Modest Dressing: faith-based fashion and internet retail.

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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.