As anyone who’s been to the Gulf lately will have noticed, something’s up – quite literally – with the local hijab.  After a half-decade of explosive innovations in color, print, and surface embellishment, headscarf styling in the Khaleej has boldly entered the third dimension.  Some might argue that the veil’s new gravity-defying form is better suited to the twilight zone than the no-fly zone; still others might praise its queenly proportions.  But one thing is for sure: from sidewalk to mallwalk to university hall, “big hijab” is making an indelible mark on our concept of Islamic chic.  And whether you love the new look or pray that it goes away, this head-y mixture of bombast and discretion might just be the perfect expression of twenty-first century Gulf femininity.

Technically speaking, “big hijab” is more beehive than pompadour; the volume is concentrated at the back of the head rather than at the front – think Holly Golightly versus James Dean and latter-day Umm Kulthoum versus early Elvis Presley.  As these examples demonstrate, we tend to associate “big hair” with 50’s and 60’s Americana (and lots and lots of hairspray), but the origins of elaborately teased and lacquered coifs are actually to be found much earlier – bouffants were high fashion in late eighteenth-century Western European cities like London, Paris, and Vienna.  In fact, fashionable hairstyles of the day could invlove as much as three feet of hair piled above the head and topped by fancy headdresses of fabric, feathers, flowers and pearls.

Quantum leap 220 years forward and 4,500 kilometers east and voila! – you have the shabbasa, Middle Eastern hair accessory extraordinaire and the principle architecture behind big hijab.  Essentially a clip festooned with a volume-building sponge of synthetic fabric and/or feathers, flowers, ribbons and beads, women can fasten one or more underneath their veils for added height, depth, and puff power.  Because I do not sport one myself, I ventured into the marketplace in search of a closer look.  As I approached one of the accessories kiosks at City Center – Kuwait’s go-to place for up-to-the-minute, bottom-up fashion, my first thought was that the brightly colored cluster of squishy things resembled an endearing family of sea anemones.  And as I shifted my attention to the larger shabbasas tantalizingly suspended from an electrical wire complete with flashing lights, I suddenly knew what Eve must have felt gazing up at the perfectly ripened fruit of human destiny.

Just kidding.  What I was really thinking was, “It’s ironic that so much color and detail goes into an object that will never see the light of day.”  For as the women I spoke with explained to me, the shabbasa exists to be sensed, not seen.  These hardworking hairclips, luscious creatures in their own right, are rarely worn sans veil for their own appeal.  Zeina, a young Lebanese woman married to a Kuwaiti, the particularly large bouffant of whose leopard print Fendi scarf was buttressed by no less than two shabbasas, claimed she had never once worn hers in the privacy of her own home.  Hidal, an Egyptian university graduate and fan of the single shabbasa, agreed; in her world, shabbasas have nothing to do with hairstyle but everything to do with fashionable hijab.  In this respect shabbasas are a bit like the beautiful linings of haute couture garments – thoughtfully conceived, painstakingly constructed, often bright-hued, and invisible to all but the wearer – discreet flamboyance at its best.

If the destiny of the shabbasa is ultimately behind-the-scenes, that of the bold silhouette it creates is anything but.  All through the Khaleej, big hijab is turning heads.  Testifying as it does to the possibility for unique combinations of religious glory and fashion statement, I suspect it embodies a deeper cultural conversation taking place in contemporary Gulf identity.