"Faith, Fashion, Identity: Contemporary Muslim Styles"

Convened by Contemporary Muslim Fashions co-curators Jill D’Alessandro,
Curator in Charge of Costume and Textile Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San
Francisco, and Laura L. Camerlengo, Associate Curator, with Reina Lewis,
Artscom Centenary Professor of Cultural Studies at London College of
Fashion, University of the Arts London, and consulting curator of Contemporary
Muslim Fashions.

Program
Held in conjunction with the special exhibition, Contemporary Muslim
Fashions, this day-long series of lectures offers focused examinations of
contemporary Muslim modest dress codes around the world from a diverse
array of international scholars and subject specialists. Topics range from
modest fashion marketing to regional explorations of modest style cultures
in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United States.

Welcome: Jill D’Alessandro
10–10:15 am

Jill D'Alessandro is the Curator in Charge of Costume and Textile Arts at
the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Keynote: Faith and Profit: Fashioning the Muslim Consumer by Özlem Sandikci
Turkdogan
10:15–11:15 am

Veiling and fashion are two terms that, until recently, seldom came
together. Yet, today, we speak of the global Islamic fashion as a thriving
market. It is truly amazing that veiling, a practice that has been
associated mostly with tradition, oppression, and resistance to modernity,
is fast adopting the logic of consumer capitalism and getting integrated to
the workings of fashion industry. In this talk, the formation of Muslim
consumer subjectivity and the concomitant rise of fashionable veiling will
be addressed. The analysis locates the development of veiling fashion
within the political economy of neoliberalism, delineates the institutional
and individual actors involved in the manufacturing of modest fashions,
maps out the changing practices and market dynamics, and elaborates on the
tensions, contradictions, and potentials between Islamic piety and
marketing ethos.

Özlem Sandikci Turkdogan is a Professor of Marketing at the University of
Glasgow Adam Smith Business School. She received her MBA degree from
Birmingham University and PhD in Marketing degree from the Pennsylvania
State University. Her research addresses sociocultural dimensions of
consumption and focuses on the relationship between globalization,
marketing, and culture. Her work has been published in the Journal of
Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Business Research,
Marketing
Theory, Business History Review, Fashion Theory, and several other journals
and edited collections. She is the co-editor of the Handbook of Islamic
Marketing (Edward Elgar, 2011) and Islam, Marketing and Consumption:
Critical Perspectives on the Intersections (Routledge, 2016).

Regional Explorations: Indonesia and Saudi Arabia
11:30 am–12:45 pm

Inspired Cosmopolitanism: Indonesian Modest Dress in National and
Transnational Context by Carla Jones

Fashion design has long relied on forms of creative fertilization glossed
as “inspiration.” This process generates a divided global fashion map, in
which designers in the global capitals of Paris, London or New York are
recognized as autonomous authors of artistic expression inspired by global
travels, while designers outside of those capitals are simply conveyors of
traditional culture. This talk reverses this dynamic by situating Jakarta,
Indonesia, as an alternative fashion capital. I describe how modest fashion
designers in the world’s largest majority-Muslim country take the concept
of inspiration seriously, treating inspiration as a both an aesthetic and
spiritual process. Drawing on diverse textile traditions from across the
Indonesian archipelago, and from transnational travel to East Asia, the
Middle East and Europe, Indonesian modest fashion powerfully articulates
Indonesian conceptions of cosmpolitaneity.

Carla Jones’ research analyzes the cultural politics of appearance in urban
Indonesia, with particular focus on femininity, domesticity, aesthetics and
Islam. She has written extensively on self-improvement programs, manners
and middle-class respectability during the Suharto and post-Suharto periods
in Yogyakarta and Jakarta, and is the co-editor, with Ann Marie Leshkowich
and Sandra Niessen, of Re-Orienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian
Dress (Berg, 2003). Her current work situates anxieties about Islamic style
in the context of broader debates about corruption and exposure. She is
especially interested in the suspicions that settle on covered women in
contemporary Indonesia, in which accusations of hypocrisy intersect with
gendered assertions about revelation and propriety.

