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ABSTRACT
Indonesia’s bid to be the world’s Muslim fashion capital involves a growing number of female Muslim fashion designers and business owners. With more urban Indonesian young women adopting modest clothing, increasing state support for creative and digital economy, and ease of access and distribution, the market expansion of the Muslim fashion industry allows young Muslim women to become successful entrepreneurs and good virtuous Muslims at the same time. Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines how Indonesia’s emerging female ethical entrepreneurs frame their successes using highly individualistic and virtuous registers. Muslim women’s fashion entrepreneurs seem to be concerned primarily with their passion, talent, and hard work combined with their commitment to religious practices to receive ‘blessings’ from God for their businesses. Labour conditions of mostly lower-class Muslim women working in home-based garment workshops or konveksi, manufacturing the new styles of hijab or veil and modest dresses for the industry, were treated as dismissible and small adjustments were quick to be celebrated as improvements. This paper calls for a critical reading of Muslim women’s economic participation and argues that the visibility of middle-class young women as aspiring entrepreneurs conceals the exploitation of lower-class young women’s labour.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Not to mention the mushrooming of e-commerce platforms, like Buka Lapak and Tokopedia among many others, that have made their ventures so much easier. In 2018, this informal online commerce was valued at $3 billion (Das et al. Citation2018).
2. The official category youth in Indonesia encompasses those aged 16–30 years old. While categorization based on age limit could be helpful, this article understands young women as those who have been positioned in capitalist media landscape as fluid but often fixated with youthfulness and future ideals (Saraswati and Beta Citation2020, 4; Driscoll Citation2002).
3. Names of business owners and their brands as well as the interviewees here have been altered.
4. In this article, hijabs and veils are used interchangeably following the popular uses of the terms in Indonesia. In Arabic, ‘hijab’ has multiple meanings: partition, veil, cover. Amongst Indonesian Muslims, ‘hijab’ is usually equated with the veil or headscarf used by Muslim women to cover their hair.
5. ‘Hijaber’ is a popular term used in Indonesia that encompasses diverse groups of young women donning stylish veils or hijab to cover themselves. Similar to ‘hijabi’ in North American and British contexts, hijabers usually don colourful headscarves matching their fun and playful interpretation of modest dressing in Islamic traditions. There is a sense of openness and creativity attached to the ‘hijaber’ style, often seen as different from the orthodoxy of Islamic interpretations about how women should cover and practice modesty (Bucar Citation2017; Lewis Citation2015; Beta Citation2014; Baulch and Pramiyanti Citation2018).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Annisa R. Beta
Annisa R. Beta is a Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne. Before moving to Melbourne, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore. While finishing her doctoral degree, she was also a visiting student researcher at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Her research is broadly concerned with youth, new media, and political subjectivity in Indonesia and Southeast Asia.