Third Text
An Egregious Case of Cultural Appropriation: The Dress in the Portrait
11 March 2026
Neil Libbert, Helen Mirren, 1969, courtesy of Neil Libbert/Hulton Archive via Getty Images
One afternoon in February 2024, as I scrolled through social media and the horrific images coming out of Gaza, a portrait from 1969 caught my eye and stopped me cold. It was of the actress Helen Mirren, photographed by Neil Libbert in her Kensington flat and later published in The Observer. She was wearing a traditional Palestinian dress from a village in the Ramleh area. I recognised the cut, the arrangement of motifs, and the embroidery style. Through my work in preserving traditional Palestinian dress, I knew which region it came from – and with that, I knew that the village had been ethnically cleansed during the Nakba.
At first glance, the image may appear captivating, gentle – innocent. Another, more critical glance may see it as a product of its time. The young woman, photographed in the 1960s, sports an ‘ethnic’ style drawn from a culture deemed ‘exotic’, a practice that was problematic, although not uncommon at the time, and one reinforced by photographers and popular media.
While cultural appropriation unfolds across many power dynamics, in settler-colonial contexts such acts of ‘borrowing’ are often made possible by conquest and by the displacement of the Other. In such moments, one can’t help but lean on bell hooks’s work on cultural appropriation. She reminds us that dominant cultures consume the cultural expressions of marginalised peoples as sites of pleasure and renewal, while obscuring the structures of domination that shape their production and meaning – or in this case, their circulation. [1]
Until the late 1940s, women in Palestinian villages wore thobes – long embroidered dresses, such as the one in the portrait. A thobe’s shape, embroidery techniques and motifs revealed its region, and in some cases its exact village. These signatures remain widely recognised across Palestinian communities today. The displacement of villages during the Nakba marked a profound turning point in this tradition, disrupting the village identities that had shaped it. While embroidered dresses were worn after, and are still worn today, their forms have evolved through displacement and modernisation. Dresses from before the Nakba, however, remain distinct, for their style, craftsmanship, quality and materials.
Dresses from Sarafand al-’Ammar and neighbouring villages such as al-Safiriyya, particularly those produced between the 1930s and the late 1940s, are distinctive. Their silhouettes are seamless and uninterrupted, with minimal units of embroidery gracing the slightly shorter sleeves and running along the front and sides. Like many dresses from villages connected to Ramleh and Lydda, they feature a square neck-opening on the qabbe (chest panel). The rasmet balat design on the qabbe, however, where a single pattern is repeated, much like tiles, is characteristic of a specific region of villages. [2]
Chest panel design from a Sarafand everyday dress (pre-1948), adapted from The Sarafand Everyday Dress, a Folkglory Pattern Book, courtesy of Folkglory
Chest panel from a Sarafand everyday dress, ca 1935, from the village of Sarafand al-‘Ammar (Ramleh district), courtesy of Folkglory
Sarafand al-’Ammar stood beside Sarafand al-Kharab, a village that had witnessed massacre long before 1948. In 1918, soldiers of the Allied forces under British command killed dozens of young men and burned homes following allegations of petty theft and the murder of a soldier. [3] Archival records later uncovered by journalist Paul Daley include a soldier’s chilling testimony describing how, after heavy drinking, troops swept through the village with bayonets. [4] Thirty years later, during the Nakba, Sarafand al-’Ammar and neighbouring villages were emptied of their inhabitants. [5] A dress like the one in the portrait may have been left behind by a woman who was unable to carry it as she fled, or by someone who believed she would return. How this particular dress made its way to a London flat decades later remains unknown, but what is not is the fact that its journey signifies the extension of the Nakba across time and space.
I traced the image to the National Portrait Gallery in London, where it is made publicly available, and wrote to them with respect, grounded in research and professional sources. Despite repeated attempts, the Gallery refused to recognise how sacred and intimate the dress was within the collective memory and consciousness of Palestinians and the Nakba. Their response insisted that due diligence concerns the provenance of the portrait rather than the objects within it, unless a ‘known sensitivity’ exists.
They refused, time and time again, to acknowledge, at the very least, that the dress was Palestinian.
