Muslim Fashionistas in Contemporary Turkey

Abstract

Turkey’s Islamic fashion market transformed during the 2010s with the entry of young, bourgeois, fashion-conscious Muslim female entrepreneurs. As designers, manufacturers, and retailers, these “Muslim fashionistas” not only gained the attention of young Muslim women but also became lifestyle gurus, projecting images of the successful entrepreneur, the ideal mother, the benevolent philanthropist, and the leisure enthusiast. This combination of roles resonates with the notion of the “ideal Muslim woman” promoted by the government. But its performance entails moments of imperfection and moral dilemma, as the demands of capitalism and consumerism place Muslim fashionistas in opposition to the teachings of their faith and traditional gender regimes. Drawing on practice theory, and on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Istanbul, this article explores Muslim fashionistas’ everyday performances in the fields of family, charity, and leisure. The objective is to analyze how these agents negotiate and interpret quotidian inconsistencies between their religious and social ideals and those ideals’ manifestation.