Although the unveiling policy of the Kemalist single-party regime have been generally discussed as a cautious one because of the lack of a national legislation banning the veil, the anti-veiling campaigns had in fact become country-wide phenomena in Turkey in the mid-1930s. The attempts to change women’s clothing were not based on propaganda and guidance only, but were carried through official decisions taken by provincial administrations. This was in fact precisely what was expected from the administrators and state officials in the provinces. In the issue of unveiling, the Kemalist leadership in Ankara had trusted the modernist visions and ambitions of the local elite and encouraged them to work towards making these visions a reality in their localities. However, it did not hesitate to intervene in the process when some local actors resisted unveiling or tried to carry the measures to extremes, contrary to the approval of the central authority. Based on a variety of sources, including the provincial newspapers, Turkish state and police archives, and the British and American consular reports, this paper aims to discuss the underappreciated and understudied role the local elite played in the anti-veiling campaigns of Kemalist Turkey and to map how the center-periphery dynamics shaped the process in the provinces. It will explore in detail the local variations in interpreting and implementing the policy of unveiling, the mechanisms employed by the provincial administrators, and their selective use of the existing legal frameworks as a base for banning the veil. It will also explore the degree to which the central authority was involved in the process, the various ways in which the Republican People’s Party and the Ministry of Interior tried to coordinate the campaigns, and how the local elite responded to these interventions coming from Ankara. The main argument of the paper is that the lack of a well-formulated central policy of unveiling resulted in a relatively loose and uneven process of change, whose main dynamics were fashioned by the interplay between the initiatives of the local actors and the efforts of the center to control the situation. As such, the paper also aims to contribute to understanding the workings of the Kemalist state in general by underlining the equally important role the provincial elites and societal actors played in the policy-making processes.