A conservative sews up the modern business

Devout Muslim makes clothing for modern women

SAN FRANCISCO (RWN) - The man's fingertips tell the story. Pin pricks, hundreds of them, making a surface of minute craters.

They are long ago pin pricks, the mistakes a young tailor makes, the ones he doesn't need to get hit for, because his master knows the pain, and that the mistake likely won't happen again. The man's hands are soft, but his eyes are fierce. They dart around his shop constantly, watching the fabric, watching the young tailors make their mistakes.

Meet Burhan Mir, 62, the man behind the most extravagant, most flamboyant dresses at the Academy Awards - and fixture on the city's Black Robe committee. The man who designed Pauline Kazan's swooping gown that had all of America talking after last year's Emmy Awards. The man who tried to shut down a local school because it was teaching "too liberally."

"I don't see it as a contradiction, as much as I see myself as a human," Mir said. "My religion is everything to me, but so is my profession. There are people that say that I am a sinner for dressing beautiful women, that they should be covered. I, too, believe they should be covered. But I know that the women are going to be uncovered whether I dress them or not. So should I not dress them in a way that I believe gives greater glory to Allah?"

It is an approach that has worked - an estimated 60 percent of Muslim women actresses get their award outfits from Mir, who started as a tailor's assistant in New York before moving to Los Angeles shortly before the Great Zionist Betrayal and then to San Francisco five years ago ("L.A. just got too weird for me," he said).

Mir has become a wealthy man through is fashion work - he was the first designer of the tailored robe, with its close fitting piece and legs that clung close to the body. The "Mir cut" robe has become the standard for women needing to bridge the gap between the religious and business worlds.

But there are many who don't agree with him. Derek Ali, for instance, the Mullah of San Francisco, who has tried twice to oust Mir from the Black Robe board. "The man is not pure," Ali said, "He acts like an apostate. He should be cast out among the whores he dresses, not listened to as an authority on religious matters."

The other members of the board have held firm against Ali and kept Mir on the board.

"He manages to be traditional and modern all at once," said Henry Jafari, one of the members of the board. "It would be ideal to return to a world where we did not have to take into account that we live in times filled with technology, but we cannot. There are certain realities we must accept. And some of us on the board, like Burhan, are good at seeing them. I don't always agree with him, but if we're talking about music television, I know at least that he's watched it."

Burhan was sitting in his shop, watching the tailors work one day, contemplating the pin pricks a lifetime can produce. "You know," he said hoarsely, "I'd like to think that if Mohammed came down here right now and saw how I gowned some of the models, he'd smile."

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