Following my complaint, the Gallery did add to the caption accompanying the portrait on their website: ‘In this portrait, the dress Mirren wears has been identified as a style that originated in and around Jaffa and Ramleh in the 1950s to 1970s.’ [6]
The dress’s origins are attributed to a vaguely defined geographical location and an equally vague period after the Nakba – an inaccurate framing that erases Palestinian national identity and the mass displacement of Palestinians from their villages in 1948. In reality, the young woman who made this dress had already been displaced from her village before the 1950s, and long before the 1970s. What replaced her home, beginning in 1949, was a settler-colonial apparatus of control: an expanding network of settlements, military bases and prisons, most notably the Tzrifin military base and the settlement of Nir Tzevi. [7]
There is a consistent pattern of colonialist orientation and pedagogy – albeit presumably outdated – that runs through the ways in which my concerns were handled. The Gallery’s responses invoked the authority of British specialists on the subject, disregarding resources I provided that were authored and curated by indigenous Palestinian experts, effectively dismissing more than seventy-seven years of documentation and scholarship produced by Palestinian collectors and researchers.
I kept thinking about the young woman whose dress this might have been. I thought of Ghalia.
In 2005, Ghalia al-Atar, then an elderly woman living in al-Wehdat refugee camp in Jordan, gave an interview to the Palestine Remembered website. [8] Ghalia didn’t own the dress in the portrait – at least not as far as we know – but she was of the same time and place.
Like many young women in Sarafand, Ghalia embroidered her own dresses. In the interview, with a flash of humour, she remembers how the female elders in her family enforced embroidery skills, teaching the girls to stitch with discipline. She and her friends would sit beneath the thick-barked tree in the courtyard of her home, learning how to embroider together. She also remembered British Mandate soldiers raiding her village. On one occasion, residents were forced from their homes and separated – the men from the women and children – while soldiers circled them on horseback. The sound of hooves hitting the ground continued to haunt Ghalia on the day of the interview.
In 1948, as news of massacres by Zionist militias, such as that of the village of Deir Yassin, spread, Ghalia fled with her in-laws, carrying only food, soap and her newborn daughter. [9] They took shelter under trees, foraged for food, and used remnants of flour sacks for shade. Her two-month-old daughter, Anisa, died during the journey – perhaps from hunger, perhaps from heat. Ghalia never knew for sure. Anisa’s grandfather buried her far from their shelter.
Displaced group fleeing their homes, Tulkarem district, 1948, photographer unknown, courtesy of ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) (ref: women-05-v-p-ps-n-00004-2679h)
They found refuge in the town of Birzeit for a time, alongside waves of other refugees. Those who had come from neighbouring Lydda told distressing stories of seeing charred corpses along the way. These refugees recounted how Zionist militias had attacked them with what Ghalia described as ‘incendiary bombs’. The Lydda and Ramleh expulsions, also known as the Lydda Death March, forced over 70,000 Palestinians from their homes, with hundreds killed. [10]
Woman carrying a jug during the Nakba, 1948, photographer unknown, source: www.hanini.org / Wikimedia Commons
But what do we know about the other subject in the portrait? The actress Helen Mirren has publicly supported the restitution of Nazi‑looted art, and in line with that, has starred in Woman in Gold (2015), a film about recovering artworks stolen during the Holocaust. Mirren is also known for her outspoken admiration for Israel. Shortly before the portrait was taken in 1969, she spent time at a kibbutz near HaOn, founded on the ruins of the Palestinian village of al-Samra. She later described this experience as ‘one of the building blocks that have made me into the actress that I am’. [11] Her stay there coincided with her travels in the region following the 1967 war and Israel’s occupation of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. In a 2023 interview with The Times of Israel, Mirren stated: ‘I saw Arabs being thrown out of their houses in Jerusalem. But it was just the extraordinary magical energy of a country just beginning to put its roots in the ground.’ [12]
Across each wave of displacement – 1948, 1967, and today – forced expulsion has been consistently accompanied of looting of property. Palestinians who were forced to flee their homes in 1948 remember not only losing their homes and lands, but also everyday items such as furniture, clothing, books and photographs. [13] Adam Raz’s Loot: How Israel Stole Palestinian Property makes an important contribution to this history through its documentation of looting by both combatants and civillians. [14] Drawing on archival material, Raz recounts, for example, a chilling testimony from a soldier:
