Tag: islamic fashion

Photo Essay: Istanbul’s Islamic Fashion

Models dress for a shoot for Ala, the first fashion magazine in Turkey for conservative women. Models get full makeup and are given headscarves, layered for a pop of color. The shoot is at Bretz Home in Kemerburgaz, Istanbul. Monique Jaques

Twice yearly, Istanbul’s Fashion Week draws a varied crowd—from the religiously conservative to social liberals. Recent trends highlighted versatility, allowing the wearer to tailor designer outfits to conservative tastes. Dresses can be worn over pants, and longer coats make curves less pronounced. Scarves are culled from top designers such as Louis Vuitton and Hermés.

Filling the need for high-end Islamic fashion is Turkish fashion magazine Ala, which the press calls the “Vogue of the veiled.” The magazine’s spreads feature bright colors and modern cuts while still maintaining modesty and Islamic values.

via Photo Essay: Istanbul’s Islamic Fashion.

https://www.newsweek.com/istanbuls-islamic-fashion-232257

March 19, 2014
Turkish Fashion Designers Make Muslim Style Chic

In Istanbul on a recent Friday, it was time to send the page proofs of Ala magazine to the printer. Ala, which means “the most beautiful of the beautiful,” is the world’s first fashion publication for conservative Muslim women. Its office doesn’t feel like a bastion of traditional Islam: The talk is of models, photo shoots, deadlines, and accessories.

Zeynep Hasoğlu, Ala’s new editor in chief, sits behind a giant desk, her brown eyes amplified with dark eyeliner and mascara. She wears a black blazer with matching pants, her tiny frame weighted by a massive tiered rhinestone collar necklace. Stiletto shoes complete her outfit—a look that many of her readers want. “We are trying to convey international fashion to ladies without infringing on our values,” says Hasoğlu. She flicks through her iPad as she describes an unfulfilled need of affluent women who have money to burn but little understanding of how to spend it. They don’t know about Islamic designers because Muslim fashion has been a word of mouth industry.

Ala, launched in 2011, is the primer these women want. It features models in head scarves with well-crafted outfits in the latest colors. One recent article, titled “Looooooong skirts!” gives tips on skirt designs and mixing and matching. A recurring section visits Istiklal Street, the central retail promenade on the European side of Istanbul, to photograph fashionable but conservative women. Like many of Ala’s readers, they sport sleeves that fall at least to the middle of the forearm and no bare leg is revealed. Yet with their head scarves they wear jeans and boots or skirts and form-fitting jackets.

Taha Yasin Toraman launched Etesettür.com 15 months ago. That’s Turkish for hijab, the veil worn by observant Muslim women. The site sells black cloaks that cover the whole body as well as tight pea coats that hug the waistline. “There are many online shopping websites in Turkey, but there were none for conservative women,” Toraman says. He is launching an English-language site by August for the rest of the Muslim world.

Turkey’s fashion industry has its detractors, who condemn the idea that conservative women can wear flattering modern apparel. Women should instead avoid drawing attention to themselves, as Islam calls for. Female attire has long been a contentious subject. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the secular founder of modern Turkey in the 1920s, urged Turkish women not to cover their hair. After a military coup in 1980 momentarily checked the rise of the Islamic parties, the government banned head scarves for university students and public servants. The ban was partially lifted in 2010.

Under Sunni Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey has enjoyed a decade of prosperity, which has given rise to an Islamic middle class. It is widely reported in the media that around 60 percent of Turkish women now wear a head covering. Mehmet Dursun, chief executive officer of Armine, Turkey’s top retailer of Islamic fashion, cornered the local head scarf market nine years ago before becoming a one-stop brand for middle-class Muslims. The retailer has a house line of apparel, shoes, and soon handbags, to be made in the same factory that makes Michael Kors bags. Armine apparel and accessories are sold in 1,400 stores, including in the U.S., the Netherlands, and Britain. Gross revenue in 2012 was $56 million. “I would like to be the conservative Hermès further down the line,” Dursun says.

