By Marianne Moore
Rack of keffiyehs at Sharks on Telegraph
It’s a tired cliché by now: the hipster in skinny jeans and vintage T-shirt wearing a checkered, vaguely Arab-looking scarf folded into a triangle and wrapped around the neck, the point draped across the chest. The scarves, loosely based on Arab keffiyehs, are thought to give the wearer an air of edginess and rebellion totally unaffected by his or her ignorance of the political significance of the accessory, which differs from pattern to pattern. The black and white checkered keffiyeh is associated with Fatah, the largest faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization; the slightly less common (among hipsters) red checked Kefi, was worn by Jordanian soldiers in the ’60s and now associated with Hamas, the ruling party in Palestine.