, as a teenager, armed with nothing but her faith...

Rosemary was definitely put to the test. It's Fashion Week, Tokyo. And runway was like my bread and butter. That's what I was good at. So she gets booked by this very big deal designer in Tokyo. So I'm just, I'm thrilled. I go to the fitting and it's this beautiful spaghetti strap, sheer in the front, mesh top. And...

Rosemary was like, wait, no bra. What am I going to do? She was not willing to publicly go out on a runway and be photographed with her chest out.

So she fought. She asked around and she talked to everyone. And like by some miracle, they agreed to let me wear like a nude stick-on bra. And I go and I buy one and...

Modesty gave Rosemary a practice of refusal.

a way of saying no, a reason to fight for her values, and a viable excuse to not go out on a runway and get photographed with her breasts out. And it actually turned out incredible because of Japanese nudity laws. There's laws about what can and cannot be shown in public billboards and in stores.

But they were able to use the photos of me at the end of the runway in their stores and like big flag banner images because my nipples weren't showing. And so it actually was really beneficial for them and worked out great for me. So, yeah, back when Rosemary was a model, her modesty practice really guided her. And it means there are no regrettable images of her floating around on the Internet. But the downside is that when modesty is taught in a lot of faiths,

Historically, it comes with a lot of shame. Do I think some of the narratives were harmful to me as a young woman? Absolutely. There are generations of Mormon women who were raised with really retrograde rhetoric around modesty. And not just Rosemary. There was a story in the

Sunday school manual when I was growing up about a young woman who wore an extra short skirt on a date because it was with a boy that she really liked. And she ends up almost getting raped in his car. And the moral of the story is she shouldn't have worn such a short skirt. It's awful. That was in the

I would have heard that late 80s, early 90s. This is Christine Haglund. I was the editor of Dialogue, which is a quarterly journal of Mormon thought. And in Mormon thought, modesty has always been a value. There's one thing in the Doctrine and Covenants that says, let your garments be plain. But the logic behind it, the reasoning of modesty in Mormonism, has evolved and changed a lot over time for reasons both within and outside the church.

For example, at the outset of Mormonism in the 1800s,

Modesty was sort of this liberal dress reform movement. It's a reaction to the fashions of the moment, which were the bustles and long trains and corsets, like really impractical and unhealthy garments for women. And there is this heavy emphasis that you should dress in a healthful way. So no corsets, skirts that are a length you can walk in. You know, it's probably the only time that Mormon skirts were shorter than everyone else's.

This early style of modesty was also a means of financial independence for the church. And in early Utah, it was about economics. It was about having homemade clothing rather than importing it and keeping the Latter-day Saint community distinctive from the rest of the United States. And so there was a lot of emphasis on making your own clothes and not following fashions of the world.

There's something kind of empowering about letting fashion pass you by, letting everybody else get bludgeoned by trends while you stick to your beliefs. It was in no small part about resisting capitalism and decoration and spectacle until it became very much about sex. The sense that our sexual mores were different from everyone else's really starts to be articulated heavily in the 60s and 70s. That is probably when

dress and sexuality got so firmly articulated to each other. Maybe because before that it was presumed that societal values around sexuality were somewhat shared. I mean, in the 1940s and 50s, Mormons did not look that outwardly different from the average, wholesome American teenager. I was at BYU. Brigham Young University. And I saw pictures of

homecoming queens in sleeveless dresses and even strapless dresses. You know, like a 50s style dress with a strapless bodice and a full skirt you would have seen at BYU like before Kimball's talk. We are happy to have Brother Spencer W. Kimball speak to us this morning. One talk by one man changed a lot. I know I'm not going to be popular when I say this, but I am sure that the immodest dressers

that are worn by our young women and our mothers contribute in some degree to the immorality of this age. Elder Spencer Kimball gave a talk in 1951 called A Style of Our Own, Modesty in Dress and Its Relationship to the Church. He gave this talk at Brigham Young University. I wonder if our young sisters realize the temptation they're just flaunting to young men when they leave their bodies uncovered.

So this talk by Elder Kimball, who was in top church leadership and would go on to become the leader of the church, was very influential. And it made modesty way more about protection against premarital sex. We kind of import the Protestant

not tempting young men. There's a lot more borrowing from fundamentalist Protestantism starting in kind of the mid-century. Women were encouraged to add sleeves to their dresses or little triangles of fabric over plunging necklines. Anything they could do to quote-unquote

kimbalize their clothes. I think probably administrators at BYU grabbed a hold of that. It's a measurable thing. You know, we can see this as an external marker of obedience and compliance. And I think that always, that often happens with external markers of piety, that it starts to become an index for other things that you can't see.