The one thing absent from Turkey’s fashion scene is name-brand designers: Most work in relative obscurity for retailers like Armine. One exception is Filiz Yetim, maker of bridal gowns for the modest. Yetim, who on an April day was wearing a beige head scarf, a black blouse tucked into a long beige pencil skirt featuring floral appliqués, and gold and silver bracelets, designs gowns that feature a head scarf, full sleeves, and a floor-length hemline. The going price averages $4,000 to $5,000—not much for a handmade item. Yetim says she’ll charge more in time. “In two years, this vision of personal fashion will be more established, and we will ask what is due,” she says.

The bottom line: Turkey’s fashion designers are reinterpreting traditional dress for Muslim women, creating a new industry in the process.

Topol is a Bloomberg Businessweek contributor.

via Turkish Fashion Designers Make Muslim Style Chic – Businessweek.

April 19, 2013
Turkey’s middle-class women mix fashion with Islamic piety

Models in headscarves feature in magazine tapping into wealth and self-confidence of new bourgeoisie

Constanze Letsch in Istanbul

The Guardian, Tuesday 18 December 2012 19.41 GMT

Turkey muslim fashion

Young Muslim women wearing headscarves in Istanbul. Photograph: Kerim Okten/EPA

Do Coco Chanel and Islam go together? Turkey’s Âlâ, a high-fashion magazine and the first to feature models in headscarves, certainly seems to think so. After its first issue hit the newsstands in June 2011, circulation quadrupled to 40,000 in only four months.

It comes down to simple economics. Over the past decade, Turkey has enjoyed an economic boom that has benefited, as before, the secular urban elites, but also conservative supporters of the AKP governing party and former rural entrepreneurs who have enjoyed unprecedented upward mobility, leading to the formation of an Islamic, urban middle class.

This new Islamic bourgeoisie has money to spend and the opportunities to do so are increasingly diverse: luxury gated communities, boutiques, restaurants, hotels and sports clubs catering to a more pious lifestyle are springing up in urban centres.

“The AKP successfully integrated a large, formerly disregarded part of society into the consumer market,” said the anthropologist and journalist Ayse Çavdar. “In that sense, market dynamics succeeded where politics have failed: it normalised [a religiously conservative lifestyle]. A magazine like Âlâ is a product and a sign of this normalisation.”

Âlâ’s fashion editor, Büsra Erdogan, thinks that the magazine filled an important void. “It was a veritable explosion – obviously scores of conservative women had been waiting for a publication like this for a long time. Many readers told us, ‘Why did it take so long?’”

While Âlâ adheres to Islamic clothing rules – headscarves and the length of hemlines and sleeves – it does not cater exclusively to women who cover their heads, and Islamic clothing companies feature next to designer brands such as Gucci, Louboutin and Stella McCartney.

Ebru Büyükdag, Âlâ’s editor-in-chief, said the magazine was initially criticised as being Islamist by secularists, and for commercialising Islam by some pious Muslims. “But we are not handing out fatwas, and we don’t break any Islamic rules,” she said. “Why should conservative women not be allowed to wear nice clothes?”

With wealth and visibility comes a new self-confidence among conservative women. “People used to look down on women wearing the headscarf,” said 35-year-old Esra Can, owner of a beauty salon in Istanbul’s conservative Fatih neighbourhood. She opened her own business after her decision to wear the headscarf put an end to her career as a sales director in the textile industry. “I was put before the choice between my headscarf and my job,” she said.

Adile Türkmen, a beautician who had to drop out of university because of her headscarf, said she breathed a sigh of relief at the appearance of Âlâ. “It brought a sense of normality,” she said, arguing that Âlâ was a sign things had changed. “When I used to go to the opera, people stared at me like I didn’t belong. Now I go everywhere, to restaurants and rock concerts.” She laughed. “Headbanging with a headscarf? No problem!”

Esra Can agreed: “With the AKP government and through economic growth people started to look past this piece of fabric. Now people judge me by what I achieve – which is a whole lot.” Her beauty salon, nestled between brand name shops, wedding gown boutiques and fancy patisseries, draws clients – with and without headscarves – from the neighbourhood and from all over Istanbul.

Âlâ’s editor-in-chief Ebru Büyükdag underlined the importance of featuring articles on professional conservative women who have succeeded – women like Esra Can. “We want to present positive examples and role models to young women.”

