Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Muslim Fashion
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1963
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.arts.ac.uk/research/ual-staff-researchers/a-z/professor-reina-lewis/ * https://www.timeshighereducation.com/people/interview-reina-lewis-london-college-of-fashion-university-of-the-arts-london
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 95034135
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n95034135
HEADING: Lewis, Reina, 1963-
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PERSONAL
Born February 3, 1963, in London, England.
ADDRESS
CAREER
London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, London, England, Artscom Centenary Professor of Cultural Studies. Former senior lecturer, Department of Cultural Studies, University of East London.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Guardian, Marie Claire, New York Times, and Times (London). Coeditor, Dress Cultures (book series), I.B. Tauris.
SIDELIGHTS
London College of Fashion professor of cultural studies Reina Lewis specializes in the study of feminism, Orientalism, and the intersections between the two. “Her current work in feminist postcolonial studies,” wrote the contributor of a biographical blurb to the University of the Arts London Web site, “focuses on matters of fashion and faith. She uses contemporary debates about the Muslim veil as a focus to explore how the figure of the Muslim woman, veiled or unveiled, continues to be central to changing debates about the relations between Islam and the West and about community and belonging. She has been researching and publishing in this area for some time.” She is the coeditor of Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Visual Cultures, Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, Gender, Modernity and Liberty: Middle Eastern and Western Women’s Writings, a Critical Sourcebook, and The Poetics and Politics of Place: Ottoman Istanbul and British Orientalism; the sole editor of Modest Fashion: Styling Bodies, Mediating Faith; and the author of Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity, and Representation, Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel, and the Ottoman Harem, and Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures.
Gendering Orientalism and Rethinking Orientalism
Both Gendering Orientalism and Rethinking Orientalism examine the critical theory put forth by Edward Said known as Orientalism: the idea that Europeans represented Africans and Asians as different or “Other” in part as a justification for European imperialism. For Said, Orientalism was a male area in much the same way that the British Empire was regarded as a male province. Lewis suggests that, on the contrary, Western women actively participated in the imperializing tendencies of Orientalism, and Asian and African women deliberately used elements of both Western and Eastern cultures; rather than victims, they were participants and definers of their own liberty.
“What is rewarding and innovative about Gendering Orientalism is its substantial engagement with visual imagery by French and British women artists,” explained Deborah Cherry in Victorian Studies, “for, although several studies have drawn attention to the centrality to Orientalism of images of women, no existing publication explores in such detail women’s paintings of the Orient. Lewis relates these images to a dense textual web, full of contradictions, deftly highlighting antiphonal voices to accentuate the range of representations by women and to signal those with the potential to destabilise prevailing fantasies of the Orient, particularly of the harem.” Gillian Whitlock declared in Biography: “For Lewis, rethinking the rigid orthodoxies of Orientalism requires careful attention to transculturation: the ongoing and provisional invention of selfhood and identity across differences of gender, ethnicity, and class. It also entails attention to the vicissitudes of the Western literary markets that reproduce the commodification of Orientalized subjects. Above all though, the representation of Ottoman women as active agents in their own representation who were able to make strategic use of Orientalist discourses in their interactions with the West is critical. . . . Ottoman women, suggests Lewis, pursued an emancipation that must be specifically Oriental.”
Modest Fashion and Muslim Fashion
In both Modest Fashion and Muslim Fashion, Lewis examines the ways in which women from both Western and non-Western cultures act as agents of their own appearance. Writing in Choice, B.B. Chico reported that Lewis’s work demonstrates the idea of “mainstream fashion designers . . . responding to the large commercial market serving a growing population of young . . . Muslim women,” aged eighteen to twenty-four years. “I was sensitised by my historical studies on Orientalism, gender, and imperialism to the overrepresentation of covered women in the news media and the underrepresentation of hijabi style in the fashion media,” Lewis told John Elmes in an interview for Times Higher Education. “The fashion industry–like the rest of the world–often presumes that religion is incompatible with fashion. And, since 9/11, the civilisational discourse that pictures Islam, and Muslims, as outside and threatening to ‘Western’ modernity has produced an aversive response from some fashion brands about being associated with Muslims. . . . Some of the hijabis [hijab-wearing women] that I spoke to consciously use style to challenge stigma: they hope that being visibly fashionable will help non-Muslims recognise them as part of the modern world and challenge prejudice that British Muslims are ‘foreign’ and ‘primitive.’”
“Lewis sets up [Modest Dress] … by writing that modest fashion is a young woman’s game, but rather than youthful rebellion or experimentation, ‘modest dressers’ tend to be regarded as ‘representatives of essentialized, unchanging collective religious identities rather than as individuated youthful style seekers,’” wrote Tina Basi in a London School of Economics [Web log] post. “The key questions posed by the book ask, does modest fashion ‘help to keep people in the faith … or does it dangerously dilute religious identifications?’ … Through a detailed discussion of Internet retail, [Web logs], and forums, the book unpicks the way in which women experience and engage with fashion and faith.” “Avoiding reductive categorizations such as ‘the Islamic world’ or ‘the Muslim dress,’” wrote Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay in Europe Now, “the book acknowledges the diversity that defines Islamic belief systems as well as the everyday experience of Islam and practices of embodiment. In-depth interviews with consumers and fashion professionals on different levels—from retail assistants to leading designers, entrepreneurs, and journalists—reveal the complex processes of design, retail, promotion, and consumption that define Muslim fashion systems. The book thus provides important insights into a growing segment of the fashion industry while also demonstrating the role of fashion in identity practices.” “Despite the hip topic and ripped-from-social-media cover image, this book is not for the casual reader,” warned Claire Sadar on the Muftah Web site. “Muslim Fashion’s deep grounding in the literature, engagement with contemporary and classic theory, and the wide variety of sources and topics it covers makes it a great starting point for scholars launching their own research into contemporary Muslim fashion and lifestyle trends.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Biography, spring, 2006, Gillian Whitlock, review of Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel, and the Ottoman Harem, p. 383.
Choice, April, 2016, B.B. Chico, review of Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures, p. 1201.
