"Enters the worlds of women who wear the hijab, both as an aspect of their religious observance and community belonging, and as a fashion statement, drawing upon global Islamic fashion industry. Anna-Mari Almila uses rich ethnographic investigation of everyday veiling practices among Muslim women in the city of Helsinki as a lens through which to reflect on and advance understanding of matters concerning Muslim dress in international Muslim minority contexts. Almila provides an innovative approach to studying veiling by connecting varied realms of practice, demonstrating how domains such as fashion, materiality, city spaces, private life, religious beliefs, and cosmopolitan social conditions are all tightly bound up together in ways that only a sensitive multi-disciplinary approach can reveal"--

Veiling in Fashion enters the worlds of women who wear the hijab, both as an aspect of their religious observance and community belonging, and as a fashion statement, drawing upon global Islamic fashion history. The book uses rich ethnographic investigation of everyday veiling practices among Muslim women in the city of Helsinki as a lens through which to reflect on and advance understanding of matters concerning Muslim dress in international Muslim minority contexts. The book provides an innovative approach to studying veiling by connecting varied realms of practice, demonstrating how domains as apparently separate as fashion, materiality, city spaces, private life, religious beliefs, and cosmopolitan social conditions are all tightly bound up together in ways that only a sensitive multi-disciplinary approach can reveal. It will appeal to scholars and students in fashion, gender, religion, material cultures, and the construction of space.

In an environment of increasing conservatism, in a world where a woman's right to wear the headscarf has become a touchstone for issues of all sorts, and at a time when racial and religious profiling has become commonplace, it is our political and social

Veils and veiling are controversial topics in social and political life, generating debates across the world. The veil is enmeshed within a complex web of relations encompassing politics, religion and gender, and conflicts over the nature of power, legitimacy, belief, freedom, agency and emancipation. In recent years, the veil has become both a potent and unsettling symbol and a rallying-point for discourse and rhetoric concerning women, Islam and the nature of politics. Early studies in gender, doctrine and politics of veiling appeared in the 1970s following the Islamic revival and ’re-veiling’ trends that were dramatically expressed by 1979’s Iranian Islamic revolution. In the 1990s, research focussed on the development of both an ’Islamic culture industry’ and greater urban middle class consumption of ’Islamic’ garments and dress styles across the Islamic world. In the last decade academics have studied Islamic fashion and marketing, the political role of the headscarf, the veiling of other religious groups such as Jews and Christians, and secular forms of modest dress. Using work from contributors across a range of disciplinary backgrounds and locations, this book brings together these research strands to form the most comprehensive book ever conceived on this topic. As such, this handbook will be of interest to scholars and students of fashion, gender studies, religious studies, politics and sociology.

Who says you can’t be pious and fashionable? Throughout the Muslim world, women have found creative ways of expressing their personality through the way they dress. Headscarves can be modest or bold, while brand-name clothing and accessories are part of a multimillion-dollar ready-to-wear industry that caters to pious fashion from head to toe. In this lively snapshot, Liz Bucar takes us to Iran, Turkey, and Indonesia and finds a dynamic world of fashion, faith, and style. “Brings out both the sensuality and pleasure of sartorial experimentation.” —Times Literary Supplement “I defy anyone not to be beguiled by [Bucar’s] generous-hearted yet penetrating observation of pious fashion in Indonesia, Turkey and Iran... Bucar uses interviews with consumers, designers, retailers and journalists...to examine the presumptions that modest dressing can’t be fashionable, and fashion can’t be faithful.” —Times Higher Education “Bucar disabuses readers of any preconceived ideas that women who adhere to an aesthetic of modesty are unfashionable or frumpy.” —Robin Givhan, Washington Post “A smart, eye-opening guide to the creative sartorial practices of young Muslim women... Bucar’s lively narrative illuminates fashion choices, moral aspirations, and social struggles that will unsettle those who prefer to stereotype than inform themselves about women’s everyday lives in the fast-changing, diverse societies that constitute the Muslim world.” —Lila Abu-Lughod, author of Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

"The tradition of the veil, which refers to various cloth coverings of the head, face, and body, has been little studied in Africa, where Islam has been present for more than a thousand years. These lively essays raise questions about what is distinctive about veiling in Africa, what religious histories or practices are reflected in particular uses of the veil, and how styles of veils have changed in response to contemporary events. Together, they explore the diversity of meanings and experiences with the veil, revealing it as both an object of Muslim piety and an expression of glamorous fashion." -- Publisher's description.

This book overturns Western notions of the veil as a symbol of women's oppression in Islamic societies. The author reveals how the veil, which has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity since the 1970s, de-marginalizes women in society and is an expression of liberation from colonial legacies as well as a symbol of resistance. She also shows how the veil has multiple and nuanced meanings which extend far beyond the narrow view that it is merely a special form of women's clothing.

This book investigates ways of dressing, style and fashion as gendered and embodied, but equally as “religionized” phenomena, particularly focusing on one significant world religion: Islam. Through their clothing, Muslims negotiate concepts and interpretations of Islam and construct their intersectionally interwoven position in the world. Taking the interlinkages between ‘fashionized religion,’ ‘religionized fashion,’ commercialization and processes of feminization as a starting point, this book reshapes our understanding of gendered forms of religiosity and spirituality through the lens of gender and embodiment. Focusing mainly on the agency and creativity of women as they appropriate ways of performing and interpreting various modalities of Muslim clothing and body practices, the book investigates how these social actors deal with empowering conditions as well as restrictive situations. Foregrounding contemporary scholars’ diverse disciplinary, theoretical and methodological approaches, this book problematizes and complicates the discursive and lived interactions and intersections between gender, fashion, spirituality, religion, class, and ethnicity. It will be relevant to a broad audience of researchers across gender, sociology of religion, Islamic and fashion studies.

Veiling is a globally polarizing issue, a locus for the struggle between Islam and the West and between contemporary and traditional interpretations of Islam. This book examines the vastly misunderstood and multi-layered world of the veil. It explores and analyzes the cultures, politics, and histories of veiling.

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.