Overview

In the shops of London's Oxford Street, girls wear patterned scarves over their hair as they cluster around makeup counters. Alongside them, hip twenty-somethings style their head-wraps in high black topknots to match their black boot-cut trousers. Participating in the world of popular mainstream fashion-often thought to be the domain of the West-these young Muslim women are part of an emergent cross-faith transnational youth subculture of modest fashion. In treating hijab and other forms of modest clothing as fashion, Reina Lewis counters the overuse of images of veiled women as ""evidence"" in the prevalent suggestion that Muslims and Islam are incompatible with Western modernity. Muslim Fashion contextualizes modest wardrobe styling within Islamic and global consumer cultures, interviewing key players including designers, bloggers, shoppers, store clerks, and shop owners. Focusing on Britain, North America, and Turkey, Lewis provides insights into the ways young Muslim women use multiple fashion systems to negotiate religion, identity, and ethnicity.

Full Product Details

Author:   Reina Lewis
Publisher:   Duke University Press
Imprint:   Duke University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.590kg
ISBN:  

9780822359340

ISBN 10:   0822359340
Pages:   400
Publication Date:   25 September 2015
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix Introduction. Veils and Sales  1 1. From Multiculture to Multifaith: Consumer Culture and the Organization of Rights and Resources  35 2. The Commercialization of Islamic Dress: Selling and Marketing Tessettür in Turkey and Beyond  69 3. Muslim Lifestyle Magazines: A New Mediascape  109 4. Taste and Distinction: The Politics of Style  163 5. Hijabi Shop Workers in Britain: Muslim Style Knowledge as Fashion Capital?  199 6. Modesty Online: Commerce and Commentary on the Net  237 7. Commodification and Community  287 Conclusion  317 Notes  323 References  331 Index  365

