THE inventor of the burkini has revealed that fair-skinned Irish women are boosting demand for the controversial beachwear to protect themselves from the sun.
“It doesn’t necessarily have to be for Muslim women,” Aheda Zanetti, the Australian inventor of the swimwear told RTE’s Morning Ireland. “It could be for many other women."
“In fact, there’s been a high demand in my emails from Ireland from women who have got fair skin that don’t want to expose their skin to all these high UV sun rays.”
Zanetti spoke on Morning Ireland to talk about the recent uproar over the burkini ban in France, where concerns are growing over the forced removal of burkinis on beaches.
The French State Council will soon decide whether the ban should be upheld, with a vocal groundswell of opposition from around the world calling for the measure to be scrapped.
Last week, pictures emerged of armed police castigating a woman dressed in a burkini on a French police, but they later denied that they had forced the woman to remove the swimsuit.
Zanetti hsaid that the burkini should not be associated with extremism in any form, and that she merely invented the beachwear “to give people the freedom of choice.”
Remarking on the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s comments supporting the ban, Zanetti said that she doesn’t “understand how he’s labelled it as such a negative product when it was supposed to give freedom of choice.
“It doesn’t symbolise any Islamic term or Islamic type of dress, it doesn’t even symbolise that a Muslim wearer would wear it.”
