ABSTRACT
Is it possible to look both fashionable and Islamic? Ask that question to young British Muslim women today and many would almost certainly answer ‘yes’. For some ‘Islamic fashion’ means wearing fashionable clothes ‘Islamically’ by which they mean in conformity with covering restrictions based on interpretations of Islamic texts. For others it means selecting from a new range of clothes designed and marketed specifically as ‘Islamic fashion’. For many, it means a mixture of both. In an American Islamic fashion blog, launched in 2007 and ‘dedicated to stylish Muslima’, it is defined as follows: ‘By Islamic fashion I mean clothing designed specifically with Muslim women in mind and other clothing that can be “Islamized”’.2 Such a definition would have been unthinkable just one decade earlier when most young Muslims living in Britain and other Muslim minority contexts in the West would have perceived the ‘fashionable’ and the ‘Islamic’ as being in tension, if not downright incompatible. Some British Muslim women did of course experiment with adapting Western fashion garments and wearing them in conjunction with hijab, but they probably would have perceived themselves as fashionable Muslims rather than wearers of something called ‘Islamic fashion’.3 If such women wanted to wear explicitly ‘Islamic’ garments then they would have been faced with two options: either purchasing jilbabs and abayas directly from or imported from the Middle East (available in mosque stores and Islamic shops usually run by men and specialized in the sale of religious items) or alternatively, stitching their own outfits. Neither of these options are likely to have been perceived as fashionable. The imported jilbabs looked distinctly foreign. They were usually black, made from thin fabrics ill-suited to the British climate and were often poorly stitched and stylistically incompatible with and impervious to the cycles of change intrinsic to the fashion system. The homemade option offered more potential for experimentation, but unless the person was particularly talented not only in stitching but also in design and innovation, they would have been unlikely to produce garments that would be perceived as fashionable. Such garments had yet to be imagined in the Western context. Furthermore young Muslims even two decades ago were generally less preoccupied both with the issue of covering and the idea of visual
distinctiveness. Those women and girls who did wish to dress modestly and visibly express their identity and faith turned to the headscarf rather than to entire outfits which might be identified as Islamic.4
