Fashionably empowered
Muslim fashion trailblazer in Indonesia unfazed by Islamophobia, saying stylish outfits can add to positive image.
It was during her time as an executive at a marketing research company that Diajeng Lestari encountered a very Islamic, and a very feminine, problem.
“There was no hijab for working women,” she recalled. “There were few options for hijab fashion or Muslim fashion, and it was very hard to find fashion for active working women.”
Her difficulty in finding fashionable, work-suitable hijabs and other items — modest clothing worn by Muslim women covering most parts of their bodies except the face and hands — eventually led her to start Hijup, which operates an e-commerce site with the same name.
Jakarta-based Hijup offers modest yet fashionable items, including headscarves, blouses, dresses, accessories and more for Muslim women, by both established and up-and-coming designers.
Seven years after its founding, the company is now aiming to be more than just an e-commerce operator. “We want to influence [women] to express their real identity — Muslim identity — but still fit the society,” said Lestari, the company’s CEO.
Even though Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, donning the headscarf is actually a relatively recent trend, Lestari points out.
During the 31-year rule of President Suharto, which ended in 1998, ethnicity and religiosity in Indonesia were suppressed in favour of promoting a single secular “Indonesian” identity for the sake of social stability. Only Muslim women in certain communities, such as students and teachers at Islamic boarding schools, wore hijabs then as they were banned in public places like schools and offices.
Twenty years later, the situation is much changed. Indonesia now has the fifth-largest Muslim clothing market, estimated to be worth US$13.5 billion, just behind Saudi Arabia, according to a report by Thomson Reuters. Turkey tops the table at v$27.4 billion.
Hijabs and other forms of covering, which in some Western countries are seen as a symbol of oppression, have come to fulfill a dual function as a sign of connection to Islam as well as a fashion item, with the emphasis in recent years on the latter.
Hijup is helping to drive the rising popularity of hijabs as fashion attire, especially in large cities, through its promotions on Instagram, where it has 790,000 followers and to some 275,000 YouTube subscribers. Hijup has had 1.6 million unique visitors to its website since 2011, and it ships products by prominent Muslim designers to more than 50 countries and handles 200 brands.
With a monthly average of 930,000 visits, the site carries popular items such as tunics, dresses and headscarves by prominent Indonesian designers, including Dian Pelangi and Ria Miranda. Women are discovering that they can look both fashionable and professional, while also remaining modest.
After opening 21 brick-and-mortar stores in Indonesia — Lestari said that despite the rapid growth of e-commerce, Indonesians still favour the face-to-face shopping experience — Hijup is now looking to offer modern designs to Muslim women in international markets.
The company already has a store in Kuala Lumpur and it will open a shop in London later this year.
The company’s expansion means that Lestari is busier than ever, especially with two small children to look after, the youngest just one year old. She lives near her office in south Jakarta in order to make it easier to balance the demands of her work with motherhood. Her husband Achmad Zaky runs the online marketplace Bukalapak — one of four Indonesian startup “unicorns”, with a valuation of more than $1 billion.
“Our strategy as parents is to choose the school that is close to the home and choose the home that is close to the office, so we can manage our time to family and work life,” she said.
Turning to her expansion plans, Lestari acknowledges the European market will be difficult to crack. “Maybe in Paris, young Muslim women are afraid of wearing hijab because there is a potential to be harassed by someone on the street because of Islamophobia,” she said.
In France, headscarves are banned in state schools, while half of Germany’s 16 states impose a headscarf ban on teachers. Austria and Belgium have banned the niqab, or burqa, the face-covering veils.
But she remains unfazed. She sees this as an opportunity to bring “positive things of Muslim value” to those countries through Muslim fashion. “Fashion [can become] a way to represent a good image of Islam.”
One US-based investor in the company agreed, saying that people in some countries sometimes have a negative impression of Muslims. “But by being fashionable … they look modern and they are more likable — more acceptable in society — and at the same time they are still following their religious rules and regulations.”
As a company that tries to shine a positive light on Islam, Hijup is keen to ingrain Islamic values in its day-to-day operations. “For example, in monthly staff meetings, we share about what are the Islamic values that relate to the work ethic,” Lestari said.
Such adherence to Islamic values also led her to seek out funding that was sharia-compliant. That is, it must not bear any interest, which is prohibited in Islam; that the investment has no ethical concerns; and that the contract is transparent.
Lestari said that her company is “very selective” on funding. When comparing potential venture capital funding and bank loans, venture capital firms were more compliant with Islamic teachings. “If we get some risk, the investor also gets some risk. But in a bank loan, if we got some risk and we don’t succeed, then the bank does not want to know.”
With the company planning expansion both within and outside Indonesia, being selective about the source of funding could cost it time, not least when it is starting to face competition.
Hijabenka, another e-commerce website for Muslim fashion — but with more affordable offerings and a mass-market focus compared with Hijup — is seen as the closest rival in the country. Muslimarket, another competitor, last year raised funding from the venture-capital firm 500 Startups and some individual investors.
Hijup is also facing intense competition from larger e-commerce sites, like Lazada and Tokopedia, which sell a broad range of general items but have their own Muslim fashion sections. Also, there are numerous small online shops marketing through Instagram or Facebook.
But Hijup takes pride in being a pioneer. Others often follow new Muslim fashion trends that appear on Hijup and introduce their own less-expensive versions.
“We want to be the leading platform [so] the core [customers] are the innovators and early adopters. We want to enter the mass market also, but we want to grab this market first because we want to influence the mass market,” Lestari said.
“We want to influence [women] to express their real identity — Muslim identity — but still fit the society” DIAJENG LESTARI CEO, Hijup