Contemporary Style Cultures
Reina Lewis
“Reina Lewis discusses Muslim dress as fashion in the United Kingdom and its networks elsewhere, eschewing its reception in mainstream media as a sign of ahistorical and unmodern identity. Lewis’ previous scholarship on gendered Orientalism and academic post in fashion studies situates her in the best position to handle this delicate topic, and she admirably achieves to maintain both a critical distance and emphatic proximity to her subject. This is a must read for anyone interested in the visual and politico-economic analyses of Muslim fashion in relation to multiple fashion systems, as well as an ethnographic study of young women who live in Britain among a minority Muslim population.”—Esra Ackan, author of Architecture in Translation
“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
Read an interview with Reina Lewis at Times Higher Education: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/people/interview-reina-lewis-london-college-of-fashion-university-of-the-arts-london
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.
Reina Lewis is Professor of Cultural Studies at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, and the author of Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem.
Duke University Press
September 2015 400pp 87 photographs, incl. 17 in color 9780822359340 PB £19.99 now only = £19.99 *0.80 £15.99* when you quote CSL1215MSF when you order