She admitted that female employment in Turkey was still dismally low – only 28% of women currently participate in the workforce, less than half the European Union average. “We rally for female quotas at the workplace and for an end to the preconception that women wearing headscarves can only work in low-skilled and low-paid jobs, if at all,” she said. “Many companies still refuse to employ highly qualified women for executive positions only because they cover their heads.”

Büyükdag said that magazines such as Âlâ also helped to bridge the gap between practising Muslims on one hand and secularists who are anxious about an Islamisation of Turkey on the other. “It shows that we like the same things: we like to look good, we like style, we like to eat good food. It’s a place to start.”

via Turkey’s middle-class women mix fashion with Islamic piety | World news | The Guardian.

December 20, 2012
Turkish Beauty Magazine Ties Muslim Veil to Glamor

Editor of Ala Magazine Hulya Aslan at her office in Istanbul on March 2. It is exactly the type of challenge posed for a little less than a year by Ala, the first fashion magazine dedicated to Turkish women wearing headscarves. (AFP Photo/Ala Magazine).

Can the Muslim headscarf be synonymous with glamor? Turkey’s first fashion magazine for conservative Islamic women hopes to prove that it can.

Launched last June, the monthly Ala, which means “beauty,” has become a mainstream glossy.

With a circulation of 20,000, it is only slightly behind the Turkish versions of Cosmopolitan, Vogue and Elle magazines.

Ala’s pages are splashed with models reflecting a conservative Islamic style, all wearing headscarves and long dresses, with their arms and necks covered.

Ala’s editor, 24-year-old Hulya Aslan, has first-hand experience with Turkey’s headscarf troubles. Because she insisted on wearing one, she had to give up a university education, instead finding work at a bank.

Ala, created by two advertisers, offers the usual fare of health tips, travel pages and celebrity interviews, supplemented by a strong dose of loud and clear Islamic activism.

“Veiled Is Beautiful” proclaims one advertisement, driving home the point with the words: “My way, my choice, my life, my truth, my right.”

But such slogans sound more like a reference to the struggles of the past, when secularism monopolized the social scene and the Islamic headscarf, often viewed as a political symbol, met hostile reactions.

The struggle continues despite the 2002 poll victory of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has Islamist roots and many of whose members have spouses who wear headscarves, including Erdogan’s wife, Emine.

Although the strict application of secularism has been loosened under AKP rule, headscarves are still off-limits for civil servants. It is now allowed in some universities, while many others ban them.

In Turkey, 60 percent of women wear some type of hair covering, according to a 2006 survey conducted by the Istanbul-based Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation.

“There are now much prettier things than before,” said Merve Buyuk, a 22-year-old trainee at Ala. “Designers have now understood that we exist. They’ve started making clothes that are not necessarily black or brown. … I’m pretty happy with this change.”

Communication scientist Nilgun Tutal of Istanbul’s Galatasaray University said Ala attested to the rise of middle- and upper-class Muslims who were adapting to the consumer society, thanks to almost 10 years of AKP rule and Turkey’s sustained economic growth.

“At one time, Islam, to distinguish itself from the West, took a position hostile to consumer society. But today, these people, to express their success, can only do that through consumer society,” Tutal said.

AFP

via Turkish Beauty Magazine Ties Muslim Veil to Glamor | The Jakarta Globe.

May 8, 2012
Turkish fashion magazine Âlâ appeals to fashionable Muslim women who wear a veil

Magazine’s sales figures are catching up with Turkish ‘Elle’ and ‘Cosmopolitan’.

The staff of the magazine are firm believers that wearing the veil is perfectly compatible with style and femininity.

A new magazine has filled a gap in the market in Turkey: Âlâ is a monthly publication aimed at women who wear a veil. After just a few months, it’s already selling almost as many copies as the Turkish version of ‘Elle.’Since it hit the shelves in June last year, Ala magazine has become a feature of the Turkish high street.

The brainchild of two Turkish businessmen, it’s a fashion and beauty magazine aimed at women who wear the veil.

“We’re saying that veiled women can follow fashion. There are more and more products on the market that veiled women can use. We’re saying: let’s not remain stuck with just one style,” says Editor-in-chief, Ala Hülya Aslan.