Middle East, December, 2004, Fred Rhodes, review of Rethinking Orientalism, p. 64.
Victorian Studies, winter, 1997, Deborah Cherry, review of Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity, and Representation, p. 377.
ONLINE
Europe Now, http://www.europenowjournal.org/ (November 30, 2016), Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay, review of Muslim Fashion.
Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (March 25, 2017), author profile.
London School of Economics, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/ (September 10, 2013), Tina Basi, review of Modest Fashion.
Muftah, http://muftah.org/ (February 28, 2016), Claire Sadar, review of Muslim Fashion.
Times Higher Education (London, England), https://www.timeshighereducation.com/ (November 5, 2015), author interview.
University of the Arts London, http://www.arts.ac.uk/ (March 25, 2017), author profile.
Professor Reina Lewis
Professor of Cultural Studies
London College of Fashion
reina.lewis@fashion.arts.ac.uk
Research interests
Fashion and Faith, especially internet retail, blogs and magazines; Fashion and Islam, especially historical and contemporary veiling debates; critical approaches to Orientalism, especially travel writing, photography, and Orientalist painting; Middle Eastern and Ottoman women's history (1800-1945); postcolonial theory, gender and ethnicity/race studies; Sexuality studies, including lesbian and gay visual and literary culture, queer fashion, queer theory; retail geographies and non-western modernities.
Research statement
Lewis' current research breaks down into two interconnected areas: feminist postcolonial studies (concerned predominantly with changing attitudes to Islam in the ‘west’ and in the Middle East); and lesbian, gay, and queer studies (concerned mainly with the role of dress in the formulation of sexed and gendered identities).
Her current work in feminist postcolonial studies focuses on matters of fashion and faith. She uses contemporary debates about the Muslim veil as a focus to explore how the figure of the Muslim woman, veiled or unveiled, continues to be central to changing debates about the relations between Islam and the west and about community and belonging. She has been researching and publishing in this area for some time.
Lewis' first book, Gendering Orientalism (1996), brought to light the contribution to imperial cultures of nineteenth-century western women artists and writers in order to demonstrate the heterogeneity and contested nature of Orientalist discourse.
Her subsequent study, Rethinking Orientalism (2004), looking at the early twentieth century, revealed how women codified as Oriental (and stereotyped as silenced and oppressed) were in fact able to manipulate western cultural codes and challenge western assumptions about middle eastern life - at the same time as they relied on Orientalist stereotypes to create a market for their books.
Lewis' new research brings these historical examples up to date by examining contemporary how the continued and contemporary commodification of Muslim femininities, including historical and current veiling debates, the development of diaspora fashion circuits, and the neo-Orientalisms developing in relation to Turkey's bid for EU accession. Putting fashion and Islam in dynamic with each other, this research focuses not just on images of Muslim dress, but on how Muslims (and people of other faiths) are contributing to the fashion industry, as designers, fashion journalists and bloggers, photographers, and working in fashion retail. Using the hyper-visibility of the veiled body as a lens through which to view contemporary postcolonial cultural crises, this research includes attention to alternative modes of fashion innovation and mediation such as the new Muslim lifestyle media. Her new book, Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures, will be published by Duke University Press in 2015.
The Modest Dressing project extended this work on Muslims and fashion to look at how women from Christian and Jewish as well as Muslim faith backgrounds are developing new trends in modest fashion - see, Modest Dressing: Styling Bodies, Mediating Faith, ed. Reina Lewis, IB Tauris 2013. Funded by the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Programme, Modest Dressing: Faith-based Fashion and Internet Retail focused on internet retail, to explore how e-commerce is making it easier for women who are religiously motivated to dress modestly to be fashionable. As well as looking at fashion design and retail, the project was also interested to see how new tastes in modest fashion are developed and communicated, especially in blogs, magazines and internet discussion fora.
Lewis' historical interest in Middle Eastern women's history and Orientalism continues with the Cultures in Dialogue book series, and associated research publications, that bring back into circulation travel writing from and about the Middle East by women since 1800.
Her work in sexualities studies uses an interdisciplinary methodology to think about circuits of production, distribution, and reception and particularly how forms of cultural consumption create a sense of who we are. A concern with audience informed the compilation of her co-edited collection Outlooks (with Peter Horne) which in 1996 helped establish the field for queer visual studies.
Her recent contributions in this area have been primarily interested in matters of dress and identity, looking at lesbians as consumers of mainstream fashion magazines, and as producers and consumers of queer lifestyle publications. Building on this, her new project involves a reconsideration of performativity - analysing the historicised cultural competencies needed to enact and decode the dressed performance of ethnicised, sexual, and gender identities. Having written on lesbian dress and visual pleasure, and always keen for a reason to dress up, Lewis' new work in this field is being developed as part of an ongoing performance piece called 'Out of the closet and into the wardrobe'.
She also edits a book series called Dress Cultures with Elizabeth Wilson, for IB Tauris. They are always happy to hear about project proposals that you think would be suitable for this series.
Interview with Reina Lewis
We speak to the London College of Fashion professor and author of a new book on Muslim fashion
November 5, 2015
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By John Elmes
Twitter: @JElmes_THE
Reina Lewis, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London
Reina Lewis is professor of cultural studies at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. Her research interests include fashion and faith, Middle Eastern and Ottoman women’s history and queer fashion. Her most recent book, Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures, which is out now, focuses on fashion and Islam.
Where and when were you born?
London in 1963.
How has this shaped you?
Growing up as a third-generation Jewish immigrant in suburban northeast London, I benefited from seeing many different ways of being Jewish. Growing up in the 1970s with the National Front [being] a real threat reinforced my parents’ lessons that minority communities of all sorts could be vulnerable and needed defending.
Why do you think the fashion world is only now waking up to “the significance of the Muslim fashion consumer”? Is it merely an oversight, or does it suggest more invidious reasons?
Both. The fashion industry – like the rest of the world – often presumes that religion is incompatible with fashion. And, since 9/11, the civilisational discourse that pictures Islam, and Muslims, as outside and threatening to “Western” modernity has produced an aversive response from some fashion brands about being associated with Muslims.
