Youth Quake Cairo

Tara Todras-Whitehill/Associated PressA woman wearing an Egyptian flag as a scarf walks in Tahrir Square.

What do you wear when protest and mayhem rock your world? Reports from three epicenters of street style: London, Cairo and Tokyo.

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One very hot and humid evening in Cairo this past June, a trio of young men dressed in stonewashed jeans, overtight T-shirts and multiple necklaces rolled up to a homemade stage in Madinat el-Salam, a rough area on the outskirts of Cairo known mostly for its blocky government housing. Expectant neighborhood kids shuffled to and fro, and a D.J. nervously tapped his foot. Amr Haha, Figo and Sadat, as they are known, climbed up on stage — for this was a street wedding — and very soon the bass and the dancing began. Sadat, the singer who approximates an Arabish Snoop Dogg in look and demeanor, sang in Arabic: “Life is like a swing it goes up and down . . . there are people who live in luxury while others don’t have it so good.” The trio is part of Cairo’s shaabi movement — the word comes from shaab, or the people, and basically denotes street music. They could have been narrating life in just about any city in the world, but here they were, in Egypt, evoking the style and sensibility of the revolution that had just come to pass.

For 18 monthlong days this past winter, Egypt, a backwater of thwarted ambitions and faded glory for at least four decades, was suddenly the center of the universe. As tens of thousands of Egyptians congregated in downtown Cairo’s Tahrir Square, to demand a better future, people tuned in from all over the world to watch the revolution in real time — many of them chaperoned by Ayman Mohyeldin, Al Jazeera’s dashing Cary Grant-like correspondent. Pop stars, presidential hopefuls and soldiers of fortune of all kinds descended upon that usually traffic-clogged square to be seen and heard in thousands of photo ops and histrionic music videos.

It made for an unlikely, if not unique, runway for radical chic.

There are many lasting images from those weeks. Fearless young people beating back tanks, young women breaking up concrete for ammunition at the front lines and men kneeling down to pray calmly as water hoses aimed by the police threatened to knock them over. Protesters ate, slept, played — and in at least one case, got married in the square. In one of the more endearing narratives drawn from Tahrir folklore, the square had its very own barber. Enterprising hawkers, too, swiftly set up stalls with T-shirts, ribbons and flags and top hats. Headgear to protect against rubber bullets and rocks was fashioned from cardboard, shoes and even stale pieces of bread. Face paint was ubiquitous. The first T-shirt commemorating Jan. 25 — the day the demonstrations began — arrived just five days into the revolution.

But for a city with remarkably few beauty parlors and where “moda,” the Arabic term for fashion, is mostly limited to polyester-inflected bureaucratic chic or the gaudy plumage of the superfluously made-up Lebanese starlet, the streets of downtown Cairo have become a site of astonishing sartorial improvisation unseen since the days of Egypt’s pre-Socialist, Greek-Italian-Levantine, pan-Med chic. Years of fashion sublimation have suddenly come undone. The blandly functional uniform of the Egyptian man — jeans and flannel shirt — has been pushed aside for a style that is more idiosyncratic, more bold, even if it occasionally traffics in the economy of boy bands. Witness Lycra-tight stonewashed jeans (“so 25 seasons ago” no longer applies, thanks to the Chinese and the tectonic shift that H&M represents); oversize cowboy hats and sequined belts; and the occasional kaffiyeh to indicate militant credentials — global fashions refracted through an Egyptian lens. The djellaba, the robe of the rural Egyptian that is more or less the national costume, was also present in Tahrir, a sign that this revolution was not limited to urban elites.

And, of course, the Egyptian flag, historically a pretty bland relic, continues to be one of the most potent symbols of this revolution. Flags were festooned on cars, trees and balconies, but also atop heads (as veils and as bandannas), necks and chests. More than one woman used the flag as a niqab, the traditional face veil. The T-shirt industry flourished, too, with slogans ranging from the standard “erhal” (leave) and “kifaya” (enough) to non sequitur references to the Facebook Revolution. All of the merchandising of revolutionary knickknackery seemed to vividly evoke the African truism that cheaply produced clothes could be damn good.

Egyptian hair, chronically underdeveloped since Pharaonic times (ancient Egyptians wore thick curly wigs), has bloomed. While most Arabs have been taught to straighten or otherwise tame their frizz, thick black curls — not unlike Afros cultivated by Black Power activists as a site of aesthetic contestation — became one of the visual references of the revolution, especially among activists.

Veiled women (muhajabat), long decried by the Western punditocracy as sad fashion victims, pushed back on traditional fashion codes through their head coverings. The especially tough minded made spaceship-like veils out of a potent elixir of hair spray, gel and a clip that rises high above the head like a halo — a style that probably migrated from the Gulf and is roughly the equivalent of showing one’s bulge. Punk muhajabat occasionally bleach their bangs, so that wisps of strangely flaxen hair poke out from underneath the veil. Some of them were seen holding hands around Cairo’s popular Stars Center Mall in February, protecting the popular shopping destination at the height of the looting.

In an incident that may have indicated just how much the pyramid has been turned on its head in Egypt, in April, Zahi Hawass, the very controversial, very megalomaniacal Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs, started a clothing line inspired by . . . himself. “Rich khakis, deep blues and soft, weathered leathers give off a look that harks back to Egypt’s golden age of discovery in the early 20th century,” reads its Web site, featuring blond models shot in Temple of Doom half light. Hawass, who is a confidant of the Mubaraks and has yet to lose his job, was roundly attacked for profiting from Egypt’s heritage, though he claims all proceeds go to charity. He may as well be accused of having bad style, too. Death to khakis! The revolution proclaimed that style was to be left to the shaab, and in those moments, it was clear that the Egyptian street was back on top.