So I saw a post on here about "Saudi King Salman's daughter flees Paris" and looked up King Salman on Wiki and while I was scrolling through I noticed it had a picture of King Salman when he was in his "youth" and another one right under it when he was in his 30s and the pictures are drastically different in the ways that he dressed (It's in the personal life section). My question is what happened? Why don't they still dress like he was in his youth today? I feel like I've seen this happen in other middle eastern countries as well and just wondering why they seemed to have adopted some western culture, as far as clothing, and then more recently rejected it and went back to more traditional wear.
The Wiki Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_of_Saudi_Arabia
Why don't they still dress like he was in his youth today?
Frankly I'm not sure I would read so much into this. Your question is actually unique in that these questions are almost inevitably about what women are wearing, but whenever we do get these questions they are invariably about the clothing choices of elite, often urban, wealthy individuals. Such individuals very rarely face issues where they would have to:
more recently [reject western clothing] and [go] back to more traditional wear.
So for instance, here's another image of Salman that to my eye looks to have been taken after that image from wiki from when he was "in his 30s", although it is undated: here.
In the Arab Gulf countries among elite men it has been the long standing case that western attire is equally as valid as national dress, but that among the broader population that traditional dress remains the norm. Thus, you have someone like Prince Turki who seems to appear equally as often in public in a western suit and tie as he does in some kind of jalabiya.
All of that being said, in regards to other countries, for instance Egypt, it is nonetheless true that the 50s, 60s and 70s involved in many instances a more explicit and ideological move towards a secularist and therefore at least superficially western style of dress for men and women in elite or urban environments. But it's this period that strikes me as being unusual, and I don't think you could describe, say, Nasser's Egypt as being culturally Western, although of course that term has serious issues in that it basically means "modern, liberal and good" and so has value judgements attached to it that are historically uncomfortable.
Or, to put it another way, there has been a religious revival in many parts of the Arab and Muslim world which has resulted in superficial changes such as an apparent increase in the number of women who wear some kind of headscarf or veil. But so what? That's almost always ultimately just a visual proxy for other political issues, like the (false) implication that women only wear a headscarf because the patriarchy forces them to do so, rather than considering the autonomous piety of women who might willing choose to do so.
I don't agree with all of her points, but the best essay on this latter subject that I'm familiar with is Lila Abu-Lughod's Do Muslim Women Need Saving?
