Modest Dressing: faith-based fashion and internet retail.

This comparative religion project looks at how internet retailing is making it increasingly easy for women who dress modestly to combine fashion with faith. Internet marketing has been invaluable for consumers who want specialist items and has reduced overheads for specialist producers and retailers. This has been especially important in clothes marketing, where consumers seeking non-standard items can now shop online to replace or augment the high street. For women seeking fashionable ways to dress modestly, like the growing numbers of Muslim women who obtain modest clothing over the web, the internet has been indispensible. Other faith groups that have dress requirements show similar developments in the commercial production and distribution of clothing: observant and orthodox Jews, and some Christian groups like the Church of the Latter-day Saints (Mormons). In most cases, internet marketing allows brands to reach beyond their immediate location, serving consumers internationally. The markets for modest clothing aimed at, produced by, particular faith groups have expanded to create ranges for women of different income brackets, ages, occupations and taste. Women are now far more likely to be able to dress in line with their sense of piety but still in fashion.

AIM 1: To discover if the expansion and diversification through e-commerce of clothes for women who are religiously motivated to dress modestly has allowed the emergence of a new category of 'modest fashion' that has the potential to transcend specific religions and reach out to consumers across faith groups.
OBJECTIVES: A)To provide a brief historical account of the international development of commercial faith based fashion, with particular attention to the dress practices of British Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities (and selected reference to their US counterparts). B)To explore the extent to which the internet rather than actual shops has been crucial in creating the conditions in which cross-faith shopping might develop. As well operational economies, internet shopping can make specialist and adventurous shopping more possible: anonymity in dealing with the virtual world makes it easier for individuals to connect to businesses and people outside of their faith communities than would be the case when physically entering a shop that was clearly coded as 'belonging' to a particular faith community. C)To establish whether e-retailers of modest clothing know if they already have or would welcome consumers from outside their target faith base. Does this prompt any changes in the business - be it range of products, advertising strategies, website atmospherics (visuals, language, music), or customer interaction? D)To find out if there are limits to the desirability of cross-faith business for retailers. Potentially expanding their consumer base might make sense for business, but is it also perceived to be in conflict with the company's religious motivation?

AIM 2: To explore the extent to which 'modest fashion' is beginning to be recognisable as a form of dressing adopted by women from different faith communities.
OBJECTIVE: A)To create an inventory of women's apparel that might constitute 'modest fashion'. B)To evaluate how this might vary across faith groups and regions.

AIM 3: To evaluate the social and personal impact of modest fashion.
OBJECTIVE: To develop an understanding of if and how shopping for modest rather than faith specific fashion changes women's sense of themselves and their relationship to their faith and wider communities.

POTENTIAL APPLICATIONS AND BENEFITS
By expanding the understanding of women's modest dress to include the three Abramic faiths, and by putting pious dressing in the frame of contemporary fashion, this research offers opportunities to foster dialogue between faiths and between religious and secular elements of society, and to challenge the normative secularised presumptions of the fashion industry.

The research has potential to contribute to improvements in community cohesion and interfaith dialogue by drawing out the links between Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities. By putting the practices of modest dress of these three faiths into relationship with each other, and by locating them in the frame of fashion, our research promises to draw points of connection between faiths and between the religious and the secular that could help remove the stigma often attached to visible religious dress.

Clothes, especially women's, are often understood by group members and external observers as a sign of community identity but they are also often regarded as outside the realm of fashion (characterized as modern, 'western', individuating, fast paced) and relegated to the domain of costume or group uniform (understood as expressive of ahistorical, unchanging, essentialised group rather than individual identities). This project reveals that faith is combined with fashion for many women in the UK's diverse population and that this is part of individuating identity formation processes that take place in dynamic relationships to internal community norms.

The focus on e-commerce promises to indicate that the de-territorialised and de-materialised nature of internet engagements makes possible a level of cross-faith activity for consumers not necessarily involved in overt inter-faith activities off-line in other areas of their lives. By emphasising that women from different faith groups are similarly concerned with matters of style and piety this research opens up new avenues for inter-faith dialogue and for interaction between religious and secular society. This has the potential to benefit community and third sector organisations such as inter-faith networks. Museums and galleries are also potential beneficiaries, especially in relation to current projects to create Islamic and other faith-based trails around permanent collections, and to curate new and temporary displays of diaspora and historical clothing and material culture.

For private sector beneficiaries in the fashion and creative industries the project's focus on religiously motivated dress practices will provide a comparative religious corrective to the normative and secularised presumptions underpinning fashion industry practice. Our research will disseminate summative and analytic material of significant potential importance about religious fashion cultures and emerging aesthetics still often unknown, or/and hard to discover. With the rise of religiosity among a young female demographic in the UK and internationally in all the major faiths, the need for the fashion industry to respond sensitively to consumers from religious communities is likely only to increase.

For the faith-based fashion market, this research will provide an opportunity to consider (and for participating companies to enter into) new forms of dialogue with existing consumers and to locate their design and commercial practices in relation to the religious and aesthetic considerations of other faith communities. Whilst the project's taxonomy of garments used for modest dressing across faiths has obvious commercial potential, it also has significant potential to increase the opportunities for interaction between faiths and with the secular world especially in relation to the educational and outreach work which many faith-based brands see as part of their remit.

For further and higher education in fashion, art and design in the UK, with a mandate to widen participation and develop inclusive curricula, this research has considerable potential benefit for both outreach work and the delivery of curriculum development. The primary and analytic material created by this project will be a valuable contribution to widening the curriculum in fashion design, management, and marketing studies, and for