I think Christine Haglund said that so well. Clothes get read as the external marker of internal beliefs. And that's also true in secular society, right? Clothing is the outward expression of what you believe your place in the world is.

So yes, modesty makes a lot of sense as a principle, but so much of it is rooted in the way that it's taught and the way that it's upheld and enforced. And in the case of the Mormon church, thankfully, they've grown a lot since the 90s and there have been new versions of the Mormon modesty manual. They have created a whole new iteration of it, which is much more focused on principles and the idea that God gave you your body, respect it,

and doesn't give specific directions about sleeves or hemlines or any of that stuff. There's a lot to admire and enjoy about the principle of modesty. The problem is that any dress code gets a little sticky when certain principles and rules are being imposed on you and your body when they make you feel uncomfortable, including physically uncomfortable.

The God that I don't believe in is like, yeah, having you physically uncomfortable all day every day is kind of part of the deal. Rosemary and Christine both talked about the practical problems that some Mormons find the garments are too stiff or uncomfortable or that the garments give them rashes or yeast infections. Well, my ideal solution, the garment has marks sewn into it that have symbolic meaning on

that connects to the temple. It's supposed to be on at certain places on your body. And if it were up to me, I would have everybody draw those marks on every day, like a bindi, you know, so that you're making a religious observance and choosing it yourself. So you would just draw it on your body, you know, like eyeliner. I don't know. I'm sure there are ways to figure that out. I mean, that would be my ideal, but no one ever asks me.

A lot of Mormon women have started to become much more fast and loose with the garment, much to the dismay of the church. It's just one of those things that I just let go of and stopped obsessing over. And it's been really good for me as an individual.

At this point in her life, Rosemary doesn't wear the garment in the consistent way she once did. But she still abides by the principles behind it. I still, like to any outsider standard, still a modest dresser. She's just currently not so vigilant about wearing the commanded garment.

But this month, the governing first presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sent out a letter that iterated that all members of the church should wear their garments day and night and not be so loosey-goosey about it. Which led to a central question that I have. Like, if one wants to practice modesty, or any part of religion, really...

To what degree do they need to adhere to the somewhat arbitrary rules? And when do they get to decide what's right for themselves?

You're not saying that you can just do whatever and it's all fine. No, absolutely not. God gave a Torah and he does expect us to live by that code of law. But God understands that we're human and he understands that there's a struggle and he appreciates the struggle that we're doing. And this is where I get into my own struggle. It's brought down in Jewish law that we need to wear a skirt as opposed to pants to our knees.

And so the idea is that our face and our neck are things that could be exposed, and our hands from our elbows under can be exposed, but the rest of our body, we should keep it covered. This is Leah, who runs a Chabad Jewish Community Center in Washington Heights.

And she just so happened to employ the same metaphor that appears in the Quran. Anything that's beautiful, anything that's precious, anything that's holy, we keep covered. Like, you're not going to put your diamonds on your kitchen counter and you're going to keep it in your jewelry box. Just because it's precious, not because it's bad, but because it's actually...

precious and special, and we want to treat it like that. Cover your jewels. So we're not saying that our looks are not important. They are important, but that's not our main focus. Our value is who we are, who I am, what I give, what I contribute, what I do, my actions. There's this idea in Judaism that to cover the body is to always invite God in, to dress up for him in the way that he dresses up for us.

Because technically, he is cloaked in the entire world. Everything around us. The sky, the trees, the sand. These are his garments. He covers himself for us.

and asks that we do it for him in return. We want God to be in our space. We want to invite God into our lives. And so God wants us to uphold modesty for that. And for Leah, covering herself every single day impacts her behavior. Like, would you behave in a certain way if you were in front of the president or if you were in front of a king? Like, you'd be on your best behaviors. So we're kind of putting ourselves in a place where we just recognize and remember that we're in God's presence. So it just, it

It gives us that reminder. And this makes sense. I mean, you can read any number of studies that talk about how dressing up in a suit makes you feel more professional or dressing up in a white coat makes doctors feel more like doctors. Dressing up entirely from head to toe every day will probably make you feel like a more dignified, righteous person instead of, say, flopping around in my underwear, which I'm literally doing right now.

