Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Hasidic and In Style

Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree

This past week New York had its knickers in a twist when fashion designer John Galliano was spotted wearing an ensemble and sporting a hairdo that, at first blush, summoned up the external appearance of the Hasidim: oversized black hat, long black frockcoat, black knickers and payes.

Some cried ‘foul,’ insisting that Galliano’s get-up was a deliberate affront to the Jews, the designer’s latest expression of malice and maliciousness. Others were equally insistent that Galliano was simply being, well, Galliano, and that his attire was just an expression of his idiosyncratic style. And still others, conceding that Galliano’s clothing was, in fact, “Hasidic-ish,” castigated the designer for being “tone deaf” and “impolitic.”

This latest fashion flap puts me in mind of an earlier, and equally provocative, moment in fashion history: Jean Paul Gaultier’s so-called “Hasidic Collection” of 1993 in which models strutted down the runway in clothing and hats that bore a rather close resemblance to that typically worn by male Hasidim.

Back then, hosannas rather than brickbats characterized the public response. Although some did take offense, most commentators hailed Gaultier’s collection as a witty, good-humored and clever “send-up.”

A few years later, one of Gaultier’s Hasidic creations was even put on a pedestal at the Jewish Museum’s 1996 exhibition, “Too Jewish.” Art historian Linda Nochlin, writing in the catalogue, applauded the designer’s “transvestite imagination,” and the ways in which he “called into question the whole authoritarian structure of Jewish fundamentalism.”

Then, as now, fashion, clearly, is in the eye of the beholder.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.