Does using fashion to help express religious beliefs help dispel the – often quite ignorant – associations of the hijab?
Yes, it can do, and some of the hijabis [hijab-wearing women] that I spoke to consciously use style to challenge stigma: they hope that being visibly fashionable will help non-Muslims recognise them as part of the modern world, and challenge prejudice that British Muslims are “foreign” and “primitive”.
What inspired your interest in fashion and faith research? Does it represent a large part of your research portfolio?
Horrified by the securitising discourse facing Muslims, I was sensitised by my historical studies on orientalism, gender and imperialism to the over-representation of covered women in the news media and the under-representation of hijabi style in the fashion media. My cross-faith perspective on religiously related fashion de-exceptionalises Muslims.
What is the future of fashion education in the sector? Will it only ever be viewed as a vocational subject area?
Fashion education has a strong future: we are vocational in the best and widest way, offering training for designers, retailers, photographers and journalists and developing the best of the next generation of researchers. The subject as pedagogy and research crosses from humanities to social science to science.
What has changed most in higher education in the past five to 10 years?
The massification of higher education has succeeded in bringing a more diverse community into universities. This demands different skills from academic and support staff in ensuring that all our students achieve fully. I wish that the government would recognise participation in higher education as a social good as well as a skills generator.
If you were a prospective university student facing £9,000 fees, would you apply or get a job?
Although education-minded like many migrant families, my parents were also firmly risk-averse. They helped me financially to the extent that they could and I worked through the holidays. Although universities, including the London College of Fashion, have done some great work to increase wider participation in higher education since the introduction of £9,000 fees, I think the cost and fear of debt would have ended my education just as it had theirs.
What kind of undergraduate were you?
I applied to study fine art at the University of Leeds because I specifically wanted to study feminist art history with Griselda Pollock. As a studious child who became a conscientious, if mouthy, student, the openness to politics as part of cultural and educational discussion at Leeds really allowed me to flourish.
What’s your most memorable moment at university?
Telling a notoriously lecherous tutor that he couldn’t come into our studio building because we, the female students, didn’t want him to teach us. Astonishingly, he went away, and there was no comeback. It didn’t occur to me at the time that he would be marking my degree!
As a child, what did you want to do when you grew up?
Be a go-go dancer. Failing that, a costume designer for go-go dancers. Failing that, a writer.
What keeps you awake at night?
Nothing; I sleep like a log. Unfortunately, I also snore. My partner Áine is a catastrophically light sleeper and I imagine there is nothing worse than being awake while the person next to you slumbers happily and snores: I am surprised that she hasn’t strangled me in my sleep.
What do you do for fun?
It used to be dancing, now it’s gardening: I’m not sure if that’s sad or fab!
What’s your biggest regret?
Not being able to sing: in my head I sound like Aretha Franklin, but in reality I am only allowed to sing in the car, on my own, with the windows closed.
Tell us about someone you admire
Joan Nestle: an outstanding polemicist and social historian and lesbian femme anti-racist warrior. Her writings deal acutely with the intersections of class, race, gender and sexuality, providing an account of lesbian lives that is moving and motivating. Check out the Lesbian Herstory Archives.
What policy would you implement if you were higher education minister for the day?
I would refocus STEM to STEAM: a) because without the arts, science and technology go nowhere; and b) because the arts and humanities are valuable in their own right. A society that imagines them to be separate, or that sees the arts as disposable, only results in a poorer world.
john.elmes@tesglobal.com
Appointments
Gordon Masterton has been appointed by the University of Edinburgh to a new post that aims to help policymakers address large-scale challenges in transport and utilities. As chair of future infrastructure in the School of Engineering, Professor Masterton will pursue research to inform decisions on projects such as high-speed rail, low-carbon energy and sustainable water supplies. He was until recently vice-president of Jacobs Engineering. He is also a past president of the Institution of Civil Engineers and was the government’s project representative on London’s £15 billion Crossrail development. Professor Masterton will oversee a new Future Infrastructure Research Centre at Edinburgh.
The University of Portsmouth has named a former head of marketing for Monash University its new director of marketing and communications. Dorothy Albrecht has more than 20 years’ senior-level marketing and communications experience in Australia, having worked at Monash from 2010 to 2014 and having held posts at the Swinburne University of Technology and Curtin University. She will join Portsmouth this month, succeeding Peter Reader, who will retire after seven years in post.
Academics are among seven senior research fellows who have been announced by Shakespeare’s Globe in recognition of their “extraordinary contribution to knowledge of Shakespearean theatre through their work at and for the Globe over two decades or more”. The fellows are: Andrew Gurr, professor emeritus at the University of Reading and former director of research at the Globe; Martin White, professor emeritus at the University of Bristol; Franklin J. Hildy, professor of theatre at the University of Maryland; Mark Rylance, founding artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe; Claire van Kampen, founding director of music at Shakespeare’s Globe; Jon Greenfield, project architect during the reconstruction of the Globe; and Peter McCurdy, Shakespeare’s Globe master craftsman.
Professor Reina Lewis
Professor of Cultural Studies at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London
Reina Lewis is Artscom Centenary Professor of Cultural Studies at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. She is one of the UKs leading authorities in modest and faith based fashion and dress and has most recently published Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures (2015). Reina is a frequent media commentator – including for the New York Times, BBC World, BBC Radio 4, The Guardian, The Times and Marie-Claire magazine. She has authored a number of books including Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem (2004), and is the editor of Modest Fashion: Styling Bodies, Mediating Faith (2013). Reina Lewis convenes the public talks series Faith and Fashion at London College of Fashion, UAL:, one of the world’s leading providers of fashion education.