The Politics of Dress in Saudi Arabia: Constructions of Nationhood, Norms
and Transgressions by Amélie Le Renard

Dress has played an important role in the symbolic construction of Saudi
nationhood and of distinctive national masculinities and femininities. This
talk discusses how young urban Saudi women inhabit, transgress, and/or
transform norms of dress.

Amélie Le Renard is a permanent researcher in sociology at the Centre
National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. She is the author of A
Society of Young Women: Opportunities of Place, Power and Reform in Saudi
Arabia (Stanford University Press, 2014). She has also published several
academic articles about gender and nation, urban lifestyles in the Arabian
Peninsula, and gender, race and class in multinational professional worlds.
Her current research deals with "Westerners" as a privileged social group
in Dubai.

Intermission
12:45–1:45 pm

Regional Explorations: Turkey and the USA
2–3:15 pm

Between fashion and hijab: Marketing and Consuming Islamic Dress in Turkey by
Anna Secor

Since the 19805, fashionable Islamic dress for
women, or tesettür, has become a growing segment of the textile
industry in Turkey, yet its meaning and practice remain hotly contested.
Through an analysis of the representation of these styles in company
catalogs and of the ways in which covered women in Turkey view the styles,
this presentation will show how fashion and Islamic dress become negotiable
elements of everyday practice. While there may be no easy reconciliation
between the demands for modesty that underlie tesettür and the spectacle of
ever changing fashion, women accept this disjuncture and knowingly engage
in a constant mediation between the two.

Anna Secor is Professor of Geography and the Hajja Razia Sharif Sheikh
Islamic Studies Professor at the University of Kentucky.

Searching Umi's Closet: Black Muslim Women as Innovators and Icons of
Muslim Style

This talk will trace the history of US Muslim fashion through the fashion
innovations of Black Muslim women in the United States. It begins with the
premise that Black Muslim women are the authors of US Muslim Style whose
innovations laid the groundwork for today's trends in Muslim fashion. I
will show how they approached fashion, from everyday dressing to yearly
fashion shows, with cosmopolitanism – drawing inspiration from styles of
the African diaspora, Muslim-majority cultures and local Black and US
styles. Recognizing that fashion, is personal, political and commercial, it
will also examine their impact as entrepreneurs, community organizers and
leaders and nation builders.

Su’ad Abdul Khabeer is a scholar-artist-activist. She is associate
professor of American Culture and Arab and Muslim American Studies at the
University of Michigan and author of the acclaimed book Muslim Cool. She is
also senior editor of the award-winning blog, Sapelo Square. She has
written for The Root, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Ebony
Magazine, the Huffington Post, and in 2018 was recognized by CNN as one of
25 influential American Muslims

Plenary by Reina Lewis
3:15–3:45 pm

Reina Lewis is the Artscom Centenary Professor of Cultural Studies at
London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, and consulting
curator of Contemporary Muslim Fashions. A prodigious author, her books
include Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures (2015); Rethinking
Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem (2004); and Gendering
Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (1996). She is editor
of Modest
Fashion: Styling Bodies, Mediating Faith (2013) and coeditor of Contemporary
South Asian Youth Cultures (2018, with Lipi Begum and Rohit K. Dasgupta); The
Poetics and Politics of Place: Ottoman Istanbul and British Orientalism (2010,
with Zeynep Inankur and Mary Roberts); and Gender, Modernity and Liberty:
Middle Eastern and Western Women’s Writings: A Critical Reader (2006, with
Nancy Micklewright). A frequent commentator on modest fashion in the global
media, Lewis is also host of the public talk series Faith & Fashion held at
London College of Fashion and around the world.

Concluding Remarks: Laura L. Camerlengo
3:45–4 pm

Laura L. Camerlengo is Associate Curator of Costume and Textile Arts at the
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Ticket Information

Tickets are required and available for purchase starting September 1
$25 general | $20 members.

Purchase Tickets

Contact InformationPublic Programs
publicprogramsfamsf.org
(415) 750-7694