Ataturk's Fashion Police
Turkey’s restrictions on wearing overtly religious-oriented attire are rooted in the founding of the modern, secular Turkish state, when the republic’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, introduced a series of clothing regulations designed to keep religious symbolism out of the civil service. The regulations were part of a sweeping series of reforms that altered virtually every aspect of Turkish life—from the civil code to the alphabet to education to social integration of the sexes.
The Western dress code at that time, though, was aimed at men. The fez—the short, conical, red-felt cap that had been in vogue [fashion] in Turkey since the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II made it part of the official national attire in 1826—was banished. Atatürk himself famously adopted a Panama hat to accent his Westernstyle gray linen suit, shirt, and tie when he toured the country in the summer of 1925 to sell his new ideas to a deeply conservative population. That autumn, the Hat Law of 1925 was passed, making European-style men’s headwear de rigueur [fashionable] and punishing fez-wearers with lengthy sentences of imprisonment at hard labor, and even a few hangings. . . .
According to this article by Roff Smith, the goal of Atatürk’s reforms was to
