Abstract
Anyone disseminating research on cultural issues with the prefix ‘Muslim’ or ‘Islamic’ should be acutely aware of the ethical dilemmas included with such labeling. In her latest book Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures, Reina Lewis, Professor of Cultural Studies at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, contributes to a deeper comprehension of this dilemma by reflexively problematizing her own use of such categorization and potential consequences. She does this while substantially adding resourceful questions and perspectives to the field known as Muslim/Islamic fashion (Lewis prefers ‘Muslim fashion’ over ‘Islamic fashion’ to avoid associations with any religious doctrinal perspective; cf., for instance, Tarlo and Moors, 2013). The study offers keen insights into this thriving segment of the fashion industry as well as into the role of fashion in intricate identity negotiations.
While reports from academia and mainstream media at large seem to ignore the various everyday wardrobes and fashions engaging Muslim women, there is a continuous reproduction of images of veiled women that are made into illustrations of their presumed alterity and the incompatibility between Islam and the West. The young female adherents in Lewis’ book are consciously using fashion to defy such stereotypes, and the author strives with them
to challenge attitudes that read Muslim dress as signs of collective ahistorical community identities. Putting hijabi and modest dressing in the context of individuating fashion contributes to the political project of deexceptionalizing Muslim youth, an antidote to the alterity made common by securitizing discourses. This is also advanced by analyzing hijabi fashion within a subcultural frame that locates dress practices (on the body, in print, online, and in commerce) within overlapping local, national, and transnational contexts that are constitutive of and constituted by interlocking social factors including ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and faith. (p. 20)
In her earlier works, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (1996) and Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem (2004), Lewis had advanced postcolonial analysis of art and literature as both produced and consumed by those who have traditionally been regarded as subalterns and, hence, she had helped to complicate the understanding of the struggles over legitimacy and meaning that indeed transcend the East–West dichotomy. Muslim Fashion introduces fashion as a cultural phenomenon in global markets and adds religion to ethnicity and gender as crucial markers of difference. That is not to say that Lewis delivers a singular representation of religion, commerce and ‘the’ veil; to explore the production, distribution, consumption, restriction, and impact of Muslim fashion, she approaches it as situated ‘in relation to a web of multiple fashion systems seen within the frame of multiple modernities’ (p. 13). Among the insights produced by this process-focused methodology is that the styles of the studied individuals undergo rapid changes – an important reminder in a present where Muslim women’s dress is so strongly essentialized and politicized.
While the earlier works of Lewis’ were mostly ‘about dead people and their paintings and about dead people and their books’ (p. xi), the present book draws on ethnographic material collected among living human subjects. On the very first page of the book the reader is invited to follow the author on an Oxford Street (London) tour through thick description field-notes dated a month after the bombs on 7 July 2005. This initial scenario of vibrant everyday Muslim wardrobe display, that occurs in stark contrast with simultaneous anti-Muslim sentiments and under-representation in the style media, is made the starting-point for a decade’s fieldwork and interviews with designers, entrepreneurs, bloggers, social media hosts and other young women who shared their stories and illustrations of styling the hijab.
Besides Britain, the key geographies of the book are located in North America and Turkey where commercial Islamic fashion developed as early as in the 1980s. Hence, present practices and discourses are analyzed in relation to heterogeneous histories of Muslim populations in Muslim majority societies as well as in diasporic contexts. The historicized contextualization includes a variety of central issues for Muslim (self)definition, such as ethnicity, religion, secularity, culture, politics and gender, as well as a variety of social positionings, such as ‘British Afro-Caribbean convert to Islam’ or ‘high-profile member of Turkish APK political elite’. The exploration of the connection between such issues and positions to fashion and religion is enabled through recurring case studies including a row of elements: garments, images, media, people and spaces.
Importantly, religion is not included in the analysis as a mere identity marker, but dealt with in terms of lived, everyday religion:
The ways in which dress, as part of Islamic consumer cultures, has become a key mode for the experience and expression of revivalist identities is identified as an example of everyday religion (Ammerman 2007; McGuire 2008), characterized by syncretism, by interaction with the market, and by a discourse of choice in the articulation of achieved rather than, or in addition to, ascribed inherited religious identities. (p. 21)
Lewis elaborates on this aspect of lived religion by perceptively demonstrating how Muslim fashion is constituted by embodied practice and meaning-making processes situated in various temporal and spatial locations with various norms for dress and behaviour. In combining material culture studies with culture studies of fashion and body management, and drawing on important theoreticians like Saba Mahmood, she brings new insights into how veiling comes to work as an indispensable means for the formation of pious selves. Furthermore, she draws on the circuit of culture/fashion model that links ‘representation, identity, and regulation as part of a mutually constitutive and interdependent set of relations through which commodities are brought into being and given meaning in the lives of human subjects’ (p. 5). In focus are both active consumers and regulation constraints on what can be produced and consumed. Examples of constraints include intra-Muslim doctrinal, ideological or generational contestations, and also external constrictions, such as school/workplace uniforms, state bans on veiling, racist/sexist discrimination or access to the Internet. Among the empowering potentials of the Muslim fashion industry discussed are new employment opportunities as well as new forms of knowledge production and authority for women.
In her last chapter, Lewis discusses the hypervisibility of the veiled body in minority contexts in relation to the relative invisibility of non-veiled women as recognizable Muslims, and importantly, the relative lack of attention paid to the so called ‘dejabis’. The latter explain their stopping to cover to be a conscious step in their process of modest dressing and, thus, indicate alternative ways to self-present Muslim piety or identity. This stance toward the hijab is taken in tense relation to the (neo)Orientalist discourse on Muslim women’s unveiling as a liberating consequence of Western influence. Hence, Lewis’ attention to their agency is compelling.
The book is rich in illustrations, acquired from the author’s own photo-documentation as well as from blog spots and Muslim lifestyle magazines like Emel and Sisters in Britain, Azizah and Muslim Girl in North America and Âlâ in Turkey. Surprisingly, there are neither pictures nor discussions about modest sportswear, an absence particularly disappointing with regard to my personal interest in the much debated swimsuit generically termed (and copyrighted) as burqini. When it comes to men and masculinity in the Muslim fashion industry, Lewis presents some illuminating comments, which make you miss comprehensive and qualified studies on this topic.
To sum up, with Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures, Lewis manages to deliver innovative and multilayered knowledge to the research field of Muslim women’s dressing. In line with her own reference to early feminists’ re-evaluation of marginalized women-led activities, such as girls’ unspectacular ‘bedroom cultures’ (McRobbie and Garber, [1975] 2006), she has in this book revealed the potential of ‘taking Muslim women’s fashion seriously – as fashion’ (p. 3, 317).