Reina Lewis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Reina Lewis
Nationality British
Occupation Art historian
Notable work Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures
Reina Lewis (born 1963)[1] is a British art historian and author. She is currently a Professor of Cultural Studies at the London College of Fashion at the University of the Arts London.[1][2]
Contents [hide]
1 Early life
2 Career
3 Works
4 References
Early life[edit]
Lewis was born in northeast London. She studied fine art at the University of Leeds.[1]
Career[edit]
Lewis' research has focused upon postcolonial history, Middle Eastern and Ottoman women's history, gender studies and studies of other minority groups.[3] Her 2015 book Muslim Fashion focused on over ten years of research into the subject, in particular the use of the hijab as a fashion statement.[4][5] The launch of the book was combined with a London College of Fashion panel discussion on "Muslim Fashion: recent histories, future directions".[6] In 2016, she was an introducer for the foundation of the British Asian Fashion Network.[7] Lewis has written for the New York Times, The Guardian, The Times and Marie Claire magazine, and has featured on BBC Radio 4.[8]
Rethinking Orientalism
Fred Rhodes
The Middle East.
.351 (Dec. 2004): p64.
COPYRIGHT 2004 IC Publications Ltd.
http://www.icpublications.com/
Full Text:
Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem By Reina Lewis published by IB TAURIS ISBN 1 86064 730 8 price 14.95 [pounds sterling] paperback
These eyewitness accounts from inside the Ottoman harem are the first full-length study in English of these previously neglected voices. At the
turn of the 20th century, the image of the women of the Ottoman harem remained a potent mystery to the West--creating a market for memoirs
and autobiographies relayed by western women travellers and also for the first time in English Ottoman women themselves telling their stories to
a curious western readership --simultaneously challenging stereotypes and relying on the mystique of the veiled woman to promote sales.
Rethinking Orientalism is a timely contribution to the critical questions we now face about the relationship between Islam and the West. It
explores alternative dialogues between Ottoman and western women and represents a major contribution to both Middle East and Cultural
Studies.
Rhodes, Fred
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
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Rhodes, Fred. "Rethinking Orientalism." The Middle East, Dec. 2004, p. 64+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA126165259&it=r&asid=6bf56088a842d1be8235f3d5773d0839. Accessed 6 Mar.
2017.
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Lewis, Reina. Muslim fashion: contemporary style cultures
B.B. Chico
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1201.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Lewis, Reina. Muslim fashion: contemporary style cultures. Duke, 2015. 386p bibl index afp ISBN 9780822359142 cloth, $99.95; ISBN
9780822359340 pbk, $28.95; ISBN 9780822375340 ebook, contact publisher for price
(cc) 53-3556
BP190
CIP
Inspired by the 2005 London bombings, Lewis (cultural studies, London College of Fashion) recognized that Muslim fashions were
underrepresented in style media and overrepresented in news media, aggravating differences between Islam and Western culture. Building on
Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith (CH, Oct'10, 48-0950) by anthropologist Emma Tarlo and Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion (CH,
Apr'14, 51-4512) by Tarlo and Annelies Moore, which revealed to Western readers the phenomenon of Muslim women living in communities of
choice and diversity, pushing the limits of traditional, modest hijabi Islamic clothing, Lewis provides a wider historical/cultural/ commercial and
non-religious-doctrinal treatment of this topic. She shows that beyond the ecommerce online niches, mainstream fashion designers are responding
to the large commercial market serving a growing population of young (18-24 years) Muslim women living in Europe, North America, Turkey,
Indonesia, and elsewhere. Such growing commercialization is related to Muslim branding, interfaith dialogue, and new taste communities.
Focusing largely on the headscarf (or hijab), Lewis claims that the logic of fashion, formerly considered frivolous, is emerging as a significant
discourse on modesty; young women are becoming religious interpreters creating a type of syncretism between faith and secularity. A sometimes
cumbersome academic writing style is the only drawback in this work on a topic of vital importance in today's changing world. Summing Up: ***
Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.--B. B. Chico, Regis University
Chico, B.B.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Chico, B.B. "Lewis, Reina. Muslim fashion: contemporary style cultures." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p.
1201. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661687&it=r&asid=1b5deb5dfea4f0a956f3fb91af394151. Accessed 6 Mar. 2017.
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661687
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Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and
Representation
Deborah Cherry
Victorian Studies.
40.2 (Winter 1997): p377.
COPYRIGHT 1997 Indiana University Press
http://www.iupress.indiana.edu
Full Text:
There can be no doubt that in the two decades since its first publication in 1978, Edward Said's Orientalism has profoundly changed the writing of
nineteenth-century history and the study of Victorian literature. Scholars working in the field of visual culture too have taken up Said's analysis of
"the Orient as an integral part of European material civilization and culture" and of Orientalism as "a mode of discourse with supporting
institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles" (2) to find architecture, exhibited
paintings, and printed ephemera steeped in imperialism and promoting Orientalist stereotypes. Along the way, Said's propositions have been
debated and reformulated, his grand narratives perceived as too totalising. Taking issue with Said's claims that the Orient was a male province and
experience, and his reluctance to consider seriously women's writing, feminist scholars have mapped women's experience and involvement in
imperialism and acknowledged the imperialism formative of, and worked into, women's cultural production. Building on and developing the
work of Anita Levy, Billie Melman, Sara Mills, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Reina Lewis demonstrates that "women did play a part in the
textual production that constituted Orientalism" and she rightly insists that "gender, as a differentiating term, was integral to the structure of
[Orientalist] discourse and individual experience of it" (18). Gendering Orientalism is therefore preoccupied with the tensions between race,
gender, and representation, and its key themes are the agency of white middle-class women as cultural producers, and the multiplicity and
diversity of their representations of the Orient. To elucidate her arguments, Lewis focuses on two areas: approximately three quarters of the book
is allocated to a discussion of women Orientalist painters, while the last chapter considers George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876). Her discussions
are presented in a lively, accessible way, informed by recent critical theory and clearly located in the current literature. What is rewarding and
innovative about Gendering Orientalism is its substantial engagement with visual imagery by French and British women artists, for, although
several studies have drawn attention to the centrality to Orientalism of images of women, no existing publication explores in such detail women's
paintings of the Orient. Lewis relates these images to a dense textual web, full of contradictions, deftly highlighting antiphonal voices to
accentuate the range of representations by women and to signal those with the potential to destabilise prevailing fantasies of the Orient,
particularly of the harem. In addition Lewis emphasises that "imperialism played a role in the very construction of creative opportunities for
European women," especially in the ways in which "they propelled themselves into the potentially transgressive position of cultural producer"
(3). While there is much to debate here - the model of power, and the highly contentious notion of women's cultural production as transgressive -
Lewis's reflections on the conflicts between the possibilities for women to enunciate a vision of imperialism "against the grain" and the
recuperative strategies of hegemonic discourse are thoughtfully elaborated.
