- Share This Post
- submit
- 7
-
Sparkle (0)
Not that I needed an additional excuse to boycott Dunkin Donuts beyond the sheer number of calories they seem to add to my morning, but if I were really, desperately interested, there's been a bizarre concerted effort this week to ban their coffee from American homes over a very ugly but likely non-offensive piece of neckwear.
Does Dunkin’ Donuts really think its customers could mistake Rachael Ray for a terrorist sympathizer? The Canton-based company has abruptly canceled an ad in which the domestic diva wears a scarf that looks like a keffiyeh, a traditional headdress worn by Arab men.
Some observers, including ultra-conservative Fox News commentator Michelle Malkin, were so incensed by the ad that there was even talk of a Dunkin’ Donuts boycott.
The company at first pooh-poohed the complaints, claiming the black-and-white wrap was not a keffiyeh. But the right-wing drumbeat on the blogosphere continued and by yesterday, Dunkin’ Donuts decided it’d be easier just to yank the ad.
The scarf in question is pictured in the story, but, most basically, its a white silk confection with frayed edges and a clashy paisly pattern, draped around Rachael's neck in a very Urban Outfitters-y way. The scarf, according to a whole mess of people who may or may not have been paying attention to recent fashion trends, looks suspiciously (if you squint a lot and have little experience with traditional fabric patterns) like a Keffiyeh scarf, a traditional cotton scarf worn by Arab men with a very distinct checker pattern (i.e. not paisely), which lately has come to be associated with various terrorist groups, who sport the scarf in kidnapping and suicide bomber videos. Dunkin Donuts, of course, insists the scarf is nothing of the sort, and that Rachael's stylist picked it up from a retail store on the way to the commercial shoot, and made quite clear that the scarf is paisely which, while a fashion tragedy in itself, has not come to represent any group hostile to the United States and its corresponding freedom except, perhaps, post-Impressionist painters.
This was not enough for some, who, outraged and angered, called for the ad to be pulled, and Dunkin Donuts, sensing a sudden drop in their custard-filled donut sales, begrudgingly complied. Cheers resounded.
Now, far be it from me to suggest that celebrities frequently have no idea of the political significance of their accessories, let alone who the hell picked them out or where the hell they came from (or what the hell day it is, for that matter), but it seems a fair stretch to think that Rachael Ray was using a thirty-second coffee ad to promote the Palestinian cause. Sure, last season, Rachael's been showing more of a tree-hugging, bleeding heart persona (another blow to my apparently shallow hope that some daytime host somewhere might actually share my political positions), but something tells me that Rachael herself had no idea that her speedily chosen neckwear could someday, somewhere, be possibly mistaken for terrorist paraphernalia. There are a lot of things one could indict Rachael Ray for -- convincing middle America that grilled chicken soaked in salad dressing is haute cuisine, making leather belts cinched tightly around ill-fitting jeans acceptable for one more season, making up idiotic acronyms for common household spices -- but one would seem to have a hard time justifying long term outrage over this particular digression. Or...sort-of digression.
Maybe all of this happened because the fashion world and the political world have been separated for far too long. After all, political writers like me have been buried in Presidential campaigns for nearly two years now, so the progression of the "organic scarf" from terrorist to totally out to generic revival has passed us by. Once the purview of actual Arabs and people across the globe who actually supported their causes, the Keffiyeh in its purest form was exported to centers of high fashion like London, Paris and Williamsburg, Brooklyn when young men realized that its niche political significance made them look more "intellectual" than their peers, thus increasing their chances of getting laid. As is typical with club-scene trends, the Keffiyeh was, a year later, mass marketed to hipsters, who, totally ignorant of its origins, made it a fashion staple. Eventually, the look made it to pre-teen meccas and then to Forever 21, at which point, people in the fashion world unanimously declared the Keffiyeh "out." And thankfully, since, really, whichever perspective you view it from, mass-marketing of that particular scarf is problematic to say the least.
Unfortunately,
