Moroccan garment design and consumption have experienced major shifts in recent history, transforming from a traditional craft-based enterprise to a thriving fashion industry. Influenced by western fashion, dress has become commoditized and has expanded from tailoring to designer labels. This book presents the first detailed ethnographic study of Moroccan fashion. Drawing on interviews with three generations of designers and the lifestyle press, the author provides an in-depth analysis of the development of urban dress, which reveals how traditional dress has not been threatened but rather produced and consumed in different ways. With chapters examining themes such as dress and politics, gender, faith, modernity, and exploring topics from craft to e-fashion, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars of fashion, anthropology, material culture, sociology, cultural studies, gender studies and related fields.

Modern Fashion Traditions questions the dynamics of fashion systems and spaces of consumption outside the West. Too often, these fashion systems are studied as a mere and recent result of globalization and Western fashion influences, but this book draws on a wide range of non-Western case studies and analyses their similarities and differences as legitimate fashion systems, contesting Eurocentric notions of tradition and modernity, continuity versus change, and 'the West versus the Rest'. Preconceptions about non-Western fashion are challenged through diverse case studies from international scholars, including street-style identity in Bhutan, the influence of Ottoman cultural heritage on contemporary Turkish fashion design, and an investigation into the origins of the word 'fashion' in Chinese. Negotiating tradition, foreign influences and the contemporary global dominance of Western fashion cities, Modern Fashion Traditions will give readers a clearer understanding of non-Western fashion identities in the present. Accessibly written, this ground-breaking text makes an essential contribution to the study of non-Western fashion and will be an important resource for students of fashion history and theory, anthropology, and cultural studies.

Much has been written about the transformation of China from being a clothing-manufacturing site to a fast-rate fashion consuming society. Less, however, has been written on the process of making Chinese fashion. The expert contributors to Fashion in Multiple Chinas explore how the many Chinese fashions operate across the widespread, fragmented and diffused, Chinese diaspora. They confront the idea of Chinese nationalism as `one nation', as well as of China as a single reality, in revealing the realities of Chinese fashion as diverse and comprising multiple practices. They also demonstrate how the making of Chinese fashion is composed of numerous layers, often involving a web of global entanglements between manufacturing and circulation, retailing and branding. They cover the mechanics of the PRC fashion industry, the creative economy of Chinese fashion, its retail and branding, and the cultural identity of Chinese fashion from the diasporas comprising the transglobal landscape of fashion production.

Introducing innovative new research from international scholars working on Islamic fashion and its critics, Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion provides a global perspective on muslim dress practices. The book takes a broad geographic sweep, bringing together the sartorial experiences of Muslims in locations as diverse as Paris, the Canadian Prairie, Swedish and Italian bath houses and former socialist countries of Eastern Europe. What new Islamic dress practices and anxieties are emerging in these different locations? How far are they shaped by local circumstances, migration histories, particular religious traditions, multicultural interfaces and transnational links? To what extent do developments in and debates about Islamic dress cut across such local specificities, encouraging new channels of communication and exchange? With original contributions from the fields of anthropology, fashion studies, media studies, religious studies, history, geography and cultural studies, Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion will be of interest to students and scholars working in these fields as well as to general readers interested in the public presence of Islam in Europe and America.

Creating African Fashion Histories examines the stark disjuncture between African self-fashioning and museum practices. Conventionally, African clothing, textiles, and body adornments were classified by museums as examples of trade goods, art, and ethnographic materials—never as "fashion." Counterposing the dynamism of African fashion with museums' historic holdings thus provides a unique way of confronting ways in which coloniality persists in knowledge and institutions today. This volume brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars and curators to debate sources and approaches for constructing African fashion histories and to examine their potential for decolonizing museums, fashion studies, and global cultural history. The editors of this volume seek to answer questions such as: How can researchers use museum collections to reveal traces of past self-fashioning that are obscured by racialized forms of knowledge and institutional practice? How can archival, visual, oral, ethnographic, and online sources be deployed to capture the diversity of African sartorial pasts? How can scholars and curators decolonize the Eurocentric frames of thinking encapsulated in historic collections and current curricula? Can new collections of African fashion decolonize museum practice? From Moroccan fashion bloggers to upmarket Lagos designers, the voices in this ground-breaking collection reveal fascinating histories and geographies of circulation within and beyond the continent and its diasporic communities.

African Fashion, Global Style provides a lively look at fashion, international networks of style, material culture, and the world of African aesthetic expression. Victoria L. Rovine introduces fashion designers whose work reflects African histories and cultures both conceptually and stylistically, and demonstrates that dress styles associated with indigenous cultures may have all the hallmarks of high fashion. Taking readers into the complexities of influence and inspiration manifested through fashion, this book highlights the visually appealing, widely accessible, and highly adaptable styles of African dress that flourish on the global fashion market.

This title explains how Moroccan women passed this cultural art down to the next generation and how embroidered pattern were used to decorate interior spaces as well as certain traditional accessories in the female wardorbe such as shawls, belts, handkerchiefs and headscarves.

Based on extensive fieldwork, Women of Fes shows how Moroccan women create their own forms of identity through work, family, and society. The book also examines how women's lives are positioned vis-à-vis globalization, human rights, and the construction of national identity.

This volume explores the ways in which the young, both in Muslim majority societies and Muslim communities in the West, negotiate their Muslim identity in relation to their youthful desires - their individuality, the search for autonomy and security for the future. The cultural behavior of Muslim youths, the authors argue, must be understood as located in the political realm and representing a new arena of contestation for power. The essays in this volume look at the strategies Muslim youths deploy to realize their interests and aspirations, including music and fashion, party politics, collective violence, gang activities, religious radicalism and other forms of expression.

Dress and Identity in America is an examination of the conservatism and materialism that swept across the country in the late 1940s through the 1950s-a backlash to the wartime tumult, privations, and social upheavals of the Second World War. The study looks at how American men sought to recapture a masculine identity from a generation earlier, that of the stoic patriarch, breadwinner, and dutiful father, and in the process, became the men in the gray flannel suits who were complacently conventional and conformist. Parallel to that is a look at how American women, who had donned pants and went to work in wartime munitions factories or joined services like the WACS and WAVES, were now expected to stay at home as housewives and mothers, dressed in cinched, ultrafeminine New Look fashions. As the Space Age dawned, their baby boom children rejected the conventions of their elders and experimented with their own ideas of identity and dress in an emerging era of counterculture revolutions.