Usually I don't pay attention to the Gmail ads that pop up along side my email, triggered by seemingly random words in the mail. Today was different. I opened up an email that contained the phone numbers to my Israeli bank and while I was waiting on hold, dazed by trying to handle banking at 6 am thanks to the time change, my eyes wandered over to the ads. One in particular caught my eye. It was for "Great Deals on Hostess Dresses!" What in the world was a hostess dress, and how could a letter containing only a bank's name and phone number trigger it? Since there wasn't much to do while waiting on hold, I opened the link. Even after seeing them, it took me a minute to figure out what these dresses were. I thought maybe they were for religious Muslim women, until I looked up the locations and found that there is one in B'nai Brak, the ultra-orthodox city near Tel-Aviv. I was fascinated by the dresses, note the names: Sunset Boulevard, Greta Garbo, Soft Innocence. I cannot imagine anything further from those names than the all black and all white floor length dresses in these photos. Isn't it interesting that they borrow the names from life styles that are shunned? I mean, why exactly would an ultra-orthodox woman want to resemble anything related to Sunset Boulevard?
Then I started thinking about the Mormon fashion parallel. For the most part, Mormons dress modernly, albeit more modestly than many non-Mormons. For example, knee length shorts, which Lesha calls "morts" (a contraction of Mormon shorts) are a common site here. But when Mormons go into the temple, they wear modest clothes that aren't so far off from the hostess dresses. Here is that link.
Who knew there was a wide world of religious fashion out there? It's amazing what one discovers on hold at 6 am.
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