Reviews

Gracefully interweaving hijab and veiling into historical, political, legal, and cultural contexts, Reina Lewis delves deeply into the everyday style, fashion, and dress of young Muslim women. Lewis captures a dynamic moment in time-transnationally and comparatively-and offers keen insights into the variations and intersectionalities of religion, ethnicity, class, gender, generation, and nation. Muslim Fashion is an extraordinary book and an exemplary model of a feminist cultural studies approach to fashion. -- Susan B. Kaiser, author of Fashion and Cultural Studies Reina Lewis discusses Muslim dress as fashion in the United Kingdom and its networks elsewhere, eschewing its reception in mainstream media as a sign of ahistorical and unmodern identity. Lewis' previous scholarship on gendered Orientalism and academic post in fashion studies situates her in the best position to handle this delicate topic, and she admirably achieves to maintain both a critical distance and emphatic proximity to her subject. This is a must read for anyone interested in the visual and politico-economic analyses of Muslim fashion in relation to multiple fashion systems, as well as an ethnographic study of young women who live in Britain among a minority Muslim population. -- Esra Ackan, author of Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House Muslim Fashion is an important book by an international authority about Muslim fashion, and yet it manages to convey insights that will be of interest across a wide range of disciplines. It is one of those relatively rare books that manages to be methodologically rigorous, while also being theoretically sophisticated. Readable, engaging, thoughtful, lively, and accessible, this book is a landmark publication for our understanding of contemporary Muslim experiences, and offers fascinating insights into the worlds of consumers and producers of Muslim fashion. -- Sophie Gilliat-Ray, author of Muslims in Britain Muslim Fashion is a thorough and thoughtful study of what it means to be a hijabi in a time and place where religion, politics, ethnicity, class, gender, generation and nationality meet and potentially clash. ... In treating hijab as fashion, Lewis counters the use of images of veiled women as 'evidence' that Muslims and Islam are incompatible with Western modernity and offers another, richer view of women in veils. -- Bel Jacobs Lewis's book cheerfully celebrates the confidence of these Muslim women, Peeking into the sanctuary of their subculture and carefully documenting their experience. It is an intelligent and serious study, abstemiously refraining from inferences, criticisms or generalizations, and yet unmistakably polemical too in the quiet case it makes against the idea of an archaic Islam conventionally positioned as antithetical to modernity. -- Shahidha Bari TLS Intersecting issues of religion, youth culture and class, Lewis presents a fascinating picture of what Islamic fashion looks like in Muslim minority countries such as France, the United States and the United Kingdom... Lewis's book is grounded in her personal experience, archival work of many years and some very rich ethnography making this a key text on Muslim fashion for many years to come. -- Rohit K Dasgupta Clothing Cultures Written by a pioneering scholar of gender and Orientalism, Muslim Fashion is one of the most important recent publications in the growing field of Islamic fashion studies. Analyzing the consumption practices of practicing Muslims in Turkey and diasporic communities in Europe, the book would also be of interest for scholars of Europe and the Middle East. With its interdisciplinary approach, rigorous methodology, and elaborate theoretical framework, Muslim Fashion asks new questions about the constitution of Muslim subjectivities and the everyday experience of Islam. -- Rustem Ertug Altinay Europe Now With Muslim Fashion, Reina Lewis makes a rich and welcome contribution to a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship that explores religiously motivated modes of dressing as evolving, complex and dynamic acts intertwining individual choice, fashion trends and conceptions of piety... Ambitious in both theoretical and topical scope, Muslim Fashion deftly illuminates the multiplicity of approaches to pious dress that constitute Muslim modernities. -- Ann Marie Leshkowich International Journal of Fashion Studies The book is a significant contribution to ethnic, gender, cultural, Middle East and migration studies. It will greatly benefit graduate and undergraduate college students in these fields. It is also an attractive topic to general readers who want to learn about Muslim fashion away from the dominant polarized politics about Islam and Muslims in the West. -- Enaya H. Othman Ethnic and Racial Studies Through a rich ethnography of Muslim consumers, fashion professionals and media operatives - across a range of entwined religious and secular fashionscapes - Lewis shows that the liminality of a new generation of Muslims is, rather, not a type of crisis, but instead a unique source of competence and cultural capital... Through this invaluable and detailed study, Lewis furthermore contributes to the growing wealth of literature that sympathetically considers the everyday practise and expression of religion through material culture. Muslim Fashion synthesises many relevant cross-disciplinary concerns and will no doubt be widely recognised as a landmark publication. -- Carl Morris Religion, State, and Society

Reina Lewis discusses Muslim dress as fashion in the United Kingdom and its networks elsewhere, eschewing its reception in mainstream media as a sign of ahistorical and unmodern identity. Lewis previous scholarship on gendered Orientalism and academic post in fashion studies situates her in the best position to handle this delicate topic, and she admirably achieves to maintain both a critical distance and emphatic proximity to her subject. This is a must read for anyone interested in the visual and politico-economic analyses of Muslim fashion in relation to multiple fashion systems, as well as an ethnographic study of young women who live in Britain among a minority Muslim population. --Esra Ackan, author of Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House

Muslim Fashion is an important book by an international authority about Muslim fashion, and yet it manages to convey insights that will be of interest across a wide range of disciplines. It is one of those relatively rare books that manages to be methodologically rigorous, while also being theoretically sophisticated. Readable, engaging, thoughtful, lively, and accessible, this book is a landmark publication for our understanding of contemporary Muslim experiences, and offers fascinating insights into the worlds of consumers and producers of Muslim fashion. --Sophie Gilliat-Ray, author of Muslims in Britain

Gracefully interweaving hijab and veiling into historical, political, legal, and cultural contexts, Reina Lewis delves deeply into the everyday style, fashion, and dress of young Muslim women. Lewis captures a dynamic moment in time--transnationally and comparatively--and offers keen insights into the variations and intersectionalities of religion, ethnicity, class, gender, generation, and nation. Muslim Fashion is an extraordinary book and an exemplary model of a feminist cultural studies approach to fashion. --Susan B. Kaiser, author of Fashion and Cultural Studies

Author Information

Reina Lewis is Professor of Cultural Studies at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, and the author of Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem.

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