Modest Fashion

Tuesday 25th May 2010

Panel discussion: Faith-based Fashion and Internet Retail

To what extent has internet shopping become an important tool for those who want to combine fashion with faith? How is modesty defined in different faith communities? And how far are religious identities and appearances  being re-shaped through the market?

These are just some of the questions that are arising in relation to increased participation in modest fashion. LCF Professor of Cultural Studies Reina Lewis and Dr Emma Tarlo, Reader in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, invite you to a special event to mark the launch of a new AHRC/ESRC- funded research project on modest fashion. With increasing numbers of women choosing to dress modestly due to their religious beliefs, a distinguished panel will discuss whether a new market is emerging for consumers from different faith groups. In addition, they will explore the potential impact for inter-faith dialogue of these shared dress practices among Muslim, Jewish, and Christian women.

Joining Reina and Emma in the consideration of these important questions will be LCF Visiting Professor Annelies Moors, Professor of contemporary Muslim societies at the department of anthropology and sociology, University of Amsterdam, and principal investigator of an international NORFACE research programme on ‘The emergence of Islamic fashion in Europe’, and Professor Niloofar Haeri, Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, and author of Sacred Language, Ordinary People: Dilemmas of Culture and Politics, currently studying comparative concepts of modesty in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

We invite you to the panel discussion, followed by a reception to celebrate the start of the new project and the launch of Emma Tarlo’s book Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith.

Panel: 5.30
Reception: 7-8.45pm
RHS East Space

There is no charge for this event, but booking is essential: please email research@fashion.arts.ac.uk.

Please contact us in advance if you may need assistance to leave the building in an emergency. www.fashion.arts.ac.uk/jps.htm.

Niloofar Haeri is Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She has written on the relations between language,  religion and politics in Egypt and more broadly in the Muslim world in  Sacred Language, Ordinary People: Dilemmas of Culture and Politics and in Langue, Religion et Politique dans l’Espace Musulman (with  Catherine Miller). She has been a Senior Research Scholar at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris and in Aix-en- Provence. She contributed to the Cambridge Handbook of Literacy with  her article “The Elephant in the Room: Language and Literacy in the  Arab World.” She has written on clerical clothes in Iran and is  continuing her field research on notions of modesty in Judaism,  Christianity and Islam.

Emma Tarlo is a Reader in Anthropology at Goldsmiths. She has a long term research interest in the anthropology of dress and material culture in India and Britain. Her books on India include Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India, winner of the Coomarasway Prize 1998 and Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi. Her recent work focuses on transformations in Muslim dress practices in Britain, Europe and in cyberspace. She was co editor (with Annelies Moors) of a special double issue of the journal, Fashion Theory (2007) which focused on new Muslim Fashions around the world.  Her latest book, Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith (Berg 2010) explores the diversity and significance of contemporary Muslim dress and fashion in Britain.

Annelies Moors is an anthropologist and professor of contemporary Muslim societies at the department of anthropology and sociology, University of Amsterdam, where she directs a research programme on Muslim Cultural Politics. She is also the primary investigator of an international NORFACE research programme on ‘The emergence of Islamic fashion in Europe’, and of a NWO Cultural Dynamics programme on ‘Islamic cultural practices and performances: New youth cultures in Europe’. She has published widely on gender, nation and religion in fields such as Muslim family law, wearing gold, the visual media (postcards of Palestine), migrant domestic labor, and fashionable and not so fashionable styles of Islamic dress.

Her publications include Women, property and Islam. Palestinian experiences 1920-1990 (Cambridge 1995), she edited special issues of Islamic Law and Society (2003, Fashion Theory (2008; with Emma Tarlo), and Social Anthropology (2009, with Ruba Salih) and book volumes on Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere (Indiana, 2006, with Birgit Meyer) and Narratives of Truth in Islamic Law (London, 2008; with Baudouin Dupret and Barbara Drieskens).

Reina Lewis is Artscom Centenary Professor of Cultural Studies at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. She is author of Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem, London: IB Tauris, New York, Rutgers (2004), and Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation, Routledge (1996). She is editor ,with Nancy Micklewright, of  Gender, Modernity and Liberty: Middle Eastern and Western Women’s Writings: A Critical Reader, IB Tauris (2006), with Sara Mills, of Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, Edinburgh University Press (2003), and, with Peter Horne, of Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Visual Cultures, Routledge (1996). Reina Lewis is also series editor with Teresa Heffernan of the book series Cultures in Dialogue (Gorgias Press 2007), which brings back into print critical editions of travel writing, memoir and autobiography by Ottoman and Western women travellers and writers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Reina is Principal Investigator on the project Modest Dressing: faith-based fashion and internet retail funded by the AHRC and ESRC as part of the Religion and Society Programme.

Reina’s new book will be called Re-Fashioning Orientalism: New Developments in Muslim Style. An early taste of this work can be found in ‘Veils and Sales: Muslims and the Spaces of Postcolonial Fashion Retail’ in Fashion Theory, 11:4 December 2007.

Jane Cameron is a researcher at the London College of Fashion. She has research interests in the role of material culture in the study of ‘religion’ and the use of visual methodologies. Her current PhD work is on visual self representations of ‘Buddhist’ identity within Dalit communities in India.

Modest Fashion is part of the Religion and Society Programme, funded by the UK  Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences Research Councils.