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The centerpiece of the book is a lengthy discussion of the French painter, Sophie Bouteiller de Saux, who adopted the professional name of
Henriette Browne, perhaps to appeal to art markets on both sides of the Channel. The consideration of Browne's work and its critical reception in
France and Britain is meticulously researched, persuasively argued, and wholly absorbing. Lewis convincingly demonstrates that Browne
produced two remarkable pictures which presented the harem "as a domestic space whose social environment is shaped by the women who live
there" (156). In their observance of codes of etiquette and propriety, their accenting of familial relationships, and their depiction of the female
body in enveloping robes, these paintings "threaten to disrupt the expected mode of viewing and satisfactions of the Western audience" (139). At
the same time, Lewis notes that other women painters and, indeed, this same artist could peddle mainline Orientalist imagery of dancers, slave
markets, and female nudes, and she concludes that the female Orientalist gaze was contradictory and fractured. Yet more than this, it was "not just
that Orientalism was a heterogenous, polyglot discourse, but that each individual image was itself polysemic" (184).
But where was the Orient? If for Said it was to be located primarily in relation to the Arab lands of the Near East and across to India, Rey Chow
in Writing Diaspora (1993) has challenged such territorial fixity. Gendering Orientalism ranges across representations of a geographical area
which extends from Africa to the eastern Mediterranean and in the last chapter to Britain, in which Lewis contends that "despite the novel's
generally positive portrayal of Judaism . . . Daniel Deronda replicates many of the fundamental Orientalist tropes of difference and otherness"
(192) and Jews "are positioned as England's Orientalized other" (201). There is, however, a missed opportunity to consider visual alongside
literary representations and to continue the interdisciplinary analysis so productively utilized in earlier sections.
It is perhaps here that this otherwise closely structured account seems to fragment, for interesting and important as this last chapter is, its ideas are
not, for this reader at least, sufficiently integrated into the main analytical framework of the book. By the end of Gendering Orientalism there is a
sense that the broadly expansive title promised more than could be fulfilled by the two case studies of women Orientalist painters of figure
subjects - no landscape artists are included, numerous though they were - and one novel, canonical as it may be. By this point, too, the reader may
be a little weary of exhortation and explanatory parentheses.
But these are minor quibbles. Gendering Orientalism is an innovative work, exceptionally useful for teaching (as I have already discovered), and
an invaluable resource.
DEBORAH CHERRY University of Sussex
DEBORAH CHERRY, Professor at the University of Sussex in the Department of Art History, is the author of Painting Women: Victorian
Women Artists (Routledge 1993) and Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture Before 1900 (Routledge 1998).
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cherry, Deborah. "Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation." Victorian Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, 1997, p. 377+. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA20545211&it=r&asid=7cd25163f223851112fce37ebd427785. Accessed 6 Mar. 2017.
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Reina Lewis. Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and
the Ottoman Harem
Gillian Whitlock
Biography.
29.2 (Spring 2006): p383.
COPYRIGHT 2006 University of Hawaii Press
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/t-biography.aspx
Full Text:
Reina Lewis. Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2004. 297 pp. ISBN 0-8135-3543-
3, $29.95.
In this book Reina Lewis focuses on a group of women writers whose travel accounts, memoirs, and fictions offer a non-Western engagement
with the stereotypes of the Oriental woman. As Lewis reminds us at the outset, stereotypes change; they are challenged and yet they also possess
a flexibility that continues to structure the terms of contemporary power and oppression. "Orientalism" gathers together a series of powerful
stereotypes that are fundamental to the self-construction of the Western subject as an enlightened, modern, sovereign individual understood over
and against its "Other," understood as the archaic, primitive, exotic Oriental. Lewis's concern, both here and in her earlier study of women's roles
in imperial culture and discourse, Gendering Orientalism: Race Femininity and Representation (1996), is to grasp how the West is constructed
through its Others. This preoccupation defines the field of postcolonial criticism, emerging originally in Edward Said's groundbreaking study
Orientalism (1978). And yet, as Said himself recognized in later work, it is a terrain that needs to be mapped with careful attention to specific
determinations of gender, race, class, and ethnicity, and in locations where local relations and the coordinates of place and time are marked
precisely and with care. It is this attention to the specific formulations of Orientalist discourse, and the ways that these are resisted and used
variously, that defines Reina Lewis's scholarly project of rethinking Orientalism and building on current developments in Middle Eastern
women's studies.
The series of little-known autobiographical English-language publications about segregated life by Ottoman women Halide Edib, Demetra Vaka
Brown, the sisters Zeyneb Hanim and Melek Hanim, and the British author Grace Ellison that Lewis focuses on here emerged early in the
twentieth century. These texts are read together as a gendered counter-discourse, a politicized rewriting of Western harem literature that occurred
at a time of tumultuous social and political change as the Ottoman Empire was transformed into the modern nation state of Turkey. In part,
Lewis's intention is to produce a biographical study of these women that brings them alive in a "quaintly old-fashioned way" (11), and Rethinking
Orientalism includes a series of photographs that do encourage this kind of engagement. However, these autobiographies and images are taken up
in what is often dense and sophisticated discourse analysis. My own heavily marked-up copy of this book, scored with highlighter and pencil,
records what has been a slow process of often labored reading that might well defeat some readers who would otherwise find these little-known
women and this moment in Middle Eastern history fascinating in exactly the old-fashioned way Lewis desires. This is a pity, and a reflection of
the fact that the mix of theoretical and biographical work required to "rethink Orientalism" in more subtle and complex ways can easily kill its
subjects of attention.
