Women’s sartorial style is a perpetual global preoccupation. Recently, Islamic women’s clothing is predominantly framed as a symbol of women’s oppression, however, historically, women in the US and Western Europe looked to “Turkish pantaloons” for freedom. Renamed “bloomers” by American media after Amelia Bloomer’s advocacy, the baggy Turkish pants were championed by feminist activists in the US, UK, Austrialia and New Zealand. However, due to widespread harassment for this gender transgression, women quickly reverted to former restrictive and hazardous fashions. Bifurcated clothing was reserved for men, according to the rigid gender divide in sartorial style that had become fashionable in Europe in the fifteenth century. Thus, women in the progressive, civilized, enlightened West fought for the right to wear Turkish baggy pants and lost. Meanwhile, Turkish men and women in Turkey and Bulgaria moved freely in their shalvar until modern nation-building projects dictated Western dress; restrictive clothing that rigidly delineated the boundaries of masculinity and femininity. About ten years after French haute couture designer Paul Poiret flaunted his “harem pants,” Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s reforms discouraged women from wearing them and imposed western clothing. The shalvar was banned in some parts of Turkey, and movies about the shalvar had a consistent message: peasant women wear shalvar and Western fashion brings protagonists happy endings. Movies with shalvar were also viewed in Bulgaria: historical movies with shalvar-clad terrible Turks that relegated shalvar to history and the Other. As part of Bulgaria’s forced assimilation campaign that sought to homogenize Bulgarian citizenry, the shalvar was banned from 1984 until the fall of Communism in 1989, coinciding with the popularity of M.C. Hammer’s shalvar-inspired “hammer pants” in the US. In Bulgaria and in Turkey shalvar remains a strictly rural phenomenon, and retains its historic associations with backwardness and Islam when worn daily by village residents. Ironically, though a signifier of backwardness, shalvar’s semiotic potential extends as a global fashion trend, including in fashion headlines in Turkey and Bulgaria. Considering shalvar’s recent elevated status as a trendy global fashion item, what is the public discourse of shalvar in Bulgaria and in Turkey? Can clothing shunned as backward be embraced as modern following global trends? More generally, what can clothing teach us about gender, modernity, and geopolitics? To answer these questions, I thematically analyze (Van Manen, 1990) over 200 hundred Turkish and Bulgarian articles through critical transculturalism (Kraidy, 2005) and critical race theory (Jackson, 2006; Snorton, 2017).