It's interesting because like we all live in a cultural context. Like now I live in this context where I cannot imagine not wearing pants. I can't fathom it. And like I'm never going to do I'm never going to give it up. I've just been doing it for for too long. And I wonder, does that does that mean there's like some element of God's will that I will never fulfill?

Absolutely not. First of all, you have to realize that it's not all or nothing. Everything that we do, every mitzvah that we do, brings us closer to God. A mitzvah is a good deed or a commandment of God. And it could be helping someone out. It could be keeping kosher. It could be maintaining the Sabbath. It could be dressing modestly in long skirts. It could be not having so many tattoos. Many things that I don't do.

I don't mean to put you on the spot here or ask you to critique me in any way, but I am very curious if you think that one... If Judaism also has to be something that you act on every day. Like if you can be Jewish without... Are you less Jewish without it? So to answer that question is that...

There is no such thing as somebody being more Jewish or less Jewish than anybody else. Really? Absolutely. But there are people who are more learned. I may be more religious, I may be more learned, but I'm not more Jewish than you. Really? Absolutely. You're just as Jewish as I am. Leah is such a kind and beautiful person. And she made me want to be more learned and more religious.

But I have to figure out what that means for myself. Like, I didn't grow up with a Jewish dress code. And my family wasn't very strict with our kosher-ness, which, by the way, mom and dad, I'm thankful for. Like, I enjoyed the leniency. But in the synagogue I grew up in, our identity was mostly a historical and political matter, right? It was mainly rooted in the need to remember the Holocaust and to unequivocally and unquestioningly support the state of Israel.

The latter of which, to put it very mildly, feels impossible for me right now. I know that every faith contains debate and no tradition is a monolith. I keep saying that over and over again. But I have long felt bereft.

And I've wondered what other ways there are to lead a righteous life in accordance with my personal values and my religion. We have in Hasidic teachings, we have this Sefer, it's called the Tanya. I had never heard of it. The Tanya, it's the guide for how you can be an upstanding person and an upstanding Jew. And when I read it, I'm like, I am so far from this. Wow. Like, I'll never get there.

But that is exactly, there is where it writes about how it's not the point if you're ever going to get there. The beautiful struggle, the struggle that God loves, is to try to obey his rules. Not to execute them perfectly, just to try. Obviously, this is like an ultimate goal. That's something that we work on lifelong.

And sometimes the task feels particularly impossible because religion, writ large, is full of such silly, ridiculous rules. Like, why are we supposed to eat kosher or eat halal or not drink or pray five times a day or not exert any labor at all on Saturdays or cover our entire bodies in cloth? I mean, you can theorize and interpret these commandments as the day is long, and heaven knows people do. But at the end of the day, the explanations mostly amount to...

Because God said so. Because community said so. Because history said so. Because tradition said so. Essentially, because a power greater than you does not want you to do exactly what you want.

You have to keep your own desires in check. It's not about logic. As Dr. Sabbat said, Because God is wise, God knows best. Sometimes we may know the reasons, sometimes we don't. And we'll just continue. That's the definition of faith.

without quite knowing why, even if it feels alienating or difficult, but trusting that it's a part of something larger. Does the Tanya say anything about clothing? It does talk a lot about how our soul has changed

three clothings which is thoughts speech and action basically the idea is is that we want our thoughts our speech and our actions to be good ones positive ones holy ones so yeah to call them clothing yes it calls it clothing it's clothing as in a second it's an expression your clothing is an expression of you so what expresses our soul our thoughts our speech and our action

I have had to learn that belief is also a means of expression, a daily practice of deciding what to say, what to pray, what to think, and what to wear. And modesty, in the deepest sense of the word, is humility and grace and understanding. And so I struggle, I struggle, and I endeavor to keep my aspirations modest.

To learn a little bit more about modest clothing and to discover some brands that specialize in modesty, check out articlesofinterest.substack.com. Edits to this story were by Kelly Prime, as well as from my unofficial consultants, Chase Anderson and Sarah Alfagi. Thank you both so much.

Thank you also to Musia Stone, Sarah Wolf, and everybody who agreed to speak on record. This is a very vulnerable and complicated topic, and I've been humbled by your honesty. Thank you also to Hannah and Cole North for giving me the space and time and sustenance to put all these thoughts down. This story was part two in the triptych that I'm making this year before I disappear to focus on writing my book. And the question for the third and final part is this.

If, indeed, God wants us to dress and behave modestly, then how do we explain this? They're gorgeous. Yeah, go to Chazzables, and you'll see how expensive they are. Part 3 of 3, next time, is about what priests wear. Radiotopia, from PRX.