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Nevertheless, this is an important book that repays the effort of reading and has much to offer postcolonial and feminist scholarly work. Lewis
focuses on some of the most resistant, entrenched tropes of Western Orientalist fantasy: the harem, the veil, and polygamy. These emerge again
around and about us now, hideously emboldened by the "war on terror." By taking these up in a study that is meticulously attentive to the
particular codifications of gender and ethnicity, Lewis means to take up the flexibility of stereotypes, and their various and contradictory social
and political uses. For example, she reminds us that from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Embassy Letters (published posthumously in 1763)
onwards, women writers have taken a culturally relativist stance to the harem, presenting Ottoman women as possessing freedoms not available
to Western women, and using the harem as a way of reflecting upon Western domesticity rather than a voyeuristic sexual sphere emblematic of
Oriental excess. By the mid-nineteenth century, trips to the harems of the Middle East were a staple of the tourist industry for Western women, to
the point that Ottoman women began to resist their commodification as tourist spectacle. Lewis reads the autobiographical writings in English by
Ottoman and Muslim women that began to appear in Europe early in the twentieth century as an engagement in print with the West and an
attempt to intervene in Ottoman gender relations at a time of rapid social change due to colonial modernity.
For Lewis, rethinking the rigid orthodoxies of Orientalism requires careful attention to transculturation: the ongoing and provisional invention of
selfhood and identity across differences of gender, ethnicity, and class. It also entails attention to the vicissitudes of the Western literary markets
that reproduce the commodification of Orientalized subjects. Above all though, the representation of Ottoman women as active agents in their
own representation who were able to make strategic use of Orientalist discourses in their interactions with the West is critical for Lewis's project.
It is here that we can see the work of biographical and autobiographical writing and criticism in shaping a more complex view of Muslim women
as powerful agents in their own right, taking the opportunities offered by progressive modernity to conceptualize a specifically Eastern and
Muslim vision of emancipation. Although female emancipation is often told as a Western story, the writings of these women suggest otherwise;
Ottoman women, suggests Lewis, pursued an emancipation that must be specifically Oriental, a selective amalgamation of Eastern and Western
ideas (140).
This, then, is an important book for thinking about the present. Lewis opens up the most entrenched space of the Orientalist imagination, the
harem, to ambiguity and to the agency of Muslim women. Its subtitle will ensure that Rethinking Orientalism will travel on the well-worn paths
established by the ongoing obsession with the harem. Yet it does so provocatively, using life narratives to render this "stereotypically deadened"
space as a "social text": open to interpretation.
Whitlock, Gillian
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Whitlock, Gillian. "Reina Lewis. Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem." Biography, vol. 29, no. 2, 2006, p. 383+.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA148868614&it=r&asid=26877d240acc86f9f3ccd08d94b8dd80. Accessed 6 Mar.
2017.
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REVIEWS
Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures by Reina Lewis
51c2lu6pwglMuslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures is Reina Lewis’s latest contribution to the critical literature emerging at the intersection of fashion studies and Islamic studies (Jones 2007; Moors and Tarlo 2013; Tarlo 2010). Reflecting the primary approach that characterizes Islamic fashion studies, the book argues that “Muslim fashion needs to be taken seriously as fashion” (Lewis 2015, 3). For this purpose, the author combines innovative archival research with multi-sited ethnography to analyze the growing Islamic fashion market and how Muslim individuals, particularly young women, engage with fashion as they negotiate the politics of identity and belonging.
Muslim Fashion’s primary sites are Britain, North America, and Turkey. Acknowledging that multiple fashion systems exist contemporaneously, the book studies sites of retail, fashion magazines and catalogues, and digital media practices to analyze Muslim fashion systems within their broader geopolitical contexts. This approach allows Lewis’s comprehensive study to demonstrate how Islamic sartorial codes are reinterpreted and negotiated, and how Muslim bodies gain new meanings at the confluence of local, national, and global political tensions.
This approach allows Lewis’s comprehensive study to demonstrate how Islamic sartorial codes are reinterpreted and negotiated, and how Muslim bodies gain new meanings at the confluence of local, national, and global political tensions.
Avoiding reductive categorizations such as “the Islamic world” or “the Muslim dress,” the book acknowledges the diversity that defines Islamic belief systems as well as the everyday experience of Islam and practices of embodiment. In-depth interviews with consumers and fashion professionals on different levels—from retail assistants to leading designers, entrepreneurs, and journalists—reveal the complex processes of design, retail, promotion, and consumption that define Muslim fashion systems. The book thus provides important insights into a growing segment of the fashion industry while also demonstrating the role of fashion in identity practices.
In order to analyze Muslim fashion systems, the book presents a diverse array of case studies, such as the development of Islamic fashion brands, Muslim lifestyle magazines, and new media practices. While the chapters complement one another, each of them can also be read separately. Following a comprehensive introduction, the first chapter of Muslim Fashion provides the background for Lewis’s study, situating Islamic consumer cultures within the global debates about Islam. This chapter covers a number of key issues, such as the policies developed to manage Muslim populations in Europe, the changing approaches in multicultural and minority politics, Muslim revivalist cultures, and the politics of veiling. Chapter 2 focuses on the case of Turkey to analyze the commercialization of Islamic clothing. Combining ethnographic research with close readings of catalogues and designs, the chapter presents important insights into the Islamic fashion industry in Turkey and its globalized dimensions. In Chapter 3, the author analyzes Muslim lifestyle magazines. Focusing on the role of fashion in these magazines, the chapter demonstrates the sociopolitical transformations that enabled the emergence of this new mediascape in the United Kingdom, North America, and Turkey.
Presenting a comparative content analysis of the magazines, Lewis examines how their complex visual and narrative strategies address (and produce) different groups of consumers.
