The Dressed Body, Material and Technology: Rethinking the Hijab through Sartorial Sociology

This article explores the opportunities provided for dress and fashion studies by an analytical focus on garments through a number of disciplinary and conceptual lenses. Drawing upon sociological sources, including Bourdieu’s practice theory and Alfred Gell’s insights of human/object agency, as well as anthropology, considerations of material technologies, and clothing physiology, a framework is developed for depicting the many roles that textile materials and garment objects play in knowledge-creation, individual experiences of wearing garments, and the operation of habitus. In my case-study analysis of female Islamic veiling in Finland, I draw upon both primary data and secondary sources that take account of histories – involving individual histories, socio-cultural histories, histories of technological and material developments, and histories of transnational trade-routes – and materialities, including the physicality of garments, human bodies and physical and spatial environments.