Introduction

Modest fashion lines are prominent in high-street chains and luxury fashion brands, in magazines and advertising campaigns. A conflation considered strange, if not incompatible, when first launched, modest fashion is now entering the mainstream. Ethnic and Asian fashion styles that were popular in the 1990s can be seen as important precursors for the later visibility and mainstream retailing of modest fashion. For instance the short-lived trend of wearing saris over jeans, bindis, and henna, which also brought some critical debate around issues of ethics, transnationalism and aesthetics in sartorial choice, as a precursor to the cultural appropriation discourse more prevalent today. Usually attributed to fashion designed for minority faith groups from the Abrahamic faiths – Islam, Christianity and Judaism – modest fashion at its simplest is stylish design that provides bodily cover. Academic studies and the fashion industry have focused on Muslim modest fashion, and to a much lesser extent Hasidic Jewish and Mormon forms of style, with some discussion of non-religious markets (Lewis and Moors 2013; Lewis 2015; Tarlo 2010). The wider marketability of longer garment lengths and more relaxed tailoring is now evident in fashion from high street to luxury, with crossover mainstream appeal. Starting as a niche segment of the global fashion market thirty years ago, modest fashion has grown exponentially with key high-street stores such as H&M, Zara, Nike, Marks and Spencer and Uniqlo launching their own modest fashion lines. The first hijabi model on a British Vogue front cover, Halima Aden, along with luxury brands such as Dolce and Gabana, Versace, Chanel and Balenciaga releasing abayas (long robes) and headscarves, meanwhile show expansion at the higher end of the market. Given the visibility of Islamic modest fashion it is unsurprisingly reported as the fastest growing sector of fashion (ThomasReuters 2018/19, 2019/20). Industry buzz around the sub-sector has made headlines across the global fashion world and media, such as the reporting by Al Jazeera, the Islamic Fashion and Design Council and Vice that by 2023 Islamic fashion will reach $361 billion turnover.

Muslim spending power has been courted in the global fashion industry, through style and marketing, but also the seasonal targeting of religious holidays.

Southeast Asia has an exceptionally rich textile history, and weaving has developed into a high art form in the wider region. The imagination and creativity that one finds reflected in the making of cloth, its detailed patterning and overall design, is equal in aesthetic quality to artistic forms that usually are associated with the more conventionally recognized visual arts of a culture, such as painting and sculpture. Cloth was and is first of all used to dress the human body. For this reason, it is also evident that textile production and design connect to a long history of change: what one may call a history of fashion. But textiles also have an unusually deep cultural significance in the region. They play an essential part in many ceremonies and rituals, either as ostentatious displays or as part of offerings, and they often are essential in gift exchanges that establish and emphasize social relationships. Southeast Asia as a region has been on the crossroad of exchanges between West and East for millennia, with direct connections between South and East Asia resulting in a particularly fruitful mixture of Indigenous and outside social and religious ideas.

This chapter analyses culture and enterprise with reference to the Scottish textiles, tartan and tweed. It considers how rhythms of culture and enterprise are accommodated in the practices of designers, and operated in the production process itself. The chapter investigates the 'fashion as fast' and 'textiles as slow' opposition by examining where and how the material artefacts are produced; the interactions between textile producers and fashion designers; and how and where the symbolic capital of textiles and fashion is manifest and maintained. It focuses on the symbolic capital of textiles as producers reach back in time to valorize traditional patterns, modes of production, and traditional garments to express the timeless qualities of the cloths. The chapter also focuses on how this is parlayed into economic capital in the sphere of enterprise. It discusses symbolic capital in the field of fashion and the place of time in strategies of distinction.

An often-quoted line from the Sikh holy book Guru Granth Sahib and attributed to the Sikh spiritual leader Guru Nanak, proclaims ‘when you embroider your own blouse, only then will you be considered an accomplished lady.’ The close connection between textile labor, particularly hand embroidery, and constructions of gender is well known and in South Asia has persevered beyond Guru Nanak’s sixteenth-century declaration. Recent craft revival initiatives and income generation projects geared towards female makers use textiles as a focal point, further solidifying this connection between textiles, ideas of femininity, social activism, and economic development. This chapter explores these themes by examining the case of embroidered textiles known as phulkaris which were historically made in pre-Partition Punjab. Now actively produced in both India and Pakistan, these textiles have become icons of Punjabi identity and remain deeply connected to histories of women’s work and constructions of gender. From recent phulkari revival initiatives by women’s cooperatives in both India and Pakistan, to the incorporation of phulkari imagery in the Slaves of Fashion series by the UK-based artist The Singh Twins, phulkaris have emerged as potent symbols that offer insights into new ways of thinking about textiles, social activism, and gender.

Introduction

Textile trades were foundational in early modern Europe, with imperial states working to protect and advance established cloth industries at the core of their economies and cultures. Global commerce unsettled these material landscapes and its established interregional competition, with cultural and political tensions erupting and nations jostling for ascendency. Policing the dress of residents became a pressing imperative. Apparel and its components could bolster state authority, or generate anxieties and rejoinders, while, in Britain, imperial priorities ignited new material discourse. As global trade grew, the impact of foreign subaltern goods sparked discomfort for some. Cloth and clothing, in particular, were intended to strengthen national and imperial purpose, but: “Wearing foreign clothes disrupted the way of knowing one’s country of origin and, perhaps more upsetting, where one’s loyalty lay.” Textile politics involved more than nationalist sentiment, however, with racialism figuring in response to global commodities. In the long eighteenth century, commodities acquired from global and colonial settings carried complex meanings: potential profit for the metropole, offset by perceived risks of pollution and disruption. These seeming threats differed fundamentally from the antagonism towards competing European wares, as evolving precepts around race strengthened beyond established xenophobic paradigms.

