Modest dressing: faith based fashion and the internet retail

The last two decades has seen the development of a rapidly expanding and diversifying market for modest fashion, arising initially from and serving the needs of women from the three Abrahamic faiths, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, who are motivated to dress modestly for religious reasons. This market is also sustained by women whose ‘look’ may share many elements of modest styling but who do not regard their processes of self-fashioning in terms of religion or modesty as such. For both groups the internet has been central to the rapid growth of the modest fashion sector, fostering the development of a niche market through e-commerce, and providing virtual platforms for debates on modesty and fashion on websites, blogs, and discussion groups (fora). Modest Dressing: Faith-based fashion and internet retail set out to explore the market for and the dialogues about modest dressing that were developing online, and their relationship to practices off-line. The project set out specifically to explore if and how e-commerce and commentary online were encouraging shopping and dialogue that went across boundaries of faith

Hijab in London: Metamorphosis, Resonance and Effects

This article is about the significance of dress as a visible indicator of difference in multicultural London. It focuses in particular on the hijab (Muslim woman’s headscarf), suggesting that its adoption by middle-class Muslim women is often a product, not so much of their cultural backgrounds as of the trans-cultural encounters they experience in a cosmopolitan urban environment. The article explores the transformative potential of hijab, demonstrating how its adoption not only acts as a moment of metamorphosis in the lives of wearers, but also has significant effects on the perceptions and actions of others. These themes of metamorphosis, visibility and agency are explored in relation to the complex conflicting resonance of hijab in the West, and how that resonance is constantly being reshaped both through contemporary political events and their media coverage as well as through the actions and campaigns of hijab wearers

Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: A Sartorial Review

An extended illustrated book review of Marjane Satrape's comic-strip book, Persepolis, which focuses on growing up in Iran in the 1970's and 1980's

Competing Identities: The Problem of What to Wear in Late Colonial and Contemporary India.

This thesis examines the importance of dress in India. It focuses less on the material artefact than on the use of clothes in the construction of social and political identity. Scholars often stress the rigidity of the clothing system in India where identity appears neatly prescribed by caste and tradition. Challenging this view, I suggest that clothes are often a highly controversial issue. In Chapter 1, I define my approach as an examination of the problem of what to wear. This provides a dynamic model with which to address questions of local and national sartorial identity. Each chapter that follows is an exploration of the problem as faced by different people in various circumstances. Chapters 2-4 focus mainly on questions of national identity through a discussion of the clothing controversies of Indian men in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These are analysed within the context of British Imperialism and the Indian struggle for Independence. Chapters 5-8 concentrate primarily on contemporary clothing issues concerning women's dress in a Gujarati village. Here the clothing choices of individuals and groups are discussed in relation to such factors as caste, education, urbanisation and ideas of female modesty. Questions of local and national identity are brought together in Chapter 9 where I examine the development of contemporary "ethnic" fashions in an urban village in Delhi where members of the educated elite are returning to the clothes that rural women are rejecting. Finally I demonstrate how all of the sartorial trends discussed in this thesis are part of a long-term cultural debate concerning Indian identity which is played out at a variety of levels from the village to the nation. By incorporating the attitudes of people both to their own clothes and to the clothes of others, I hope to have created a new dynamic model with which anthropologists can approach the complexity of the relationship between clothing and identity

Jewish wigs and Islamic sportswear: Negotiating regulations of religion and fashion

This article explores the dynamics of freedom and conformity in religious dress prescriptions and fashion, arguing that although fashion is popularly perceived as liberating and religion as constraining when it comes to dress, in reality both demand conformity to normative expectations while allowing some freedom of interpretation. The article goes on to trace the emergence of new forms of fashionable religious dress such as the human-hair wigs worn by some orthodox Jewish women and the new forms of Islamic sportswear adopted by some Muslim women. It shows how these fashions have emerged through the efforts of religiously observant women to subscribe simultaneously to the expectations of fashion and religious prescription, which are seen to operate in a relationship of creative friction. In doing so, they invent new ways of dressing that push the boundaries of religious and fashion norms even as they seek to conform to them

Close Encounters of a Hairy Kind

A reflection on visual methods in anthropology, focusing on Emma Tarlo's research on the global trade in human hair

Great Expectations: The role of the wig stylist (sheitel macher) in orthodox Jewish salons

Wigs are curious liminal objects that hover somewhere between the categories of prosthesis and clothing and offer a variety of possibilities from transformation to hair substitution, covering and disguise. In this article I focus on the particular demands and expectations placed upon the sheitel (Yiddish term for wig) worn by increasing numbers of married Jewish women who identify as frum (Torah-observant). Based on research in Jewish wig salons in Britain and the United States and on Jewish online forums, internet discussions and blogs with a wider geographic reach, this article sets out to show the complex web of material, social, emotional, aesthetic and moral concerns that cluster around the sheitel and to highlight the role of the sheitel macher (wig stylist) in managing these anxieties and expectations. If all wigs are fraught with expectations in terms of their capacity to enable successful social performances, sheitels, it is argued, carry a particularly high burden of expectations owing to their contested and multivalent role as material embodiments of religious commitment, social status and fashion competence and owing to the ambivalent feelings many Jewish women have towards their wigs

Crossing boundaries:bras, lingerie and rape myths in postcolonial urban middle-class India

With the processes of modernization, urbanization and the entry of women in the formal labour market in Indian metropolitan spaces, this paper examines how the modern middle-class woman’s sartorial choices become enmeshed in popular rape myths (false beliefs) that serve to blame her for the wearing of western clothing. The paper articulates the ways in which middle-class women’s social realities are shaped by historical, colonial and nationalist ideologies of modernization, constructed and mediated through moral codes of dressing. By drawing upon original and contemporary empirical narratives from the urban spaces of Delhi and Mumbai, we emphasise how everyday sartorial choices, in relation to particularly the bra and lingerie, can reveal the nuanced ways in which Urban Indian Professional Women (UIPW) seek to understand, negotiate, and resist patriarchal power. Our findings shed light on conflicting and contradictory spatial experiences, where some women internalize and negotiate moral codes of dressing, out of fear, and others who transgress are subject to sanctions. Given the paucity of scholarly literature in this area, the paper makes an important theoretical and empirical contribution with its focus on postcoloniality and everyday discursive material spaces of gendered and sexualized dress practices. It argues for the consciousness raising of everyday urban geographies of dress that reveal complicated structures of power that are often deemed hidden

Islamic Cosmopolitanism: The sartorial biographies of three Muslim women in London

This article focuses on the dress of three prominent Muslim women who have made a significant mark in British public life: the textile artist Rezia Wahid, the stand-up comedienne Shazia Mirza, and the councilor and advisor on Muslim affairs Humera Khan. It focuses, in particular, on their sartorial biographies, tracing the processes, experiences, and reasoning behind their clothing choices. Whilst the wearing of dress that is visibly identifiable as Islamic is often interpreted as a sign of narrow conservatism or political activism, the biographies of these three women suggest something very different. Their sartorial choices and stylistic innovations are the creative products of cosmopolitan lifestyles and attitudes in which concerns about fashion, religion, politics, and aesthetics are interwoven in interesting ways. The article suggests that a focus on sartorial biography enables a shift away from a whole series of conventional dichotomies: religious/secular, traditional/modern, Eastern/Western, Islam/West, towards a broader understanding of the wide range of experiences and concerns that inform the clothing choices of contemporary British Muslim women. Finally, it is suggested that the proliferation of religiously oriented fashions amongst Muslims in Western metropolitan cities is not necessarily a sign of narrow conservatism. It may also signal the emergence of new forms of Islamic cosmopolitanism