Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Life

Modesty Isn’t About Shells. It’s About Patriarchy.

Upon reading Michelle Honig’s article “Why This Orthodox Layering Trend Has to Stop”, I felt more worked up than I might have expected about a fashion item, albeit an extremely popular one laden with meaning.

In her article, Ms. Honig attacks the “Kiki Riki” brand shell, a ubiquitous clothing trend used to ensure modesty for what would be considered revealing outfits for observant women. She critiques this garment from many angles, focusing on its questionable fashion sense, and concludes by observing that the obligation to conform to male-defined modesty codes frees her into thinking “outside of the box” and making creative fashion choices.

The unstated question remains: Why would restrictions imposed by men be necessary in order for women to dress creatively? What legitimacy, in fact, do such restrictions hold?

By critiquing minor aspects of tznius, like shells, women may claim to have a degree of control over their bodies and how they choose to cover them. Yet adhering to normative modesty codes, by definition, cedes this control. Any alleged “creativity” involved in selecting an outfit which will not offend or disturb Jewish men is a sad and minimal compensation. Mild complaints about minute details only grant tacit legitimacy to this system. While almost everyone is obligated to accept limits on how he or she dresses — considering factors such as age, profession, and, more problematically, gender — Orthodox women must conform to specific limitations defined by men.

I find Ms. Honig’s assertion, that modest fashion allows for creativity, to be paradoxical. How can one both accept male authority in this area, and yet claim to circumvent it at the same time?

However a woman chooses to adhere to modesty, shells or not, the rules she complies with are predicated on male anxiety about women’s bodies and the potentially dangerous responses which the sight of women’s bodies may provoke.

I teach in an allegedly centrist Orthodox boys’ high school. Whenever I present an image of women in history, from Nefertiti to Abigail Adams to Rebecca Gratz, I am greeted with the anxious accusation by the students, “That’s not modest,” regarding these women’s attire. They immediately recognize off-the-shoulder dresses or petticoats as signifiers of a code in which men are entitled to prescribe appropriate limits for women’s behavior. Any attempt to engage in dialogue with them about this would be met with a conviction that they are following Torah, rather than expressing fears of female challenges to men’s authority.

The moment children are taught that these parameters are supposedly timeless, suddenly an equivalency emerges: A woman’s wearing pants or even a short-sleeved shirt is now tantamount to the consumption of trayf meat or watching a movie on Shabbos. Even historical women figures, distant in time and sometimes place, can be removed from their context, to be subjected to a contemporary process. Their clothing choices, and all which these imply about female autonomy, must be judged.

Layers of clothing in modest dress codes correspond to layers of tradition and authority. The brightly colored and widely available shells which women add to outfits in order to conform to these codes offer a promise of creativity, but this seems less of a choice and more of a shell game.

Emily Schneider is a writer and Jewish educator in New York City. Her articles about children’s literature, Jewish culture, and history have appeared in The Forward, Tablet, Jewcy, and “Family Reading” at The Hornbook.

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.