Just as winter was approaching the Kurdish region of Iraq in 2014, I met several Yazidi women driven from their homes by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. With the other 16,000 displaced people in the camp I was visiting, the women were eating bread twice a day and had found shelter in one of the thousands of tents that dotted the landscape.

Yet, all their essential needs had not been met. They had been wearing the same long white dresses since arriving in the camp weeks earlier. As war and internal tensions and divisions polarized Iraq, they had no way to return home or buy or make new dresses.

Their situation was desperate.

They didn’t just need clean, warm clothing. They needed the white dresses that were part of their traditional attire and which carried significant cultural and

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