When Heather Akou sees Somali women working behind the counters at area Target stores, she can’t help but smile. Wearing red hijab—headcoverings—clearly designed to go with the standard Target uniform, the women are for Akou proof positive of the emergence of a more globalized Minnesota, and of the creativity of at least one local employer in responding to emerging cultural needs.

Akou, a newly minted Ph.D. graduate in design, housing, and apparel, is the world’s leading—actually, the only—expert on the subject of Somali dress. That’s a big deal in a state some Somalis have dubbed Somaliland for its large and growing Somali population. With as many as 60,000 Somalis coming here since 1995 (the year U.S. immigration officials picked Minnesota as a Somali resettlement center), Minnesota has what is far and away the largest Somali community in the country.

In many parts of the state, and especially in the Twin Cities and Rochester, the presence of Somali women in colorful headwraps and flowing skirts has become part of the fabric of everyday Minnesota life. But Akou says that in a state more familiar with Norwegian lefse than Somali sambosa,  employers and policymakers have often been slow to roll out a broad welcome mat to this culturally distinct group of Minnesotans, particularly since September 11.

The cultural divide has perhaps loomed largest in employment interviews and on the job, according to Akou. The issue: dress—or more precisely, how the clothing worn by Somalis for cultural and religious reasons can and should be accommodated in offices, commercial establishments, factories, and other workplaces.

To this debate Akou brings much-needed perspective, and lots of it. Working with CHE Regents Professor Joanne B. Eicher, a renowned authority on crosscultural dress (whose work has included pioneering research on the Nigerian Kalabari), Akou has spent the last five years investigating in exhaustive detail the history and politics of Somali dress. Her Ph.D. dissertation on the subject was so pathbreaking that it propelled her into a tenure-track faculty position at Indiana University (she’s starting this fall).

Somali dress makes for truly fascinating study, Akou says. Contrary to popular understanding, there’s no one style that can be called “traditional Somali attire, but a number of styles rooted in Somali history and culture that are presented as ‘traditional’ for various social, political, and religious reasons.” That’s hardly surprising given the history of Somalia, a semidesert country the size of Texas that’s located on the northeast tip of Africa but that’s culturally aligned more with the nearby Middle East—and that has a centuries long history of involvement in global trade.

“Over the centuries, Somali dress has reflected the evolving dynamics of fashion and trade, politics and religion,” Akou says. The country was originally settled by Arabs, Persians, and Indians, but colonized over the years by the French, British, Italians, and Ethiopians. Arabic, Swahili, Italian and English are spoken along with Somali. In recent decades, the country has been a hotbed of political unrest and warfare, waged along geographic, class, and political lines; the central government collapsed entirely in 1991 (after the failure of U.S. and United Nations peacekeeping interventions) and has yet to be restored.

As a result, the story of Somali dress has been one not of immutable tradition—like, say, the dress of Hasidic Jews or the American Amish—but of endless fluidity. In her research, which has taken her to the Smithsonian to pore over 19th- and 20th-century explorers’ narratives, photos, and artifacts, Akou has found that Somalis over the years have worn leather garments, cotton robes made of “Merikani cloth” imported from early America, “wrappers” modeled after the dress of Islamic pilgrims, Arab-style turbans and tunics from India, and garments made of colorful sheer fabrics from Japan and India. After World War II, men in urban areas wore business suits; in the 1960s, women donned miniskirts (a style also condemned as un-Islamic and too revealing).

Not until the late 1970s, says Akou, did some women in Somalia begin wearing hijab, the elaborate shawls or veils most often associated with Somali women today. She explains that this form of dress, which was modeled after Arab-style dress (particularly the Iranian chador), was most often adopted as a form of political and religious expression under Somalia’s increasingly repressive military dictatorship.

Flash forward to 2004 in Minnesota, when nearly every Somali girl and women wears a headcovering, whether the encompassing three-piece jelaabib worn by the most devoutly Islamic women (perhaps a third of all Somali women in Minnesota, Akou estimates) or the simple headwrap called masar referred by many teenagers. As Akou explains it, “The widespread embrace of these styles as ‘traditional Somali dress’ is just as rooted in historical circumstance as Somali dress always has been. For people now without a country, there’s enormous concern about preserving culture, religious identity, and language. Claiming a ‘traditional Somali dress’ is a way to do that. The fact that it isn’t necessarily a tradition of long standing doesn’t make it any less real, or less important.”

Akou’s research will no doubt be useful to community leaders and Somalis as they work out reasonable, culturally sensitive policies on workplace attire and other issues. Akou has heard over and over from Somali women in the Twin Cities that many employers balk when they see headcoverings. “It’s a question of two different cultures colliding, workplace culture and Somali culture,” Akou observes. “Obviously, as Minnesota becomes more diverse, education and dialogue are going to be key.” She points to Target’s approach—working with Somali women to combine Somali cultural needs with company dress codes—as a sign that “employers and Somalis can and will find ways to bridge differences of culture.”