Asserting Their Fashion
Identity in the Muslim World
By ELIZABETH
PATONNOV. 1, 2016
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Princess Deena Aljuhani Abdulaziz, the new editor
in chief of Vogue Arabia.CreditLauren Fleishman for The New
York Times
Last week, quietly and without much fanfare, the
22nd global Vogue went live.
Framed in striking black and gold, the glossy
digital pages look, in many ways, much like any other international issue of
the world’s most powerful fashion magazine. There is a video interview with the
star model Gigi Hadid, a colorful carousel of spring 2017 runway trends, a
lavish editorial featuring the latest Chanel, and bright, chatty pieces about
hot local brands and social media stars.
But then there is this: “How to Style Your Hair
Under a Hijab.” And this: Malikah, a fiery Beirut-raised hip-hop star,
describing how she began her career spitting lyrics into a face mask to hide
her identity from disapproving conservatives.
And, just after a cinematic short film featuring
the Lebanese designer Elie Saab and the model Elisa Sednaoui amid ornate dining
rooms and lush walled gardens, there is this: the definitive edit of this
season’s most stylish abayas (robelike dresses).
Welcome to Vogue Arabia, a
digital-first, bilingual foray into the hearts, minds and wallets of women in
the 22 countries of the Arab League. As such, it is the latest, and potentially
the strongest, new voice to join a growing chorus demanding global recognition
and respect for Muslim culture and its commercial clout.
Photo
A story on the Vogue Arabia website on hairstyles
for hijabs. CreditVogue Arabia
From Arab Fashion Week, based in Dubai, United Arab
Emirates, which debuted last month on the heels of Paris
Fashion Week, to Jakarta Fashion Week, held last week in the
Indonesian capital, formal fashion showcases are being institutionalized across
the Islamic world.
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At the same time, private individuals are also
claiming their due. A 15-year-old Saudi teenager called for the development of
a hijab-clad emoji this fall, while a fully clothed Muslim journalist was featured wearing a hijab in the
October edition of Playboy. If fashion helps define a social and cultural
narrative, then this movement is focused on reshaping the perception of
21st-century Muslim female identity in ways that go far beyond the veil.
“This Vogue is very overdue,” said Deena Aljuhani
Abdulaziz, 41, the Riyadh-based Saudi princess, former retailer and newly
crowned editor in chief of Vogue Arabia, while she was in Paris during fashion
week last month. “The Arabs deserve their Vogue, and they’ve deserved it for a
long, long time.”
Though Vogue Arabia is not the first foreign
women’s lifestyle magazine to publish an offshoot in the Gulf (Harper’s
Bazaar, Marie Claire and Elle all
publish Arabian editions, for example), its audience ambitions extend far
beyond its immediate geographical borders.
“The Vogue Arabia woman is one who celebrates her
tradition but also considers herself a highly educated global citizen,” Ms.
Aljuhani Abdulaziz said. “Don’t forget that we understand luxury almost better
than anyone else on earth. Middle Eastern women have been serious couture
clients since the late 1960s. We’ve been around long before the Russians and
the Chinese ever came into the picture.”
A key part of her Vogue editorial mission, she
said, is to eradicate misconceptions around the Arab and Muslim diaspora. The
new magazine’s headquarters will be in Dubai, and alongside the online platform
starting next March, the 25-member editorial team will produce 11 print issues
a year, two of which will be solely in Arabic.
Photo
Ms. Aljuhani Abdulaziz works on set at White Rabbit
studios in London for a shoot for Vogue Arabia.
CreditLauren Fleishman for The New York Times
“Vogue Arabia is not just about appealing to our
own region, but about providing a cross-cultural bridge, a beautiful source of
inspiration you would want to pick up even if you were from another area,” she
said.
“Many people don’t really know exactly what Arabia
is, and there are major misunderstandings around modest dressing, too,” Ms.
Aljuhani Abdulaziz added. “I have a responsibility to tackle those issues,
through a fashion lens, of course. I am not interested in being a political
magazine. There are plenty of others who do that. But what I can lay out to
readers, both near and far, is that what brings us together is far greater than
what sets us apart.”
Anniesa Hasibuan, 30, would agree. The Indonesian
designer of modest fashion collections with 124,000 followers on Instagram made history in September
during New
York Fashion Week with a catwalk show in which every model wore
hijabs in ivory, peach and gray silk.
A hijab is not just a symbol or a statement, “but a
part of a Muslim woman’s identity, an identity they are asserting more
confidently,” Ms. Hasibuan said. (Her show received a standing ovation.) “I
believe fashion is one of the outlets in which we can start that cultural shift
in today’s society to normalize the hijab in America and other parts of the
West, so as to break down stereotypes and demystify misconceptions.”
Indeed, modest fashion is fast becoming a
commercial phenomenon; the global Muslim clothing market is forecast to be
worth $327 billion by 2020, according to the latest Global Islamic Economy
report — larger than the current clothing markets of Britain ($107 billion),
Germany ($99 billion) and India ($96 billion) combined. And a rising Muslim
middle class, having greater affluence and sophisticated tastes as well as
pride in its religion, is likely to triple from an estimated 300 million in
2015 to 900 million by 2030, according to Ogilvy Noor, the Islamic branding
consultancy.