I got some things in Safed. I found some really beautiful embroidered Arab dresses for Sarah and me, and I might be able to get them altered here. Kaffiyehs and scarves, bracelets and beads, a Damascus table and set of wonderful silver demitasses, and, most importantly, Sarah brought back a gigantic Persian carpet that is brand new and beautiful. I have never seen something so beautiful in my life. A living room [with it in it] would be on par with [the living rooms] of Tel Aviv’s richest people. By the way, this stationery also belonged to Arabs. [15]
Decades later, the dehumanisation of Palestinians continues in ways that are more harrowing than ever. Today, Israeli soldiers post images and videos of themselves on social media posing with women’s underwear taken from homes in Gaza – from the bedrooms of the dead and displaced in the midst of a genocide. Palestinian journalists on the ground, alongside Reuters and the United Nations, have documented these grotesque spectacles. The latter has underscored how such acts constitute a defilement of human dignity and civilian property. [16]
Post on the Middle East Eye Instagram page, 27 August 2024, image in the public domain
Against these many backdrops, a portrait such as this becomes nothing short of unsettling – alarming, even. It depicts an object stripped of its lineage and the pain rooted in its memory. The refusal to recognise the harm this portrait is causing remains adamant – so adamant that even uttering the word ‘Palestinian’ carries a weight they cannot bear, because they know exactly what this dress is and what it represents. An image like this should not be allowed to exist so easily, so freely and so void of all the malign things that it carries. What it should do is compel us to confront the enduring legacies of colonial violence – legacies that continue to manifest in their most extreme forms against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank today.
[1] See bell hooks, ‘Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance’, in Black Looks: Race and Representation, South End Press, Boston, Massachusetts, 1992, pp 21–39
[2] See The Sarafand Everyday Dress – A Tatreez Pattern Booklet, a Folkglory Pattern Book, a free download from www.folkglory.com, accessed 16 February 2026
[3] See Haifa Zealter, ‘Were it not for ANZAC, the Balfour Declaration would have been ink on paper... The Forgotten Massacre of Palestinians’, raseef22.net, 7 April 2021, accessed 16 February 2026
[4] See Paul Daley, ‘The moment that forever changed my perspective on ANZAC mythology’, The Guardian, 9 December 2018, accessed 16 February 2026
[5] See Walid Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, Institute for Palestine Studies, Washington, DC, 1992
[6] See the image on the website of the National Portrait Gallery, with the updated caption, accessed 16 February 2026
[7] See the entry for Sarafand al-’Amar on the online Interactive Encyclopaedia of the Palestinian Question, accessed 16 February 2026
[8] See the interview with Ghalia al-’Attar from 2005, an Oral History Podcast on the Palestine Remembered website (in Arabic), accessed 16 February 2026
[9] See Walid Khalidi, Dayr Yasin: 9 April 1948, Institute for Palestine Studies, Beirut, 2003 (in Arabic); also see ‘The Deir Yassin massacre: Why it still matters 75 years later’, Al Jazeera, 9 April 2023, accessed 17 February 2026
[10] See the entry for ‘Lydda 9–13 July 1948: A City-Wide Massacre Culminating in the Death March’ on the online Interactive Encyclopaedia of the Palestinian Question, accessed 17 February 2026
[11] See ‘Helen Mirren on Israel Boycott: “It’s the craziest idea”’, an interview with Helen Mirren in The Times of Israel, 30 October 2015, accessed 17 February 2026
[12] See ‘Helen Mirren: Israel must exist “for eternity” because of the Holocaust’, another interview with the actor in The Times of Israel, 28 August 2023, accessed 17 February 2026
[13] See Rebecca L Stein, ‘Dispossession Reconsidered: Israel, Nakba, Things’, in Ethnologie française, 2015/2, vol 45, pp 309–320, accessed 17 February 2026
[14] Adam Raz, Loot: How Israel Stole Palestinian Property, Verso, London, 2024, originally published in Hebrew by Carmel Publishing House in 2020
[15] Ibid, p 80
[16] See the United Nations Security Council document ‘Public Dossier of Evidence Relating to the State of Israel’s Intent and Incitement to Commit Genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza’, S/2024/419, presented to the Security Council by the Permanent Representative of South Africa, May 2024, accessed 17 February 2026
Laila Mushahwar is a writer and researcher based in Amman, Jordan, and the General Manager of the Tiraz Centre (Widad Kawar Home for Arab Dress). Her work focuses on documenting, researching and presenting dress and embroidery traditions from Palestine, Jordan and the wider region.