Interview with Reina Lewis

Abstract

This interview with leading fashion studies scholar Reina Lewis discusses the various foci of her research about fashion and visual culture: orientalism, religion (especially Islam), and queer sexualities. The interview highlights the intersection between these strands of Lewis’s work. Parkins and Lewis discuss what these intersections might reveal about regimes of visibility for differently marginalized groups, historically and in the contemporary moment. Issues of the gaze, modest dress, online communities, and the commodification of outsider identities are paramount in the conversation.

KEYWORDS:

• Reina Lewis
• fashion
• Islam
• veiling
• homosexuality
• diversity
• fashion marketing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Ilya Parkins is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus. She is the author of Poiret, Schiaparelli, Dior: Fashion, Femininity and Modernity (Berg, 2012) and the co-editor of Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion (UPNE, 2011). Her research on fashion, feminist theory, and mediations of femininities in modernist and contemporary contexts has drawn extensively on fashion magazines and periodical studies, and has appeared in periodicals including Time & Society, Feminist Review, Australian Feminist Studies, and the collection Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918–39.

Notes

1 Revisiting the Gaze: Feminism, Fashion and the Female Body, was organised by Morna Laing and Jacki Willson and held at the Chelsea College of Arts, University of London, 28–29 June 2017. Information available at https://revisitingthegaze.wordpress.com/. Accessed June 5, 2018.

2 Lewis and Rolley 1996; Lewis 1997.

3 Maxine Beneba Clarke, untitled poem posted on Twitter, March 17, 2018. Twitter: @slamup.

4 Lewis and Tarlo 2011.

5 Mort 1996.

6 Lipka and Gecewicz 2017.

7 Clark 1991.

8 The New York store opened in early May 2018.