Dead Sea Fashion Week

Okay, so it wasn't part of a Fashion Week, it was a fashion show...and I was a model!  Wearing a dress worth worth around $3000 - with accessories of equal scale.  I modeled a 150 year-old traditional Palestinian dress...from Gaza! 

Yes, it was awesome! Yes my head was covered! No, Paul did not recognize me! No, I didn't know they had women that tall but the dress went to the ground. Yes, the sleeves were too short (or maybe that was the style).  Yes, picture here.

As a part of a work retreat one of our colleagues worked with a museum in Jerusalem to organize a fashion show for the staff, using the staff as models.  They brought 8 Palestinian dresses from the area including Bethlehem, Jaffa (Jonah and the whale), and Gaza.  All of us had our heads covered by scarves, my face was also covered very creatively! and another girl had a head cover made coins - kind of resembling a helmet (worth $3000 for the head piece alone).  But they all did the job of covering your head.

The dresses were very intricate and heavy, leading us all to wonder when we could take them off and how the Palestinian women 150+ years ago wore these dresses in the heat.  The other interesting revelation was that they chose (among the 8 models) three of the tallest women at the mission.  Models are usually tall, but the average Palestinian woman 150 years ago...I didn't picture her as tall.  We thought for sure the dresses would be too short on us, but they weren't! They were just the right length. 

I was sworn to secrecy so Paul had no clue I was participating (or that he was attending a fashion show!), so he didn't know it was me until after I was off stage.  In fact, only one colleague recognized me.

Palestinian dresses.  I'm on the far right.

Beyond the pictures and the dresses, the interesting part of the fashion show is that the other models included my boss and a few women from work that I didn't know too well.  It was a lot of fun to hang out with them backstage, try on the dresses together and talk about how we should walk and where we should stand.  Half of the women were Palestinian, but for me - an American who doesn't fully understand the history or culture of Palestine - it was really interesting to think of myself presenting (or representing) Gaza.

How would a Gazan woman walk?  Would she be shy or bashful with her face covered? Or would she be like my colleague who presented the bridal dress (which was black with red embroidery too) who was dancing around and lively?  Would she strut her stuff, twirl around the dress, make large sweeping motions with her arms to show off the dress...where did the line between presenting the dress/culture and modeling? Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, my "walk" was less then two minutes and I was instructed to sit on the ground and mortar coffee with the prop I was given. (Huh..throw in another trick of how to sit on the ground and stand back up in a 150 year old floor length dress...without stepping on it or ripping it!)