Iranian parliament debating 'leggings are not pants'.

Iranian parliament debating 'leggings are not pants'.(IranWire).

Iranian Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli was summoned to parliament to answer questions about why more measures have not been taken to prevent women from wearing leggings in public.

In the open session, members of parliament were shown pictures of women in leggings, called “support” in Iran. The elastic, skin-tight garments, typically worn by women who loosely observe Iran’s modesty and hijab laws, have irked some religious conservatives.

Parliament members Ali Motahhari and Mousavi Largani summoned Rahmani Fazli today, June 24, to answer two questions:

1.Why has he been indifferent toward leggings-clad women in Tehran and other cities?

2.Why has he been lax in implementing the law to expand the culture of modesty and hijab use, and why has the small budget to enforce this law been eliminated?

Once only worn for aerobics classes, leggings have become standard fashion in cities across Iran, showing up in clothing stores everywhere, sold in home legging shows, and spawning a domestic market in Iranian-made leggings and a glut of imports from both Turkey and China. As Iranian women continue to push the boundaries of what can be worn within the state's strict dress codes, looks that were risque even a decade ago are becoming, by sheer force of mass determination, ordinary today.

The nationwide popularity of leggings however, is provoking a backlash from hardline bloggers and religious websites, who fear the onslaught of tight pants is perilous for the country's morals. “This year women's fashion has changed yet again,” laments the conservative website Fater News. 

“They are now wearing leggings instead of pants altogether, not even tight jeans!” The website News Base of Supporters of Velayat blames the trend on “spy agencies of the enemy and anti-revolutionaries.”

The newest front in Iran's long-running fashion wars is also being waged on social media, where devotees and angry critics are battling it out on Facebook pages like Supporters of Leggings-Wearers and I Hate Leggings, which worries that “what we're seeing now with leggings is only the first phase of a horrifying project intended to denude Iranian women and normalize such an effort before officials.” The page also uses a play on words for the Persian term for leggings (“support”) to suggest that wearing them is equivalent to supporting free sex.

It's not only modern women who are into leggings. A survey of religious sites affiliated with the seminaries of Qom suggests that traditional women are also fans, and often wear leggings with their families' approval. One woman enquired on a religious site as to Islam's view on leggings: “I've been wearing leggings outside the house instead of pants for a couple of weeks now, and my husband doesn't mind. I wanted to ask, is it all right to wear leggings, and these new tight manteau that are figure hugging?”

The response of religious sites to such questions is usually pretty clear, and bears the authority of senior clerics who are considered sources of emulation: “Apparel that provokes lust, the attention of men who are not direct relatives, clothes that are vice-inducing, or that pave the way for sin, wearing such clothes outside the house, before non-relatives, is not correct or permissible. A manteau that is figure revealing, in that it reveals the outline of limbs, is also haram before a man who is not your husband, father, or brother.”

Hardline and conservative bloggers and websites are recently besides themselves. One blogger, writing on Facebook, sought to find out how leggings caught on in Iran, and concluded that satellite television was to blame, specifically the popular Googoosh Music Academy show.

 “I sat and watched the entire season, and I noticed that in every sequence, on every show, the women are wearing leggings! Now I know from where we've been struck.”

He goes on to write about two women arrested in Tehran's Vanak Square for wearing leggings patterned with the Israeli flag.

Iran's religiously radical blogosphere, from news sites to blogs, is rife with such legging hysteria.Read the full story here.