Reina Lewis

Veils and Sales: Muslims and the spaces of postcolonial fashion retail

Abstract Linking veils to fashion (and Islam to modernity), this article analyzes the presence of veiled assistants in London fashion shops as examples of spatial relations that are socializing and ethnicizing. In the anxious days after the 2005 bombs, the veiled body working in West End fashion retail moved through the postcolonial city in a series of fluid dress acts whose meanings were only partially legible to her different audiences. Connecting recent international Muslim lifestyle consumer cultures to gendered consumption in the development of Middle Eastern modernities, this article evaluates new British legislation protecting expressions of faith at work in relation to the role of veiled shop girls in postcolonial shopping geographies.

Marketing Muslim Lifestyle: A New Media Genre

Recently developed to serve the consumption needs of an emergent Islamic bourgeoisie, English-language Muslim lifestyle media depart from previous community media by including fashion as an integral part of the genre. Creating fashion editorial brings lifestyle publications up against internal debates about the representation of the female body and concepts of modesty. Central to this is the problem of what Muslim looks like, or what looks Muslim. The challenges faced by Muslim style intermediaries in staging a dressed body recognizable to readers as Muslim parallel those faced by the new queer lifestyle media established a decade previously. This paper draws on interviews with Muslim lifestyle journalists to explore how they negotiate internal community debates about female modesty while dealing externally with the mainstream fashion industry. These magazines strive to produce content that meets the needs of modesty and fashion in a context where Muslim womens dress is accorded hypervisibility by majoritarian cultures. The study raises questions about the relationship between marketability, fashion, and piety in the ongoing development of faith-based consumer cultures, evaluated in relation to critiques of neoliberalisms fostering of consumer subjects.

On veiling, vision and voyage

This article is concerned with the changing significance of the veil in Turkey in the early years of the twentieth century. Its discussion of the political significance of womens dress in a period of accelerated social change is conducted through the analysis of two illustrated books, one by a visiting English feminist and one by a Turkish woman who writes about life in Turkey and her travels in Europe. In this way, the debate about the veil is examined through an analysis of cross-cultural dressing which takes into account the different significations of seclusionary mechanisms for women constructed as Oriental and as Occidental. The study engages with recent theories about cross-dressing and transgression but argues that such theories are often unthinkingly Eurocentric in their valorization of transgression. Its analysis of the photographs and written elements in its primary sources suggests that cross-cultural dressing is a practice unevenly open to differently racialized social subjects. To this end,...

Feminism and Orientalism

Deborah Cherry, Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture, Britain 1850–1900. London: Routledge, 2000. 268 pp. (inc. index). ISBN 0–4151–0727–X, £13.99 (pbk) Julie F. Codell and Dianne Sachko Macleod, eds, Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998. 249 pp. (inc. index). ISBN 1–8592–8454–X, £49.50 (hbk) Dorrine Kondo, About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. 277 pp. (inc. index). ISBN 0–4159–1140–0, £50.00 (hbk); ISBN 0–4159–1141–9, £14.99 (pbk) Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature. London and New York: Yale University Press, 2000. 328 pp. (inc. index). ISBN 0–3000–8389–0,

Uncovering Modesty: Dejabis and Dewigies Expanding the Parameters of the Modest Fashion Blogosphere

35.00 (hbk) Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 182 pp. (inc. index). ISBN 0–5126–2658–7, £14.95

Seeing, recording and discussing LGBTQ fashion and style

Abstract Since the early 2000s modest fashion blogs and social media and related e-commerce have constituted a zone of women-led fashion mediation fostering dialogue within and across faiths and between religious and secular practitioners. Premised on a discourse of modest fashion as individual choice rather than compulsion, modest fashion incorporates style considerations into the quotidian practices of “everyday religion” characterized by blending, syncretism, and contradiction. This article examines how modest fashion discourse responds to the increasing numbers of women who choose to discard what have come to be the key signifiers of religious female modesty in Islam and orthodox Judaism, the hijab and the wig or hat, made prominent online by the wardrobe changes of two transnationally prominent USA-based bloggers, Nina Cohen of alltumbledown and Winnie Détwa of winniedetwaland. Interviews and blog and social media analysis demonstrate that contra mainstream orientalist presumptions that women who remove the veil have been saved from Muslim civilizational alterity, online debates within modest fashion seek to regard these modified forms of self-presentation as widening, rather than quitting, the frame of modest embodiment.

Fashion, Shame and Pride: Constructing the Modest Fashion Industry in Three Faiths

Introduction to edited special issue of journal on LGBTQ fashion and style. Cole and Lewis were the editors of this special themed issue.

Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation

Dress that is understood to be religiously defined is presumed to be the opposite of fashion, to be spatially and temporally apart from the fast changing individuating global trends that characterize modernity. It is also presumed that religious cultures that require or encourage versions of modest dressing and body management are motivated by shame. These presumptions are challenged by the development in the mid-2000s of a new niche market for modest fashion that crosses the three Abrahamic faiths and that works internationally. The potential cost-savings of e-commerce allows many niche markets to grow. The field of modest fashion online is characterized by a mixture of commerce and commentary with an active blogosphere and social media providing opportunities along with entrepreneurship for a women-led discourse about fashion, modesty, and the body. This chapter uses the framework of internet commerce and communications to de-exceptionalize religious clothing cultures and place them within the wider consideration of how shame impacts fashion as an embodied practice, repositioning shame as one among other considerations that factor into the current explosion of creativity in modest fashion.