Like their readers, the staff of the magazine are firm believers that wearing the veil is perfectly compatible with style and femininity.

“People have started to take more of an interest in this section of the public. They’ve finally understood that we exist. They’ve begun to make veils which aren’t just black or brown, which are more colourful – personally, I’m obviously pleased with the change,” says Merve Büyük, Staff member.

The sight of veiled women striking relaxed poses in glossy magazines is a novelty in Turkey. But visible displays of piety have become more common since the conservative, Islamic AK party came to power in 2002.

Some believe it’s also part of a more relaxed attitude to money on the part of the faithful.

“At one time, Islam, to distinguish itself from the West, adopted a hostile position towards the whole consumer society; but nowadays, to show their success, this section of the population can only do it through the consumer society,” says Nilgün Tutal, Sociologist.

After less than a year on the market, Ala’s sales figures are not far behind those of Western staples such as ‘Elle’ and ‘Cosmopolitan’.

And in a country where at least 6 out of 10 women wear the veil, it could become one of the country’s essential style guides.

via Turkish fashion magazine Âlâ appeals to fashionable Muslim women who wear a veil – NY Daily News.

May 1, 2012
A Turkish Fashion Magazine, Ala, Is Unshy About Showing Some Piety

The magazine Ala uses Eastern European models, including this woman from Ukraine, partly because their pay is relatively low.

By DAN BILEFSKY

ISTANBUL — Across a neon-lighted corridor in a hyper-designed modernist loft here, a group of Eastern European models posed coquettishly for a magazine spread, their heads covered in brightly colored scarves.

Except for the religious headgear, the shoot could have been for any glossy fashion magazine. But Ala — called the “Vogue of the veiled” in the Turkish news media — is no conventional publication. In an unlikely fusion of conservative Muslim values and high fashion, it unabashedly appeals to the pious head-scarf-wearing working woman, who may covet a Louis Vuitton purse but has no use for the revealing clothing that pervades traditional fashion magazines.

One of Ala’s founders, Ibrahim Burak Birer, 31, a religious Muslim and a former marketing analyst who favors jeans and designer jackets, said he decided to start the magazine — its name means “the most beautiful of the beautiful” in Turkish — after seeing a transsexual with strap-on breasts in a transparent dress on the cover of an international fashion magazine.

“We realized that there was a gap to be filled for conservative Muslim women in Turkey who have a different worldview,” he said in an interview at Ala’s sleek offices, where young women in head scarves sit hunched over Apple computers. “Until now, most fashion magazines have offered a lifestyle centered on being sexy, being skinny and eating sushi. But not all women dress like those girls from ‘Sex and the City.’ ”

Ala adheres to strict Islam-inspired sartorial guidelines: arms and heads must be covered; tight pants and skirts above the ankle are forbidden. But, Mr. Birer said, the Koran has no prohibition on five-inch stiletto heels. “You can be elegant and sophisticated,” he said. “Female beauty is O.K. as long as it’s not seductive.”

The success of Ala, which has attracted 30,000 subscribers since its founding in June, reflects the rise of an Islamic bourgeoisie in Turkey that has prospered under the Islam-inspired Justice and Development Party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

This religious merchant class, which sees nothing incompatible between wearing a head scarf and driving a Mercedes, is altering the society in a country once dominated by a secular elite that banned the wearing of head scarves in public institutions. In Istanbul today, religious businessmen endure six-month waiting lists for $150,000 BMWs, while hip young women in head scarves, skinny jeans and bright red lipstick throng the more than 80 shopping malls in the city. Head scarves are also now ubiquitous on college campuses.

In Ala, page after page of beautiful women in designer head scarves underscore Turkey’s growing comfort with such outward displays of religion.

Yet for all of Ala’s avowed restraint, the magazine and its attention-grabbing images of pouting models staring suggestively in their costly outfits have been criticized by some religious scholars. They argue that regardless of whether a woman is photographed showing off a head scarf or sexy lingerie, such behavior violates Islam, which calls for women not to flaunt their femininity.

via A Turkish Fashion Magazine, Ala, Is Unshy About Showing Some Piety – NYTimes.com.

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April 16, 2012