Presenting a comparative content analysis of the magazines, Lewis examines how their complex visual and narrative strategies address (and produce) different groups of consumers. Chapter 4 critically unpacks the discourse of choice that is central to the discussions on veiling practices—especially in Western Europe, North America, and, to an extent, Turkey. Focusing on the case of South Asian Muslims in Britain, the chapter demonstrates how choice is defined through multiple social control mechanisms, and how individuals engage with diverse yet intersecting fashion systems as part of their identity work. The chapter thus undermines the presumed binary of mainstream and Muslim fashion. Chapter 5 focuses on retail to analyze the experiences of consumers and sales professionals in Britain. The chapter demonstrates how cultural, ethnic, and religious capital may define the aesthetic and affective labor of visibly Muslim and female fashion professionals. Chapter 6 studies Muslim female bloggers’ and entrepreneurs’ use of digital media and communication technologies. The chapter shows how “modest” fashion practices are presented and redefined, and alternative forms of religious knowledge production emerge with the aid of new media. The final chapter analyzes the complex relationship between commodification and community formation. For this purpose, the chapter examines Muslim fashion’s relationship with the connected spheres of Islamic branding, interfaith dialogue, and “new Muslim taste communities.” A particularly interesting aspect of this chapter is its analysis of non-hijabi modest fashion and the role of the people Lewis describes as dejabi women—Muslim women who stop covering their hair yet dress modestly—in defining Islamic fashion practices and Muslim communities.
The geographical scope of Muslim Fashion and its commitment to historical analysis enables a sophisticated understanding of Muslim fashion systems, as well as the everyday experiences of young Muslim women and how their bodies and subjectivities are shaped through complex power dynamics. The extensive geographical scope of the book, however, at times poses an obstacle to the study—particularly in the sections on Turkey. While Lewis does present an insightful account of the world of Islamic fashion in Turkey, the book could benefit from a more comprehensive discussion on the transformation of the public sphere under the successive governments of the Justice and Development Party [Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi] since 2002 and how the producers and consumers of Islamic fashion have experienced these processes. Muslim Fashion also features thought-provoking arguments on the parallels between the identity practices of queer and visibly Muslim subjects. The similarity Lewis proposes in the historical development of queer and Islamic subcultures, and her definition of Muslim women’s adopting the hijab as “coming out” are particularly interesting (Ibid. 171 and 195) and have the potential to inspire future research on the intersection of Islamic studies and queer studies.
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.
Reviewed by Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay, New York University
Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures
by Reina Lewis
Durham and London: Duke University Press
Paperback / 400 pages / 2015
ISBN: 978-0822359340
To read more book reviews, please click here.
References
Jones, Carla. “Fashion and Faith in Urban Indonesia,” Fashion Theory 11(2&3) (2007): 211-231.
Moors, Annelies and Emma Tarlo, eds., Islamic Fashion and Anti–Fashion: New Perspectives from Europe and America. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013.
Tarlo, Emma. Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith. Oxford, UK and New York: NY: Berg, 2010.
Claire SadarFebruary 28th, 2016
Lewis, Reina. 2015. Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures. Duke University Press; Durham, NC.
Muslim fashion is an emerging, hot topic in international, English-language media and marketing. In just the past few months, there has been media buzz over a hijabi model in the video ad for international retailer, H&M, while the hijabi founder of the online lifestyle magazine, MuslimGirl.net, rang the opening bell of the Nasdaq stock exchange as part of a group of young entrepreneurs honored by Forbes magazine.
Of course, the phenomenon of Muslim (also sometimes referred to as Islamic) fashion predates this sudden interest from Western media outlets and corporations. Among minority Muslim populations in Western countries, Muslim fashion has been a vibrant industry for a number of years; in Muslim majority states, like Turkey, Malaysia and Indonesia, it has thrived for decades.
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Reina Lewis’ deeply researched and densely packed book Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures explores the phenomenon of Muslim fashion from a number of different angles, in three different social contexts. Lewis is a professor of Cultural Studies at the London College of Fashion, which is part of the University of the Arts London. Her research and scholarly output has been extensive, and focuses on post-colonial studies, the history of the Middle East and the Ottoman Empire, and the fashion cultures of minority groups (sexual, religious and ethnic/racial), among other areas.
Muslim Fashion is grounded in Lewis’s extensive field work, conducted over ten years, as well as her deep theoretical engagement with thinkers from Pierre Bourdieu to Edward Said. In her book, Lewis argues that “Muslim fashion needs to be taken seriously as fashion,” and makes clear that the central purpose of her book is to move away from:
questions of alienation and extremism among young men to explore how and why young Muslim women are using their engagement with mainstream fashion to communicate their ideas and aspirations about modern Muslim identities to coreligionists and to majority non-Muslim observers alike.
Lewis goes on to define “Muslim Fashion” as a:
.. a form of youth subculture. This is a subculture in which religiosity figures as one among other mutually constitutive terms of social differentiation alongside class, ethnicity, and gender; a subculture that defines itself in relation to and distinction from the social and cultural norms of both a dominant or mainstream (and often hostile) non-Muslim majority and parental cultures of religion and ethnicity that are themselves socially and politically minoritized; a subculture in which creative practices of bricolage appropriate and transform commodities from multiple intersecting fashion systems…
Lewis focuses on societies where Muslims, as a religious and cultural group, are in the numerical minority, are subject to legal and social prejudice, or both. Defining the book’s scope in this ways, Lewis includes Muslim majority Turkey alongside Britain and North America, because, as she argues, Turkey is a “secular state in which ‘religious’ dress has been regulated by the state and regarded with hostility by secularists.”
But, adding Turkey to the mix is not without its problems. Lewis is not wrong to argue that pious Muslims, generally, and covered (hijabi) women, particularly, have historically been politically marginalized and officially discriminated against by Turkey’s secular political establishment. However, over the last ten to fifteen years, it has been hard to argue that hijabi women in Turkey are a marginalized minority population. The current ruling party, the AKP, has governed Turkey with the goal of politically and social empowering the pious Turks, who make up the majority of the country. The change in Turkey’s legal and social atmosphere over the last ten years leaves no doubt that the AKP has delivered on this promise.
Comparing Turkey with non-Muslim countries also does not hold up from a cultural standpoint. Pious Muslim Turkish women are simply not subject to the same type of racial, religious or cultural harassment in Turkey as they are in the Western context.
Despite the hip topic and ripped-from-social-media cover image, this book is not for the casual reader. Muslim Fashion’s deep grounding in the literature, engagement with contemporary and classic theory and the wide variety of sources and topics it covers makes it a great starting point for scholars launching their own research into contemporary Muslim fashion and lifestyle trends.
