.... a penchant for anti-social fashion, an urge to pick out and put on clothes that express one's disregard for the world and its inhabitants, that say a big fat "screw you" to other people.
.... Veil-wearers often talk excitedly about the "barrier" their robe erects between them and the madding crowd. In the words of one, putting the veil on "creates [a barrier] between myself and the harsh, frenetic world [of] nosy passers-by, noise and crowds".
What really motivates this desire for sartorial separation from the mob is not some profound sense of piety or religious duty, but rather the same thing that drives "chavs" to put on face-obscuring hooded tops or young middle-class people to get covered in tattoos that were once the preserve of the workless or sailors - an instinct to advertise one's disdain for one's surroundings, to make an ostentatious display of one's practised, manicured sense of alienation.
There's nothing foreign or religious about this. The urge to put on some kind of veil doesn't come from some dusty backwater in the East but rather from the super-fashionable politics of identity here at home. [The Huffington Post UK, 17 September] Read more
