I’ve never been religious, but wrangling my political convictions and a love for clothing taught me the vicissitudes of negotiating two value systems that are seemingly at odds while attempting to craft an image that reflects my beliefs and is aesthetically pleasing (to me, at least). It is this tension that drives Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith, which looks at Muslim women who cover in contemporary England through a series of ethnographic profiles highlighting the diversity of their practices and perspectives. Anthropologist Emma Tarlo attends at length to how individual women reconcile visibly displaying their faith with the desire to dress fashionably and self-expressively.

Tarlo describes in great detail how her subjects adapt and negotiate signifiers of both Islam and style in order to craft their own looks, and she repeatedly emphasizes the great creativity of Muslim dress in the West. Noting that some of her subjects have more than 500 hijabs, she argues that the headscarf serves as “a new form of Muslim personal art” that in many cases “provides the aesthetic focal point of a young girl’s appearance.”

Because her account is so grounded in individuals, she mostly addresses hijabi practices as strategies that enable the women to craft the appearances they desire. Thus, she dedicates a lot of time to what her interviewees’ clothing habits mean to them and how they came to decide whether and how to cover. This entails considerable detail into the minutiae of covering choices, for example how tight clothing should be or whether to hide or display one’s neck or wrists.

Which brings us to one of the more politically fraught themes of the book, how different hijabi styles communicate to other Muslims. Men are largely absent from her account, which is, after all, primarily a study of women who display their faith sartorially. But one chapter attends to a group called Hizb ut-Tahrir, describing the strict guidelines for covering the group recommends for its adherents and its critiques of the women who cover less stringently. Tarlo uses her discussion of the group to introduce one of the book’s more interesting tangents: the paradoxical tension inherent in thinking the hijab as a form of fashion at all. The point of hijab, of course, is to remain modest, following the Qu’ranic injunction for a women to hide her beauty. But how, then, do women draw the line between immodesty and fashion? Tarlo effectively points to the difficulties of reconciling the desire to conform to Muslim doctrine by not being too showy with the desire to appear fashionable where they meet, in the hijab that effectively signifies, in the West, the desire to visibly display one’s faith.

This book is primarily intended for an academic audience, and unless you’re really interested in the subject matter you might not take that much from it. I occasionally found the lengthy ethnographies in the first half of the book boring, although her case studies of political organizations and businesses were more gratifying, to this reader at least. Ultimately, Tarlo effectively addresses a weighty issue in a way that respects the autonomy and individuality of those it depicts.

Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith by Emma Tarlo, Berg, 2010
reviewed by Emily Raine
photography by Arden Wray

Designer Josiane Perron recently launched her eponymous label, and has now launched three collections of elegantly constructed vintage-like women’s garments, all made entirely in Montreal.

How and when did you get into making clothes?
At the age of ten, when I would amuse myself tracing Betty & Veronica comics, I decided to make a job of it. I was fascinated by Betty’s ability to make her own clothes and by the scope of Veronica’s closet.

What was your personal style like in high school?
I passed through a classic phase, a vintage phase, and a designer brands phase. In high school my personal style was marked by a transition from grunge style to skater, but there was always a touch of Britpop. My biggest influence at the time was music, especially Elliott Smith and Blur.

What’s your favourite item in your wardrobe?
My Second yoga jeans! The slightly tiedyed wash is superb, and they’re incredibly comfortable. It’s a real addiction, it’s impossible to wear other jeans once you’ve tried yoga jeans. The only thing that beats my yoga jeans is the pleasure and lightness of wearing a dress.

What are your biggest influences when you design?
The 20s and 60s remain by far my biggest influences, but it’s above all ambiances that give direction to creating each of my collections. These ambiances come from places, images, blogs or TV shows like True Blood, Six Feet Under, and Mad Men.

What inspired your last collection?
My spring-summer 2010 collection is inspired by hot summers and the 60s-70s. It has a bit of a folk, western allure in the white, grey, khaki, mustard and red tones. A bit of flowered print, fringe, recovered buttons and flounce give the collection a feeling of lightness.

Josiane’s Favourite Designers…
Wren
Orla Kiely
Marc Jacobs
Paul Smith
A.P.C.

…plus a few of her favourite up and comers
Dace from Vancouver, for their simplicity and dreamy brand image. Their ambient video clips are unforgettable.
Betina Lou in Montreal, for her magnificent and feminine dresses inspired by yesterday’s muses.
Noir Bonbon from Vancouver, for the comfortable materials and a simplicity always underlined by fascinating details.

Interview by Emily Raine
Photos by Karine Perron

When I first received My Wonderful World of Fashion, my main concern was that I would write such a raving review that I’d sound like the publisher’s flack. Nina Chakrabarti’s lovely line drawings take us on an interactive tour of fashion history, letting her young audience explore their own twists on the designs en route. Opening it made me want to either take a hot tub back in time to play with it as a 12-year-old, or breed purely for the pleasure of giving it to my girls later.

The book contains a mishmash of colouring, design and basic crafty projects, the latter all simple enough that a ten- to thirteen-year-old (which seems to be her target audience) could do them without adult help. My favourite pages let you colour in iconic designs such as Marc Jacobs’ animal-face flats, Elsa Schiaperelli’s shoe hat, Hussein Chalayan’s wooden corset, Ferragamo platforms and two full pages of Roger Vivier pumps! She also includes guides to a mixed bag of sartorial topics, such as basic embroidery stitches, Yoruba Adire textile patterns and antique Bengali jewels, and throws in the odd project like making paperclip necklaces or pom-poms. She is keen to teach, often showing her audience how to draw an article and then giving them space to get creative with it; so, for example, she’ll include several examples of collar lace to colour in, followed by a page of blank collars where her users might render their own lace patterns.

