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  5. Volume 7, Issue 2, 2020

International Journal of Fashion Studies - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2020

Volume 7, Issue 2

Volume 7, Issue 2, 2020

Language: English
  • Articles

      • Narratives of ‘getting it right’: Class, culture and good taste in clothing

        https://doi.org/10.1386/infs_00024_1

        Broad changes taking place in the fashion scene are argued to blur social class distinctions and render class emulation theses less relevant to explain the dynamics of clothing consumption. Critically engaging with this literature, and drawing from Bourdieu, Goffman, and recent feminist literature on the formation of classed femininities, this article explores the extent to which women’s narratives of good taste in clothing are structured by class processes. It utilizes in-depth interviews conducted with Turkish women, covered and not covered, on how they engage with the consumption domains in which bodies are shaped and adorned. The literature on self-fashioning in Turkey tends to focus on a quite over-emphasized and politicized dichotomy between pious and secular embodiment styles, ignoring the sociologically meaningful heterogeneity that exists within each. This article, however, demonstrates how class and cultural capital cross-cuts such distinctions and generates distinct understandings of age appropriateness, public-private sphere distinction, suitability of social context and body shape, and ‘naturalness’, shared across women who have different proximities to Islamic lifestyle. This article contributes to clothing consumption and fashion studies by showing the ways in which social class continues to generate embodied femininities with unequal symbolic values, despite the so-called ‘democratization’ trends in fashion, even in a context like Turkey where other significant religio-political divisions are in play.

    • Piety, fashion and festivity in a modest fashion shopping mall in Istanbul

      https://doi.org/10.1386/infs_00025_1

      This article studies a new shopping and entertainment centre in Istanbul, Zeruj Port, founded and run by young Muslim female entrepreneurs who specialize in Islamic modest fashion. Based on an ethnographic enquiry, the article analyses how female Muslim entrepreneurs in this unique women-themed mall develop new forms of Islamic fashion and leisure, thereby giving a new meaning to female piety in contemporary Turkey. Female Muslim entrepreneurs have emerged as the new tastemakers in the market, seeking to accommodate western trends in fashion and leisure without making major concessions to the consumer market, but also without completely conforming to the dominant Islamic discourses on fashion and leisure. These pious female entrepreneurs achieve this using reconciliation strategies based on notions of individualism. However, the article discusses cases where these young female actors do not so easily challenge Islamic rules of propriety regarding fashion and leisure. Thus, the article concludes that the fashion and leisure performances of female Muslim entrepreneurs subversively accommodate existing regimes of truth about female piety.

    • ‘She just does not fit in here’: Identity, politics of appearance and aesthetic labour in Turkey’s retail landscapes

      https://doi.org/10.1386/infs_00026_1

      This study looks into the politics of appearance in the retail sales labour market for women in Turkey and explores how norms of ‘being presentable and fashionable’ prevailing in different retail landscapes map onto intersections of class, status and the fault lines of Turkey’s identity politics. In an attempt to understand how such norms are constructed, this article employs the discussion on aesthetic labour and focuses on the aesthetic labour requirements in large-scale retailers selling or competing with global brands, small-scale retailers and retailers. The article relies on data derived from participant observation, in-depth interviews and focus groups conducted with saleswomen and employers in different retail landscapes in five cities of Turkey between 2009 and 2012. The study suggests that large-scale retailers and shopping malls require retail workers to convey an appearance and deportment that fits in with globally circulating images of what is taken to be ‘normal’, middle class and fashionable, leading to the exclusion of saleswomen with headscarves as they are perceived to manifest a particularity and deviation from a normalized middle-class identity. On the other hand, in chain stores competing in the area of global veiling fashion, the headscarf is usually a requirement as a part of the globally relevant, Islamic middle-class image that retail workers are expected to embody. The norms of aesthetic labour in both kinds of large-scale retailers differ sharply from small-scale retailers, where embodying local gendered norms, and the ability to manage relations in local marketplaces surface as the most salient requirements from retail saleswomen.

    • Religious ritual and sociopolitical ideologies: Circumcision costumes in the Turkish marketplace

      https://doi.org/10.1386/infs_00027_1

      Male circumcision is a widely practised Islamic ritual in Turkey regardless of families’ level of devotion. It is traditionally celebrated with a party where boys wear special ‘circumcision’ costumes. Concentrating on these costumes, this study examines the construction, interaction and intersection between religion, masculinity, nationalism, militarism and neo-Ottomanism, by investigating costumes available between 2014 and 2019 and exploring previous studies and archival resources on circumcision celebrations in the Ottoman and Turkish contexts, such as photographs and memoirs. By doing so, it identifies three main styles: classic, modern military and neo-Ottoman. Classic circumcision costumes emerged in the early twentieth century, while modern military style spread in the 1970s under the influence of the Turkish political sphere. The variety and availability of circumcision costumes has enormously increased since the 1990s due to the country’s economic upsurge. Under AKP rule, particularly in the 2010s, there has been a rise in Islam(ism) and neo-Ottomanism, which has been reflected and propagated through popular culture, particularly Ottoman-themed TV dramas. This has influenced the emergence and development of ‘neo-Ottoman’ circumcision costumes. Following the description of the stylistic universe of circumcision costumes, this article develops a semiotic square, which illustrates contradictions of ‘modernities’ and ‘modernity’, contrarieties of ‘historicity’ and ‘utopia’ and implications of ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ in each of the three styles.

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