Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology Serra Kocak has just published a solo-authored article entitled “Aesthetics of Piety: Everyday Islamic Feminisms Among Modest Fashion Designers in Istanbul” in Oxford Intersections: Gender Justice. The abstract is below. Congrats to Serra on this terrific work!
This article examines how young Muslim women designers in Turkey’s rapidly expanding modest fashion sector reinterpret piety through creative labor. The article argues that their practices can be understood as forms of everyday Islamic feminisms: feminist agency expressed through design work, moral reasoning, and negotiations of gendered power rather than through formal political activism. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted between 2015 and 2017, ethnographic observation, and analysis of designers’ public self-presentation on social media, the article examines how designers navigate public visibility, respond to conservative backlash, and negotiate ethical boundaries within a fashion market increasingly shaped by social media. Rather than treating modesty as a fixed sartorial code, designers frame piety as a relational and intentional practice grounded in ethical conduct and responsibility. By centering women designers as cultural producers rather than consumers, the article reframes modest fashion as a site of cultural production in which Muslim women craft new religious subjectivities and assert professional authority.