The Turkish single-party period was an extraordinary era marked by modernizing reforms unleashed by the republican regime led by Atatürk. One of the most radical modernizing attempts was clothing reform, which culminated in unveiling campaigns. Unveiling reforms started with women working in government offices in 1925, gaining momentum in the mid-1930s by spreading unveiling to all parts of social life. Although political and ideological standpoints and interpretations differ, both nationalist accounts and critical accounts (especially Islamists) in Turkish historiography see the early republican unveiling campaigns through the prism of the state. Due to the exclusive focus on legal and institutional changes and the acceptance of the representation of the unveiling campaigns presented in official texts as a reality, scholars have generally argued that the unveiling campaigns radically transformed all Turkish women. Non-elite women’s and men’s perceptions of and resistance to the unveiling have not been studied in depth. The few scholarly studies, which deal with the political opposition to unveiling, use a culturalist approach. Nationalist accounts have viewed cases of public protest as the abortive efforts of religious reactionaries, whereas critical accounts have explained a few open protests as desperate expressions of people’s attachment to religious values. Neither everyday forms of social response to unveiling campaigns nor the socio-economic dynamics and gender relations affecting the people’s approach to unveiling have been considered in these studies. This paper, based on new sources such as police, gendarme and court records, politicians’ reports and petitions as well as a history from below approach, examines an ignored aspect of the Turkish unveiling reform, i.e. ordinary people’s perception of it and resistance and adaptation to it in everyday life. Focusing on widespread everyday and covert forms of resistance among Anatolian women and men and their selective adaptation strategies to unveiling campaigns, this paper shows how ordinary women and men coped with the radical state intervention in women’s clothing. Instead of making a culturalist analysis, this paper uncovers the social, economic, and psychological dynamics behind resistance and selective adaptation to unveiling, which outweighed the state’s control and propaganda. Finally, it explores how this active response thwarted the implementation of unveiling campaigns in many Anatolian towns and forced the government to retreat from its radical and coercive measures. In this respect, this paper argues that the early republican regime had to pursue a flexible and moderate secularism rather than a strict and Jacobin one.