Lynne Hume - The Religious Life of Dress: Global Fashion and Faith

The Religious Life of Dress

Dress, Body, Culture

Series Editor: Joanne B. Eicher, Regents Professor, University of Minnesota

Advisory Board:

Ruth Barnes, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

James Hall, University of Illinois at Chicago

Ted Polhemus, Curator, Street Style Exhibition, Victoria and Albert Museum

Griselda Pollock, University of Leeds

Valerie Steele, The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology

Lou Taylor, University of Brighton

John Wright, University of Minnesota

Books in this provocative series seek to articulate the connections between culture and dress which is defined here in its broadest possible sense as any modification or supplement to the body. Interdisciplinary in approach, the series highlights the dialogue between identity and dress, cosmetics, coiffure and body alternations as manifested in practices as varied as plastic surgery, tattooing and ritual scarification. The series aims, in particular, to analyze the meaning of dress in relation to popular culture and gender issues and will include works grounded in anthropology, sociology, history, art history, literature and folklore.

ISSN: 1360-466X

Previously published in the Series

Helen Bradley Foster, New Raiments of Self: African American Clothing in the Antebellum South

Claudine Griggs, S/he: Changing Sex and Changing Clothes

Michaele Thurgood Haynes, Dressing Up Debutantes: Pageantry and Glitz in Texas

Anne Brydon and Sandra Niessen, Consuming Fashion: Adorning the Transnational Body

Dani Cavallaro and Alexandra Warwick, Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress and the Body

Judith Perani and Norma H. Wolff, Cloth, Dress and Art Patronage in Africa

Linda B. Arthur, Religion, Dress and the Body

Paul Jobling, Fashion Spreads, Word and Image in Fashion Photography

Fadwa El Guindi, Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance

Thomas S. Abler, Hinterland Warriors and Military Dress: European Empires and Exotic Uniforms

Linda Welters, Folk Dress in Europe and Anatolia: Beliefs about Protection and Fertility

Kim K. P. Johnson and Sharron J. Lennon, Appearance and Power

Barbara Burman, The Culture of Sewing

Annette Lynch, Dress, Gender and Cultural Change

Antonia Young, Women Who Become Men

David Muggleton, Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style

Nicola White, Reconstructing Italian Fashion: America and the Development of the Italian Fashion Industry

Brian J. McVeigh, Wearing Ideology: The Uniformity of Self-Presentation in Japan

Shaun Cole, Don We Now Our Gay Apparel: Gay Mens Dress in the Twentieth Century

Kate Ince, Orlan: Millennial Female

Nicola White and Ian Griffiths, The Fashion Business: Theory, Practice, Image

Ali Guy, Eileen Green and Maura Banim, Through the Wardrobe: Womens Relationships with Their Clothes

Linda B. Arthur, Undressing Religion: Commitment and Conversion from a Cross-Cultural Perspective

William J. F. Keenan, Dressed to Impress: Looking the Part

Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wilson, Body Dressing

Leigh Summers, Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset

Paul Hodkinson, Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture

Leslie W. Rabine, The Global Circulation of African Fashion

Michael Carter, Fashion Classics from Carlyle to Barthes

Sandra Niessen, Ann Marie Leshkowich and Carla Jones, Re-orienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress

Kim K. P. Johnson, Susan J. Torntore and Joanne B. Eicher, Fashion Foundations: Early Writings on Fashion and Dress

Helen Bradley Foster and Donald Clay Johnson, Wedding Dress Across Cultures

Eugenia Paulicelli, Fashion Under Fascism: Beyond the Black Shirt

Charlotte Suthrell, Unzipping Gender: Sex, Cross-Dressing and Culture

Irene Guenther, Nazi Chic? Fashioning Women in the Third Reich

Yuniya Kawamura, The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion

Patricia Calefato, The Clothed Body

Ruth Barcan, Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy

Samantha Holland, Alternative Femininities: Body, Age and Identity

Alexandra Palmer and Hazel Clark, Old Clothes, New Looks: Second Hand Fashion

Yuniya Kawamura, Fashionology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies

Regina A. Root, The Latin American Fashion Reader

Linda Welters and Patricia A. Cunningham, Twentieth-Century American Fashion

Jennifer Craik, Uniforms Exposed: From Conformity to Transgression

Alison L. Goodrum, The National Fabric: Fashion, Britishness, Globalization

Annette Lynch and Mitchell D. Strauss, Changing Fashion: A Critical Introduction to Trend Analysis and Meaning

Catherine M. Roach, Stripping, Sex and Popular Culture

Marybeth C. Stalp, Quilting: The Fabric of Everyday Life

Jonathan S. Marion, Ballroom: Culture and Costume in Competitive Dance

Dunja Brill, Goth Culture: Gender, Sexuality and Style

Joanne Entwistle, The Aesthetic Economy of Fashion: Markets and Value in Clothing and Modelling

Juanjuan Wu, Chinese Fashion: From Mao to Now

Brent Luvaas, DIY Style: Fashion, Music and Global Cultures

Jianhua Zhao, The Chinese Fashion Industry

Eric Silverman, A Cultural History of Jewish Dress

Karen Hansen and D. Soyini Madison, African Dress: Fashion, Agency, Performance

Maria Mellins, Vampire Culture

The Religious Life of Dress

Global Fashion and Faith

Lynne Hume

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

www.bloomsbury.com

Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published 2013

Lynne Hume, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Lynne Hume has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-0-8578-5363-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Religious dress is a visible signifier of difference. The message communicated is that the wearer chooses to follow a certain set of ideological or religious principles and practices. Dress distinctions function to set one religious community apart from other religious communities, and they also operate within a religion to distinguish hierarchies, power structures, gender distinctions, ideas of modesty, roles, mores, group identity and belief and ideology. Religious dress also alters over time, changing according to political pressure from within an institution or group, or outside political and social influences and changes in the prevailing views of morality. Dress can be used to silently express either rebellion or orthodoxy, and when a religion is exported to another culture, some interesting adaptations to an original item of dress might occur. As well, missionaries have been known to enforce punitive measures on indigenes through dress.