San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
WHAT IS MODEST FASHION?
De Young exhibition explores modern Muslim dress.
Is modesty a new kind of power dressing?
It’s a question many in the fashion industry are asking in the #MeToo era, and #modestfashion is trending on social media. Within the Muslim community, it’s a topic that has deep resonance. Now, the de Young Museum takes on this and other questions with “Contemporary Muslim Fashions,” a first-of-its-kind exhibition that explores the present-day global style stories of Muslim women.
So what does it mean to dress modestly in 2018? For exhibition curators it’s about more than just measuring hemlines, sleeve lengths or concealing parts of the body.
“For the purposes of this exhibition, modesty is however it’s defined by the individual,” says Laura Camerlengo, the show’s associate curator with Jill D’Alessandro. “In terms of certain religious aspects, there are some guidelines in the Quran that intersect with how respectable women dressed at the time of Mohammed, but it’s not rigidly defined. It’s an area that’s had such a flurry of activity around it these past few years with the rise of Muslim modest fashion bloggers and fashion weeks. It’s changing very rapidly.”
Former Fine Arts Museums director Max Hollein calls the exhibition “an overdue, much-needed exploration of a multifaceted topic as yet largely unexplored by museums.”
The exhibition, running Sept. 22-Jan. 6, looks at how Muslim women have become style influencers and brought renewed outsider interest to contemporary Muslim life. The Bay Area has one of the highest concentrations of Muslims of any metropolitan area in the United States (almost 250,000, or 3.5 percent of the region’s population, according to a 2013 study by the Santa Clara University Institute for Social Policy and Understanding). With issues like President Trump’s travel bans still in the news, it’s a timely discussion.
Here in the epicenter of tech innovation, the curators have a special interest in how social media have facilitated conversations around modest fashion and personal redefinitions of Muslim dress. It’s not surprising that curators D’Alessandro and Camerlengo name Instagram as one of their primary sources in their search for designers and fashion influencers. The exhibition focuses mainly on objects from the past two years, with a geographic focus on the Middle East, Southeast Asia and diaspora communities throughout Europe and the United States.
Designers include Faiza Bouguessa, Mashael Alrajhi and Wadha Al Hajri representing the Middle East; Itang Yunasz, Khanaan Luqman Shamlan and NurZahra of
Indonesia; Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Céline Semaan Vernon of Slow Factory; and Saiqa Majeed of Saiqa London. Nike’s Pro hijab and a burkini swimsuit by Aheda Zanetti are on display — among 80 ensembles.
The fashions range from extravagant haute couture by Christian Dior, Jean Paul Gaultier and Valentino made to modest specification for her highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, to an almost minimalist jersey dress by Nzinga Knight. Nora Aldamer’s boldly colored crepe de chine maxi reads as secular and contemporary, while Slow Factory’s U.S. Constitution and First Amendment flight jacket from 2017 is an obvious political statement. Malaysian designer Melinda Loo’s ornate fantasies evoke the rich history of orientalism in Muslim design; Dubai-based Rebecca Kellett’s “Utopia” ensemble, with its extreme silhouette, nods toward futurism.
Photographs in the exhibition by Wesaam Al-Badry and Hassan Hajjaj capture how and where women actually wear modest fashion, and document the communities from which these designs emerge. This, D’Alessandro says, demonstrates that Muslim fashion (and modest dress) is a topic much larger than simply who chooses to cover her head and who doesn’t.
“There are some individuals who have a fairly rigid, literal definition” of modesty, says D’Alessandro. “But across faiths, you see texts can also be up to interpretation and things can be porous. We have a streetstyle photographer in the exhibition, Langston Hues, who would do call-outs on Instagram within the modest-fashion community.” Hues photographed subjects based on each person’s definition of modesty. Says D’Alessandro: “You can see how broad the interpretation is. It’s parallel to the exhibition.”
Muslim women’s representation has recently been on the upswing in the Western fashion industry. Anniesa Hasibuan presented an all-hijab runway show at New York Fashion Week in 2016, and Indonesian designers Dian Pelangi and Vivi Zubedi presented modest fashion at shows in New York. Halima Aden was the first model to wear a hijab at Kanye West’s Yeezy fashion show in February 2017 (one of the most widely covered shows at fashion week), and her visibility has risen steadily since then. Macy’s began carrying the Verona Collection, a modest, Islamic-focused collection by Lisa Vogl, in 2018 — a major leap into mainstream America .
With Islam continuing to be one of the fastest-growing religions in the world, both Muslim women and women who choose modest dress are demographics designers can not afford to ignore. As such, the modest-dress market continues to expand with retail portals like ModLi and luxury site the Modist. These offer fashion specifically created with modest dressing
in mind and modest clothing from major mainstream fashion houses.
“The shopping experience had always been time consuming and borderline alienating to put together an outfit,” says Ghizlan Guenez, who founded the Modist in 2017. “There was a very clear knowledge that there are millions of women who dress this way across religions and backgrounds.” And yet, Guenez felt it was a market that was mostly unserved.
“There’s a misconception that modest dressing, whether personal or for faith, is frumpy,” Guenez says. “We wanted to flip that on its head. This is a woman who exists, she's abundant, she’s everywhere. We wanted to smash all these stereotypes and showcase her in a way she deserves.”
The Modist now carries 100 major brands, including Oscar de la Renta, Lanvin and Mary Katrantzou. In 2018, Guenez was listed as one of Fast Company’s Top 50 innovators and made the Business of Fashion’s influential BoF 500 list. She says part of the Modist’s success is that “the women we speak to don’t just dress modestly for religious reasons, we speak to executives, women of a certain age. Because we address a diverse audience, we have the flexibility in what modesty is,” which has allowed for a wider reach.
Guenez doesn’t believe that the modesty movement is part of a backlash against recent sexually provocative and revealing trends like “naked dressing.” She sees it as part of a larger conversation about who women dress for.
“One day it's the maxi dress, the next it’s the mini,” Guenez says. “But also there’s been a long period in fashion where there’s a lot of the male-gaze perspective in trends, magazines, editorials and what’s considered ‘in.’ Now we’re seeing a different perspective. It’s different, the female gaze, how we look at each other. That can naturally be a more demure aesthetic. And, of course, social media also created a dialogue around modesty.”
D’Alessandro says that Muslim fashion and modest fashion are bigger than any one definition.
“How we define modest fashion is changing,” D’Alessandro says. “As these design weeks go forward, we’re going to see a lot more cross-cultural influences. I think people will start taking higher risks. In the last decade the clothes are becoming more fashion forward and avant-garde.”