Modest fashion as a work-wear requirement: negotiating religious and regional codes of modest dress and behaviour in Saudi Arabia

Academic and media commentary largely regards modest fashion as a concern only for religious women; whether regarded as a personal choice and expression of religious identity or uniquely religious patriarchal oppression. In contrast, this paper draws on ethnographic research into how women encounter religiously related codes of modest dress and behaviour as a workplace requirement regardless of their own diverse religious and secular beliefs and practices.

Women working for ostensibly secular global companies and organisations have to dress modestly for work when visiting Saudi Arabia where they are obliged to wear an abaya (a long loose robe that covers and obscures the body’s contours). Investigating how women acquire and learn to wear abayas, I consider the role of Saudi and regional women as informal cross-cultural fashion mediators and examine if/how local abaya fashion designers produce design propositions for women unaccustomed to abaya-wearing. Despite that Saudi women often code the abaya as a cultural rather than religious garment, both non-Muslim and Muslim research participants report wearing an abaya as a process of incorporation into a distinctive form of religious dress and body management: Muslim participants from outside the region may feel spiritually ill at ease in a different version of their own faith cultures; non-Muslims may feel alienated from their accustomed workplace impression management by modesty codes that are not their ‘own’. I use sociological understanding of syncretic daily religion to analyse experiences of in-group and out-group religious dress requirements as exemplars that go beyond a binarized view of cultural ownership or appropriation.