Book Review: Modest Fashion: Styling Bodies, Mediating Faith edited by Reina Lewis
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Tina BasiIn Modest Fashion, scholars and journalists discuss the emergence of a niche market for modest fashion among and between Jewish, Christian and Muslim faith groups as well as secular dressers. Crossing creeds and cultures, analysing commentary alongside commerce, the book aims to explore the personal and the political as well as religious, aesthetic and economic implications of contemporary dress practices and the debates that surround them. Reviewed by Tina Basi.
Modest Fashion: Styling Bodies, Mediating Faith. Reina Lewis (ed.). I.B. Tauris. May 2013.
Find this book: amazon-logo
Hardly a day goes by without a news story appearing in which the modesty of women is discussed. Miley Cyrus’s MTV VMAs appearance, the Slane girl, Steubenville, Kate Middleton, Madonna, to name but a few. ‘Too slutty,’ ‘too conservative, ‘too old,’ ‘too young,’ ‘what was she thinking?’ ‘mutton dressed as lamb,’ can often be found in the captions.
The policing and regulating of women’s bodies through modest dressing and the counter move of autonomy and rebellion expressed through fashion and trends is not a new story. It has been over twenty years since Judith Butler wrote in Gender Trouble that, “identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results,” enhancing our understanding of sartorial choice as sartorial strategy.
Modest Fashion: Styling Bodies, Mediating Faith, a collection of contributions on new configurations of ‘modest fashion’, is edited by Reina Lewis, who has previously authored Gendering Orientalism and Rethinking Orientalism. Unlike other contributions to the discussion of gender, identity, and sartorial strategies (see Carla Freeman’s High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy; Irene Guenther’s Nazi Chic?; and Emma Tarlo’s Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India), this collection sidesteps discussions of the performative aspects of clothing choices and the way in which they function to construct identity and cultural meaning. Rather, the book explores the intersection of faith, fashion, and ICTs, particularly through the use of social media and online shopping.
Lewis sets up the collection by writing that modest fashion is a young woman’s game, but rather than youthful rebellion or experimentation, ‘modest dressers’ tend to be regarded as, “representatives of essentialized, unchanging collective religious identities rather than as individuated youthful style seekers” (p.3). The key questions posed by the book ask, does modest fashion, “help to keep people in the faith…or does it dangerously dilute religious identifications?” (p.12). Through a detailed discussion of Internet retail, blogs, and forums, the book unpicks the way in which women experience and engage with fashion and faith.
The chapter by Annelies Moors, “‘Discover the Beauty of Modesty’: Islamic Fashion Online”, is an especially enjoyable read that describes the use of social media and discussion forums. The personal accounts and narratives of women’s experiences shopping and the points where authors noted the localising of web stores and the Islamic clothing guidelines will be of interest to many researchers working on identity and technologies.
The chapter by Lewis, “Development of Women as Religious Interpreters and Intermediaries”, is perhaps the strongest in the collection, unsurprisingly as much of the research behind the book comes from Lewis’s AHRC/ESRC-funded research project on modest fashion at the London College of Fashion. Lewis accepts that the Internet is not neutral and not experienced by everyone in the same way, but argues that the deterritorialised and dematerialised nature of online sales and related communication is essential to the emergence of niche markets. Her chapter also better defines ‘modest fashion’ as, simultaneously, a taste-making mechanism, ideological category, and marketing device. She goes on to say that through the relentless spread of social media and the blogosphere commercial websites are “expanding their role in commentary as well as sales” (p.44).
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A sign requesting modest dress in Zefat, Hazafon, Israel. Credit: tracealex CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Some readers may feel frustrated with the book at times. I often found myself searching for deeper insights and analysis in to the motives or objectives as to why these women were choosing to dress modestly. The book often felt like a description rather than an analysis of the emerging niche markets and commentary. Clothing and fashion is experienced and whilst discussion is of course relevant and can influence choice, the motives behind the ‘ideological category’ of modest fashion were left unexplored.
Linda Woodhead perhaps gets closest to this in the introduction, where she acknowledges that fashion is significant to the discussion of religion precisely because it is a sphere where, “women can act autonomously and creatively, outside of male control and as leaders in their own right,” (xviii). Lewis herself does offer a brief nod to this unexplored area (unexplored in this collection at least) when she writes that in Mahmood’s study of Islamic revivalist women in Cairo in the 70s:
“women may dress modestly for all sorts of reasons (making a political statement, avoiding unwelcome male attention, accommodating community norms, gaining social mobility or status)” (p. 43-44).
My own sense was that avoiding unwelcome male attention, spatial mobility and social mobility played a large part in choosing modest fashion, but this collection does not engage with such a discussion. At heart, the book is about consumerism and consumption and less about production or construction of identity. With the exception of Elizabeth Wilson’s chapter on religious beliefs, the book does not explore the cultural baggage and the assumed responsibility for women as ‘cultural carriers’ (see Yuval-Davis’s chapter “Identity, Politics, and Women’s Ethnicity,” in Identity, Politics, and Women) – much of which is mediated through clothing.
Though Lewis writes that “women’s online discourse about modesty contributes a distinctively gendered strand to the emergence online of new forms of religious discourse often regarded as a male sphere of activity” (p.48) and that “women style mediators and entrepreneurs are themselves constructing innovative forms of religious discourse online, creating cross-faith interactions that span commerce and conversation,” (p.49), the other chapters in the book do not explore this observation. The book’s strength lies in the discussion of fashion and ICTs as a way in to the mainstream discussions of religion and autonomy.
Other chapters in the book include debating modesty on the Internet (Tarlo), consumer experience (Goldman Carrell), and notions of modesty (Miller). Miller posits quite a delightful theory in suggesting that wearing denim jeans represents its own particular morality, albeit unintentional and unconscious. “It seems that it is the orthodox religions that are trying to cultivate what we could term immodest claims to being conspicuous and morally superior…who repudiate a form of clothing precisely because it has been more effective…in becoming the material culture of modesty and self-effacement” (p.135). He leaves the reader with the wonderful image that we might all consider telling our children, ‘when you grow up I want you to be ordinary, I want you to wear jeans’.