Daughter of the Salwar Kameez?

• Years ago, I used to see Arab school girls in school uniforms, similar to what girls wore in Britain, over slacks. I figured their rules of modesty required covered legs -- more covering than British wool knee socks. (They didn't cover their hair -- whether because that was not yet common or because they were Christians, I don't know.) In the last few years I began to see religious Jewish school girls in their long skirts over sweat pants. (See http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/comfort-relativity.html) I figured they had the sweat pants for gym class (where, with no males around, they'd remove the skirts) or that away from home and school (where neither parents nor teachers would see them) they were going to remove their skirts.
• This year I see both religious and nonreligious teenaged girls wearing denim skirts over jeans, flouncy skirts over matching slacks, and (among the nonreligious) miniskirts over jeans. Last night at folkdancing one girl, maybe 17 or 18 years old, wore a paisley micro-mini over jeans. The trendy but inexpensive shops near the ben Yehuda midrehov, have racks of skirt-pants combos out. Now was there a sequence? Did the idea get passed with modifications from girl to girl until designers took it up? Or was it re-invented two or three times. (I've got Richard Dawkins memes in my head.)

• Is this a fashion elsewhere? I've often seen fashions here that later show up in the US. The clunky shoes of a few years back are an example. I don't know whether they started here or started elsewhere and were taken up in Israel before they arrived in the US. And how can I tell which girls are religious? I leave that for another day.

• In addition to the skirts over jeans (which I think is a riff on the Indian/Pakistani salwar kameez ), I've seen what I call "remnant skirts," -- waistband and six inches of denim, six inches of gingham, six inches of georgette, six of paisley -- or some other combo. Only seen this in a little shop, not on anyone. About a year ago I saw something similar in a fashion news article in the NY Times.

• Usually I don't notice fashion, but here there is so much variety -- lots of little shops including hole-in-the-wall businesses, many run by dressmakers showing their own stuff. I've become quite a "window shopper" (often without the windows because the storefronts are open to the sidewalks). See http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/yabetz.html

• Last Friday I tried out the skirt over jeans look. I put on my Landsend skirted tankini and pulled jeans up over the panty letting the skirt hang out. "Well," I thought, "that's how I look in it."
• See also http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/sleeve.html

Coyright 2006 Jane S. Fox