I decided to test drive this bad-boy with an accomplice, the lovely and talented Miss Eva Barney, 11. Eva is a young designer, currently drawing a portfolio of her own dress patterns around a demanding public school schedule. I couldn’t have asked for a more fun book review buddy, and she helped me catch some of the book’s age-appropriate foibles that I otherwise would have missed.

We started out filling in a design on an outlined dolly dress, which we decided would be best suited for a sailoress. Eva came up with the concept, and she executed her vision with the precision of a field marshal. I’ve been out of the colouring game for a while, so she patiently gave me some tips for staying inside the lines and taught me how to smudge the pencil crayon so the colours bleed into a pretty fade. We were supposed to design a handbag to go with our dress, but we decided that sailor girls don’t need handbags and moved on. I sort of coerced Eva to colour several pairs of Vivienne Westwood platforms with me, and she begrudgingly obliged, even though they were a bit bizarre for her taste (“that one looks like a rock star’s head upside down!”).

Which brings us to our first issue: Chakrabarti wears her taste on her sleeve—the lady really goes for weird couture—which is both a strength and weakness of the book. While this subtly encourages her audience to embrace fashion at its most whimsical, my colouring partner merely found a lot of these designs weird (“where would you wear a shoe hat?”), suggesting that she might potentially be alienating her target audience. That said, the author really is all over the map, which I loved, and the book is eminently inclusive—the hair section in the back gives more space to afro stylings than to non-nappy locks, and the design portions are evenly distributed between couture history, street fashion and forays into global or ethnic fashions such as henna tattoos, Moroccan kaftan or geta shoes (the book has a pronounced shoe fetish, in case this wasn’t clear—but, hey, who doesn’t?).

After we’d had our way with Ms. Westwood’s oeuvre, we flipped around for a long time before finding a new project. Which brings us to issue number two: Eva was most interested in designing and stylizing full outfits, and she didn’t think that the book made enough room for this. There are a lot of smaller tasks where users can decorate or personalize parts of her images—creating tee shirts logos, embellishing Carnival masks, applying patterns onto tights—but very few spaces where you could use Chakrabarti’s line-work as the basis for your own design, as we did with our first project. Eva pointed out that anyone old enough to be interested in fashion history as it is presented here is probably too old for colouring—and I’d probably believe her if I didn’t have a date with a pack of pencil crayons and some Tokio Kumagaï slip-ons as soon as I finish this sentence.

My Wonderful World of Fashion by Nina Chakrabarti, Lawrence King, 2009.
Reviewed by Emily Raine and Eva Barney.

A recent exhibition in Italy that includes several burqa-wearing Barbies has unleashed, of course, a wave of scandal, much of which is precisely the sort of ill-informed knee-jerk backlash about Islamic women that makes my skin crawl. Typical is Barbara Kay’s assertion, in the National Post, that these are “travesties of multiculturalism” that “make a mockery of disempowered women who have been stripped of all human dignity, women with no means of challenging their forced depersonalization.” OK, so fierce rhetoric. But let’s unpack a little, shall we?

The Barbies in question are part of a 500-piece exhibition of Eliana Lorena-dressed dolls at the Salone del Cinquecento in Florence, backed by Mattel. These one-off dolls will be displayed, then auctioned off by Sotheby’s on behalf of a charity called Rewrite the Future, which benefits children affected by war. In addition to a few fluorescent burqa-clad Barbies, we find geisha Barbies, shalwar khameez Barbies, chador Barbies, and what can only be described as slutty co-ed Barbies. In short, the collection runs the gamut of cheesy feminine stereotypes, by region. So far, I’d say we’re pretty firmly on standard Barbie territory.

Kay writes plaintively that, with this exhibition, “Barbie has shed her cultural innocence.” It seems to me a thundering irony to accuse the burqa of having suddenly rendered Barbie anti-feminist, given that the doll is based on a German hooker called Lilli and has a—shall we say—fraught history as a model for women’s self-images.

Furthermore, Kay critiques the exhibition for trivializing the plight of burqa-wearing women, a stance that I can certainly get behind. However, while she is sympathetic to those hidden women, I for one fail to see how casting any representation of them as ineluctably anti-feminist is going to help them gain exposure, nevermind political agency. If anything, the exhibition has forced the issue into the limelight, so that it becomes something we can mull over and discuss.

Enforced veiling—which is unquestionably sexist, offensive and demeaning—receives a lot of airtime as yet another shocking manifestation of the terrible ways that brown men treat brown women, to paraphrase Spivak. Veiling practices are systematically policed in Saudi Arabia, Iran and in Taliban-controlled territories, but elsewhere are mostly individual women’s choices, albeit ones framed by cultural habits and expectations—skipping the veil can invite unwelcome attention or even violence in places where most women cover. However, such discourses have been used to justify an ironic reversal in the West, where women in some countries (I’m lookin’ at you, Sarkozy) have been forbidden from voluntarily donning hijab or, more famously, the burqini to go about their business.

To me, this burqa Barbie “scandal” is indicative of a broader problem with how we talk about Muslim women in the West, where we start from the assumption that their cultural differences are a problem to be solved. Ultimately, I’m inclined to agree with Sadie’s Stein’s post on Jezebel, where she reminds that, “it’s a single doll. It’s not mass-produced. It’s presumably not intended for any children, Muslim or otherwise, and doesn’t seem to involve any more social commentary than Malibu Barbie does on Proposition 8.”

- Emily Raine