Fashion and Faith in Urban Indonesia.

In the past fifteen years, urban Indonesian women have increasingly chosen to adopt a form of Islamic dress called busana Muslim. This shift could be read as an index of two apparently contradictory or mutually exclusive phenomena, a rise in Islamic piety and a rise in consumerism. This article suggests that rather than reducing the popularity of Islamic fashion in contemporary Indonesia to either religion or consumerism, the rise of Islamic fashion should be understood within a context of national debates about modernity and piety. Through a consideration of Islamic fashion as commodity fetish, I argue that the commodification of Islamic dress in urban Indonesia has not been a straightforward process, but rather is an arena for Indonesian Muslims to think about the relationship among faith, gender, and materiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]