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.
Industry Reviews
"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."
-- Ruestem 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 *
