Fashioning place: young Muslim styling and urban belonging

In this chapter geographical and social ideas of being in place/out of place are reconsidered through looking at fashion and high street shopping practices by young Muslim women. Addressing the cultural economy of how power and agency are distributed, it attends to the changing dynamics of the high street amidst local contexts of social pluralism. The everyday creativity of Muslim women negotiating social and spatial discrimination is explored, along with the kinds of subjectivity produced through fashioning forms of conformity and resistance. Here the experiences of women in everyday tactics of shopping and self-styling are shown as they build new Muslim female identities and spaces of belonging, and renegotiate a sense of place as part of a streetwise Mancunian youth and global Muslima. Faith and fashion are thus advanced as key to a critical, contemporary understanding of place.