Images of Desire

Abstract

The recent and highly visible rise of Islamic consumer culture in contemporary urban Indonesia is a source of both pleasure and anxiety for many Indonesians, figuring in debates about the appeal of a new piety there in the past decade. At the center of these debates is the image of the piously dressed woman. Simultaneously a consumer and a sign of piety, modest yet attractive, she seems to blur assumptions about the boundaries between image and substance, and in so doing generates anxiety. A booming Islamic fashion industry and Islamic fashion media traffic in this space, turning virtue into value and vice versa by deploying the image of the pious feminine to incite consumer desire while denying accusations that this is simply capitalism with a religious face. Based on research and interviews with the editorial staff of one Islamic fashion magazine, NooR, this article traces how Indonesia’s rising Islamic fashion industry and lifestyle media have placed women at the center of broader cultural debates about the relationship between devotion and consumption.

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