By IANS,
Washington: Why are increasing numbers of Turkish women wearing veils in a secular country where the practice is banned in public buildings?
Study authors �zlem Sand and G�liz Ger at Bilkent University, Turkey, said much like the first few people who began wearing blue jeans or getting tattoos, adopting this “stigmatised” fashion signifies independence from social secular norms.
So while the veil is perceived as repressive by Westerners, some Turkish women wear them to rebel against the tradition of their mothers’ generation, which has been wearing Western garb since the 1920s.
“Women, in their pursuit of freedom from the discomforts of various political and everyday anxieties and moral threats, willingly chose a stigma symbol and became part of a new community,” the authors write.
The study found that the interaction among the market, religion, and the national and international political spheres underlies the emergence of new veiling as an attractive choice for individuals.
The fashion industry is responding. The scarves and loose overcoats worn by Muslim women in the 1980s have been replaced by fashionable alternatives, said a Bilkent release.
“As women compose new elegant, beautiful, and fashionable styles, they inspire others to adopt veiling. Fashionable veiling owes its spread and visibility partially to a new business sector claiming to make covering beautiful,” the researchers write.
“Faced with increasing demand for fashionable covering, clothing companies catering to a newly emerging clientele proliferate. As new fashionable styles of covering spread and become visible, a new Islamist bourgeois aesthetics gets constructed.”
These findings were published in the Journal of Consumer Research.