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

Excerpt from Night Fitties // Fragmento de Night Fitties

We have worked since 2013 on and with a contested coastal community on one of the U.K.'s last existing plotlands, the Humberston Fitties in North East Lincolnshire.  Here, since between the wars, local people and visitors have erected their diverse dwellings, in order to enjoy the simple, restorative pleasures of seaside life. This painting and poems are from the series Night Fitties They explore the play of light and dark and the uncanny transformations of the chalets that take place after hours as well as notions of vulnerability, occupation and emptiness. The work considers, in the shadow of recent dramatic political changes, how notions of place and identity are constructed on domestic and larger scales, as reflected by the play on flags and other indications of Englishness. Our cross-disciplinary collaborative practice between poetry and visual art explores open, environmentally-aware engagements and methodologies with landscape and place. We investigate the relation of social, environmental and energy politics on micro and macro scales, looking out to land and sea and back to the community. We are interested in the effects of radical open form text and paintings presented innovatively together and how this challenges audiences' assumptions. Resumen     Hemos trabajado desde 2013 y con una disputada comunidad costera en uno de los últimos asentamientos temporales existentes en Reino Unido, los Humberston Fitties, al noreste de Lincolnshire. Aquí, desde el periodo de entreguerras, la gente local y los visitantes han erigido sus diversas moradas con el fin de disfrutar de los simples y vigorizantes placeres de la vida junto al mal. Esta pintura y poemas son de la serie Night Fitties. Exploran el juego de luces y sombras y las insólitas transformaciones de los chalets que tienen lugar después de hora, así como nociones de vulnerabilidad, ocupación y vacío. El trabajo considera, a la sombra de los dramáticos cambios políticos recientes, cómo las nociones de lugar e identidad se construyen a escala doméstica y a mayor escala, tal y como refleja el juego con las banderas y otras indicaciones de lo que es ser inglés. Nuestra práctica colaborativa interdisciplinar entre poesía y arte visual explora compromisos y metodologías con el paisaje y el lugar que son abiertos y medioambientalmente conscientes. Investigamos las políticas energéticas, sociales y medioambientales a menor y mayor escala, volviendo la vista hacia la tierra y al mar y de vuelta a la comunidad. Nos interesan los efectos de presentar juntos e innovadoramente textos de forma abierta y pinturas, y cómo esto desafía las suposiciones de la audiencia

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

‘Off path, counter path’: contemporary walking collaborations in landscape, art and poetry

This is a jointly authored practice-led article by a poet and artist who have produced place-based work based on slow-walking practices for exhibition and publication since 2011. It is developed out of close reading of our own work, our key consideration being whether and how collaborative walking and art together might be conceived of as counter-cultural. We consider our walking inheritance, from the Romantics, via Thoreau to mid-century painters and poets and contemporary ecocritical theorists including Doreen Massey, Yi-fu Tuan, Deirdre Heddon and Richard Kerridge. We trace changes in theoretical and artistic approaches to walking, perception and making art together. We reference other contemporary poet and artist pairings including Frances Presley and Irma Irsara and Thomas A. Clark and Laurie Clark. Finally, we consider how walking and working collaboratively in different artistic media might produce work that challenges and affects viewers in gallery and book spaces

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

From cut flowers

Poe