Monday, November 14, 2016

Sweden's 'hijabista': Selling Muslim fashion

Stockholm, Sweden - In the last few weeks the Swedish fashion brand Hennes & Mauritz, known globally as H&M, has made headlines for featuring a Muslim woman in hijab in their 2015 fall collection campaign video.
They are not the only Swedish retailers to have done so. Ahlens department store also featured Muslim women in hijab in their 2015 fall campaign.
Both drew praise. But there was also criticism, with some accusing the retailers of "normalising the hijab and supporting the oppression of women". 
This kind of sentiment is all too familiar to Iman Aldebe, a Muslim designer who was born in Sweden to Jordanian parents.

Many of her designs feature haute couture turbans that are sold in exclusive department stores in Sweden, Paris, New York and Dubai.

The imam's daughter

But getting here hasn't been easy. As the daughter of a recently retired imam, Aldebe grew up in a religious Muslim family in Stockholm, where, in the early 1990s, the only place to worship was a mosque in a basement that doubled up as a community centre.
Muslims from all over the country would come to the capital to worship there, to buy religious books and halal food and to learn the Quran. For a few hours at the weekends or during the holidays, the people who gathered there felt the acceptance that came from being around those who shared their beliefs.
And, in such circles, there were clear expectations for how an Imam’s daughter ought to look and behave.
"I started wearing hijab when I was six," explains the 30-year-old designer. "Growing up, I was always monitored. Wearing makeup and anything that differed from [what] the [rest of the Muslim] community [wore] was not acceptable."
 
"I felt that I had so much responsibility and a certain role I had to live up to," she reflects.
But an interest in fashion always bubbled beneath the surface.

"I remember while growing up how I used to dislike the way my mum and her friends had the same uniform, colourless headscarves. They also used to wear the same style of A-line coat – it was the only thing available [in the shops] at the time that was deemed modest," Aldebe explains.
She began studying fashion design in high school when she was 16-years-old and quickly realised that there was an entrepreneurial side to her passion for crafting clothes. She started creating graduation and wedding outfits that were fashion-forward but still modest.
"I started with small orders for my immediate circle of friends and family," she says.
Aldebe went to university to study journalism and law, but a year into her studies she decided to take a gap year.
Re-imagining the hijab
That year proved valuable; teaching her much about how the real world of retail worked. But it also gave Aldebe her first taste of anti-hijab discrimination.
She remembers seeing an ad outside a boutique that was looking to recruit a sales person.

 


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