Moroccan Fashion: Design, Culture, and Tradition by M. Angela Jansen (review)

M. Angela Jansen’s book highlights Moroccan fashion as a lens with which to view and problematize women’s dress as a manifestation of national culture, tradition as a construct, and innovation in design as an expression of a reinvented identity. Two of her main aims are to explore the compatibility of traditional dress and modernity and to show that the interaction between local and foreign fashions “is not necessarily conflicting, but can be a powerful tool in redefining notions of tradition and modernity as well as localness and globalness, and that these concepts are neither static nor mutually exclusive” (1). The book covers a wide range of topics, from the Eurocentricity of fashion studies to Moroccan lifestyle media and the impact of foreign fashion brand on national designs. Jansen delves deeply into underlying theoretical concepts, including the complex relationship of fashion, tradition, and modernity; fashion as a manifestation of tradition encompassing political ideology; and notions of agency, emancipation, and Islamic heritage. While summarizing the biographies of three generations of Moroccan fashion designers, she discusses the importance of the 1960s as Moroccan fashion followed “significant changes in Moroccan society” (33); the participation of the 1990s generation of designers in globally connected fashion events; how Moroccan designers took advantage of the evolution of lifestyle media from print to cyberspace; the construction of “traditional” Moroccan fashion for new markets; and, finally, the creation of a particular national identity through defining Moroccan fashion for global consumption.

Jansen’s manuscript draws from in-depth interviews with Moroccan fashion designers and observation fieldwork that complements her scholarly readings of Moroccan historians, anthropologists of dress, and fashion studies experts. However, tensions inherent in her praiseworthy efforts to speak to a diverse and generalized audience lead to an occasional lack of particularities of Moroccan history and culture. For example, there is little attempt to problematize the narrow urban, secular positions of those who produce urban Moroccan fashion. Jansen’s key informants in the fashion industry provide interesting insights into an understudied trade in Moroccan scholarship, but does their experience provide insight into urban elites? Secularists? Upwardly mobile middle-class Moroccans? In addition, despite Jansen’s claim that in her interviews “Islam as a cultural heritage plays a more significant role … than Islam as a dogma” (13), she skirts a conversation that Moroccan feminist writers, such as Fatima Mernissi, have nuanced in their attempts to reconcile religious belief with emancipatory fashion. A discussion of the postcolonial constraints around the experience of designing Moroccan fashion in a majority Muslim context might have been served by drawing from previous anthropological works, such as Clifford Geertz’s Islam Observed (1968).

These details aside, I believe that Jansen’s theoretical contributions relating to the dynamic relationship of local dress production in conversation with global market demands substantially further our knowledge of postcolonial Islamic societies and the use of dress to validate indigenous agency. Moroccan adult female dress becomes a canvas on which to observe competing ideological traditions, including the cultural anxiety of dress being “prettier and more colourful than it used to be” yet “too naked. Too European” (110). The fine line between tradition and modernity, exemplified in Jansen’s discussion of Moroccan women’s dress, extends the conversation about the “politics of piety” and “Islamic feminism” beyond the hijab (veil).

The book is well written and theoretically important for extending discussions of Muslim women’s agency through their clothing. Jansen’s problematization of the traditional and modern dichotomy of Middle Eastern subjects advances recent scholarship of the modern Middle East. But Moroccan specialists might wish for even greater depth in the literature she references to frame her case study. I would have liked a more critical analysis and interrogation of the urban representation as a limitation in the sense that rural Moroccan women’s voices are marginalized from the fashion conversation, while urban elite designers reify “traditional” Moroccan dress for global and indeed Moroccan urban elite tastes. In which ways are rural Moroccan women...