So it is of no surprise that in the last 18 months,
a host of Western
brandshave made their own efforts to get into this booming market,
like DKNY, which created a Ramadan capsule collection in 2014; to Tommy
Hilfiger; and Dolce & Gabbana, which included a range of luxury hijabs and
abayas, made from the same fabrics as the rest of its collection. Not to
mention Marks & Spencer’s controversial burkini,
and Uniqlo’s LifeWear collection, created in collaboration with a Muslim
fashion designer, Hana Tajima, which includes “breezy dresses” and “iconic
hijabs.”
Photo
Looks by the fashion designer Anniesa Hasibuan
during Jakarta Fashion Week.
CreditGoh Chai Hin/Agence France-Presse — Getty
Images
Shelina Janmohamed, vice president of Ogilvy Noor,
said: “The rise in modest fashion over the last decade has come hand in hand
with the emergence of ‘Generation M’: Muslims who believe that faith and
modernity go hand in hand. They want to wear their religion with pride but also
feel part of the societies around them.”
She said that more than one-third of today’s
Muslims are younger than 15, and nearly two-thirds are younger than 30. And
when it comes to young women, more are digitally connected, marrying later and
in possession of a disposable income than ever before.
“Consumption is part of their identity,” Ms.
Janmohamed said. “When they buy products that help them better their practice
and that reinforce their beliefs, then they believe it will also make them
better Muslims.”
Events like the Muslim
Lifestyle Expo, held last weekend in Manchester, England, and now in
its second year, offer smaller Muslim lifestyle brands the platform to showcase
their products and services in the realms of halal food and travel, finance and
fashion, to over 10,000 attendees.
The modest fashion catwalk, which hosts three to
four runway shows per day, largely from foreign brands, is the centerpiece of
the weekend, said the Expo’s chief executive, Tahir Mirza, though it also
includes live cooking demonstrations and workshops on Islamic art put on by
local galleries.
“The shows are packed,” Mr. Mirza said. “Many young
British Muslim women love these modest fashion houses from abroad, because they
have westernized branding but traditional values. And they don’t want to
compromise.”
For Jacob Abrian, the chief executive of the Arab
Fashion Council, the industry body responsible for organizing Arab Fashion
Week, his primary focus beyond show seasons is on reinforcing local
infrastructure and the framework necessary to create a viable, interconnected
fashion industry across the region. By strengthening the existing manufacturing
roots and luxury heritage — from the small traditional factories and village
damask weavers to glossy fashion houses being started from the glittering
skyscrapers of the Gulf — and encouraging Western designers to come and
showcase their work to a valuable client base, the Middle East could become a
center for fashion in its own right.
Ms. Aljuhani Abdulaziz appeared acutely aware that her
role as Vogue Arabia editor in chief would require relentless careful
navigation of religious and regional codes.
But as the first Vogue editor to have formerly been
a retailer (she was a founder of a fashion concept store in Riyadh called
D’NA), she pointed out that she was in the best possible position to understand
the demands of her 21st-century readership, “be it the sophisticated Qatari
woman able to shop in Europe, or to help a young woman in a remote village in
Algeria or Yemen have dreams and feel like she can belong to something.”
“This job is not without its challenges,” she said.
“It only really dawned on me after the appointment that this won’t just be me
doing something I love, but is also a massive responsibility. But I know what
offends in this world and what doesn’t, because I am one of them. I have my own
sensitivities as to what is appropriate and what is not. I certainly don’t
believe that you have to have blatant sexuality or absolute nudity to do a
beautiful editorial.”
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As the furor set off by France’s attempt to bar Muslim
women wearing burkinis in public this summer proved, tensions around the right
to bare skin (or not) and what freedom really looks like still simmer across
the world. Reina Lewis, a professor of cultural studies at London College of
Fashion, UAL, and the author of “Muslim
Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures,” suggested that Vogue Arabia
may struggle to be all things to all people.
“Any regional title outside the so-called Western
world has to make decisions on models and their ethnicity, skin color and body
type rather than the usual default Caucasian, and consider considering cultural
distinctions,” Ms. Lewis said. “But Vogue Arabia will have to constantly cross
overtly into religious as well as national and regional identities, practices
and a variety of income brackets in order to find her reader. And that won’t
always be easy.
“Then again,” she continued, “this is something
Western brands are being forced to think about more and more when it comes to
appealing to observant women from numerous religious backgrounds. Fashion
designers in particular need to think more laterally about how they design and
the nonnegotiable elements of some lifestyles they design for.
“Modest fashion and Muslim fashion are no longer on
the periphery of the industry, and an industry that stopped being able to
afford to be elitist and exclusive long ago. This movement is really driven by
an empowered new demographic who are expressing their presence in the modern
world, and attempting to assert their place in it.”
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