“Consumer Culture, Islam and the Politics of Lifestyle: Fashion for Veiling in Contemporary Turkey” (with M. Binark), European Journal of Communication, 17 (4), special issue ‘Lifestyles’, D. McQuail (ed.). (original) (raw)
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The emergence of the first fashion and lifestyle magazine for devout Muslim women in Turkey, Alâ Dergisi, in July 2011, has ensured both negative and positive publicity in Turkey. The humble purpose of this article is to examine the role of Âlâ Dergisi within the nexus of fashion conscious veiled women and fashion industry and how it constitutes a specific image of a new consumer. Hence, the article will first try to detect the dominant discourses regarding to the magazine’s content by using Critical Discourse Analysis and will later discuss them in a more boarder social economical context. The results demonstrate that Âlâ Dergisi as a cultural artifact constitutes both a new image of an Islamic female consumer and a new form of Islamic conspicuous consumption. However, as a commodity product Âlâ Dergisi is still part of an Islamic commodity industry and is thus, bound into the logic of market, following liberal economic principles like offer and demand and profit making.
Turkey’s Headscarf Issue Unveiled: Fashion, Politics and Religion
Tradition and modernity. Religion and secularism. Unwritten conventions and defiance. Change and continuity. Trends and anti-trends. Headscarves and mini-skirts. Competing identities that seemingly exclude themselves. Briefly, Turkey is a land of contrasts and these are reflected in almost every aspect of life, from politics to one’s spiritual and religious choices, including apparently neutral fields such as fashion. “Clothes do not make the man” is a generally accepted truth, yet in Turkey clothing can provide information not only about social status, but also about the religious thinking and political orientation of a person. Fashion, especially women’s clothing, plays a central role in Turkish politics. From Atatürk’s dress code, which encouraged Turks to adopt European clothing instead of the Ottoman fez and the Islamic veil—a measure supported by the state owned clothing industry—to the headscarf “revolution” and the controversial veil ban. From the emergence of Western-inspired shopping malls overloaded with European-style clothes to the opening of their Islamic counterparts that promote modern, fashionable ways of covering up—the so-called türban, available in many colors and various forms (unlike the traditional başörtüsü worn in rural areas or the black çarşaf worn by older women), as well as the recent lifting of the veil ban and the political debates focusing on the headscarf, we can notice that both politics and religion have exerted influence on Turkish fashion trends, challenging Turkish identity and belonging.
Aesthetics, ethics and fashionable veiling: a debate in contemporary Turkey (pre-print)
World Art, 2017
Observant Muslim women all over the world experiment with materials and styles, find inspiration in past and present, Eastern and Western fashions, and create new types of covered dress. This fashionable veiling has also become the topic of heated debates. This article builds on an ethnographic study that highlights the debate over fashionable veiling within Turkey. According to the conceptualisation of the revivalist movement, veiling is an ethical practice of self-cultivation. The dress hypostatises a particular religiously sanctioned aesthetics (an aesthetics of the proper form); and the practitioner commits herself to a religiously defined conduct (an aesthetics of the correct posture). Fashionable veiling is (also) a sartorial practice of self-enhancement. It demonstrates experimentation within a religiously sanctioned aesthetics; and the practitioner’s public behaviour evidences both conformity with and transgression of religiously defined conduct. The article approaches fashion as a realm of the aesthetic and finds guidance in anthropological discussions of ‘Islamic art’, ‘ordinary ethics’ and ‘everyday Islam’. I argue that the debate over fashionable veiling among religious conservatives provides insight into what kind of relationship there can be between ethics and aesthetics, and who is qualified to define it. Religious conservatives emphasise that in veiling the only possible and permissible relationship between ethics and aesthetics is one of subordination of aesthetics to ethics. In contrast, headscarf-wearing fashion professionals, the most visible practitioners of this type of veiling, claim that in fashionable veiling the relationship between ethics and aesthetics is one of identity, namely, aesthetics as ethics.
