Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures

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.

“Gracefully interweaving hijab and veiling into historical, political, legal, and cultural contexts, Reina Lewis delves deeply into the everyday style, fashion, and dress of young Muslim women. Lewis captures a dynamic moment in time—transnationally and comparatively—and offers keen insights into the variations and intersectionalities of religion, ethnicity, class, gender, generation, and nation. Muslim Fashion is an extraordinary book and an exemplary model of a feminist cultural studies approach to fashion.”—Susan B. Kaiser, author of Fashion and Cultural Studies

“Muslim Fashion is an important book by an international authority about Muslim fashion, and yet it manages to convey insights that will be of interest across a wide range of disciplines. It is one of those relatively rare books that manages to be methodologically rigorous, while also being theoretically sophisticated. Readable, engaging, thoughtful, lively, and accessible, this book is a landmark publication for our understanding of contemporary Muslim experiences, and offers fascinating insights into the worlds of consumers and producers of Muslim fashion.”—Sophie Gilliat-Ray, author of Muslims in Britain

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