New imports were often aligned with populations of colour and figured as part of imperial agendas. For instance, over the 1600s, English authorities grappled with the perceived threat of “Indianization” through the growing use of tobacco from the Americas. The disquiet surrounding this substance stubbornly persisted through the century, even as this leaf became culturally infused with acceptable (racialised) connotations of empire.

The Thai textile industry's future seemed bleak in the 1950s when local investments in mechanized spinning collapsed in the face of subsidized cotton imports from Pakistan. But over the next decades, the industry grew (Tables 6.1, 6.2), and by the mid-1980s, a fairly complete textile “complex” had developed (Figure 6.1). The industry's export value also grew from roughly $636,000 in 1981 to over $4 billion in 1991, with garments gradually dominating the industry's exports (Figure 6.2). By the year 2000, Thailand was ranked as the world's ninth largest apparel exporter. The industry also became a key part of the Thai economy: it was the largest export earner by the mid-1980s and the second largest exporter in 2000 (Figure 6.3); it was also the source of 4.5% of total Thai GDP in 2003 employing over 20% of the manufacturing workforce.

But textile's share of Thai manufactured exports fell from around one-third in the mid-1980s to 14% in 1997 and 11% in 2000–2002. Thailand's share of world garment exports fell from 3.2% in 1995 to 2% in 1998. The industry's export growth rates fell from 26% in 1989 to 7.2% in 1995, actually declining by 14% in 1996. These declines reflected an overall fall in competitiveness. Textile exports subsequently rebounded (Figure 6.2), but the country's share of global textile trade continued declining to 1.8% in 2004, and the recovery was largely a function of exchange rate shifts and market diversification, not upgrading.

This chapter investigates an Early Bronze Age centre of Únětice culture, focusing on what can be learned about textile production from the remains of textile imprints on ceramics.

This is an exploration to understand and appreciate another aspect of Yoruba art – the textile – through an interrogation of textiles “as an intelligence” with corroborative references to other scholars. Given that Yoruba textiles are adorned till date, most importantly in their rich varieties, the chapter is filled with enough material evidence to sustain a debate aimed at establishing the beauty and creativity inherent in African culture through the textiles. In this chapter, the “readability” and “intelligibility” of Yoruba textiles is established, with its peculiarity seen as an ambassador of the Yoruba culture. In addition, the importance of textile as a craft, which, by virtue of the peculiarity of its making, portrays the Yoruba art and provides a history of textiles in Africa, is drawn on. Historically too, the chapter shows that Yoruba textiles also contribute to premises that counter the Western assumption that Africa is backward.

Among the less developed countries, India was the first to export cotton textiles on a significant scale. As far back as 1948–1950, she accounted for more than 11 per cent of the world trade in cotton textiles. In the years that followed, the Indian textile industry was unable to maintain its level of exports, as a result of which its share of the world market registered a decline. All the same, until 1960, cotton textiles were an important foreign exchange earner for the country. During the period 1950–1960, they contributed between 10 and 13 per cent of total export receipts each year. In the 1960s, however, their relative importance in India's exports appears to have declined. The share of cotton textiles in export earnings fell from 7.7 per cent in the three-year period 1960/61–1962/63 to 6.3 percent during 1968/69–1970/71.

Table 4.1 outlines the main trends in India's exports of cotton textiles over the decade, and shows that: (a) exports of cotton yarn increased quite rapidly – particularly after 1967; (b) handloom cloth exports remained more or less unchanged except for the peak performance in 1965; and (c) in the first half of the 1960s exports of millmade cloth declined both in value and in quantity. After 1966, however, rupee earnings from mill cloth exports increased rapidly, although the quantity seems to have remained more or less unchanged. This discrepancy can be explained partially by improved unit values and partially by the substantial devaluation of the rupee in June 1966.

This chapter traces some key relationships between Norwegian textile enterprises and British suppliers of machinery and ancillary equipment who provided the technology on which the Norwegian industry was based; the objective here is to evaluate the interaction between these two industries in terms of its significance for Norwegian textile industrialization. The question asked, therefore, is what were the roles of, and the technological functions performed by British textile machinery makers in the development of the Norwegian textile industry?

Showing the importance of British machine makers for Norwegian industrialization involves two things. First, I shall demonstrate that the extent of the relationship between the two industries was large. This is of interest in itself, for it suggests that the existence of the British industry, and its active foreign role, was a necessary condition for the development of the Norwegian industry. As I showed in Chapter 4, the textile technology flow was large in relation to the size of the capital stock of the Norwegian industry, but it is also of great importance that a very large number of British firms were involved in this technology flow. At the same time, the substitution possibilities were limited or non-existent. No non-British economy had a textile machinebuilding capacity to compare with Britain's, and it is difficult to see how Norwegian entrepreneurs could have looked elsewhere for technology supplies on the same scale. Without the transfer of technology through British machine makers, therefore, Norwegian firms would simply not have been able to enter the business.