Area, 2009
The rise of the transnational veiling-fashion industry in Turkey has taken place within the context of neoliberal economic restructuring, the subjection of the veil to new regulations, and the resurgence of Islamic identities worldwide. Even after almost two decades since its first catwalk appearance, the idea of 'veiling-fashion' continues to be controversial, drawing criticism from secular and devout Muslim segments of society alike. Analysing veiling-fashion as it plays out across economic, political and cultural fields is to enter into a new understanding of the role of Islam in the global arena today. Veiling-fashion crystallises a series of issues about Islamic identity, the transnational linkages of both producers and consumers, and the shifting boundaries between Islamic ethics and the imperatives of neoliberal capitalism. In this paper, our overarching argument is that controversies and practices surrounding veiling-fashion show how Islamic actors are adapting and transforming neoliberal capitalism at the same time as they navigate a complex geopolitical terrain in which Islam -and the iconic Muslim, headscarf-wearing woman -has been cast as a threatening 'Other'. Thus the rise of veiling-fashion as a transnational phenomenon positions women and women's bodies at the centre of political debates and struggles surrounding what it means to be 'modern' and Muslim today. Based on interviews with producers, consumers and salesclerks, and our analysis of newspaper articles, catalogues and web sites, this article traces out how the transnational production, sale and consumption of veiling-fashion works to order spaces of geopolitics, geo-economics and subject formation.
Islamic Perspective: Journal of the Islamic Studies and Humanities, 2015
Jurgen Habermas sees modernity as an unfinished project in his same-titled essay. Even though this project was formulated originally as a project of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, it by no means stayed in the eighteenth century alone, but extended its influence further onwards in different contexts to describe different periods of history and aspects of life. Therefore, it is not possible to talk about the modernity, but rather, as Shmuel Eisenstadt introduces the concept, there are multiple modernities. Setting out from this concept, this paper aims to discuss modernity’s relation to religion by focusing on their confrontations, clashes and/or crossroads. In order to comprehend this relation better, the paper uses the context of Turkish society, specifically its practicing religious community as its research setting. Starting with the first modernization efforts in the nineteenth century of the late Ottoman era, and peaking in the early Republican periods, modernization and ‘being modern’ were perceived to be a must for the Turkish State to rise up to the level of developed civilizations. Consequently, this goal was attempted to be achieved through a series of reforms, which mostly concentrated on the appearance –to be modern, one should look modern. Since then in the Turkish context, modernization efforts have mainly tended to be interpreted over the visual, namely the clothing, and especially over the clothing of the women. In line with this tendency, this paper touches upon the common perceptions of ‘what is modern, and what is not’ that are profoundly embraced by the secular elite within Turkish society, who have a tendency to oppose being modern with being religious. However, the focus of the paper is on the perception of ‘modern’ by the conservative Turkish population. This perception is specifically portrayed (but not claiming as all-representative) over the headscarf-wearing women through a survey analysis as well as a case study on the rising popularity of ‘tesettür fashion’ in recent years in Turkey. All throughout the study, the paper questions the possibility of ‘modern Muslim’, and eventually suggests ways to overcome the modern/anti-modern tension profoundly present within Turkish society. The paper, however, does not associate headscarf as the only way of being “modern Muslim”, but rather provides an open floor for discussing its possibility through other cases and definitions. Keywords: modernity, religion, Islamic modernity, tesettür fashion, Turkey
BETWEEN FASHiON AND TESETTOR, MARKETING AND CONSUMING WOMEN'S ISLAMIC DRESS
Journal of Middle East Women s Studies
Since the 19805, fashionable Islamic dress for women, or tesettur, 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 styes in company catalogs and of the ways in which covered women in Turkey view the styles, this article provides insight into how women's fashion and the question of tesettur become negotiable elements of everyday practice. Our analysis shows that while there may be no easy reconciliation between the demands for modesty that underlie tesettur and the spectacle of ever changing fashion, women accept this disjuncture and knowingly engage in a constant mediation between the two.