Styling South Asian Youth Cultures ─ Fashion, Media & Society

For South Asia, fashion and consumption have come to play an increasingly important role in the lives of young people and in the formation of youth cultures. Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have all, in related and distinctive ways, been producing confident young fashion consumers, who are proving to be an important market for fashion. This book explores South Asian youth cultures and fashion across the countries of this region and their diasporas from a transnational perspective. Through visual and textual analysis of film, photography and digital cultures, as well as ethnographic fieldwork, the expert contributors look at how gender, sexuality, class, the media and faith intersect with and style youth cultures. By establishing the heterogeneous nature of South Asia and its youth cultures, they also dismantle grand western narratives that tend to understand the region's diverse cultural modernity through the lens of homogeneity.

Lipi Begum is Programme Leader in Fashion Management at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. Formerly lecturer in Marketing and Branding at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, she has worked as a global consultant for the ready-made garment sector in Bangladesh. She is developing her research practice in gender, South Asian consumer cultures and fashion creative industries.
Reina Lewis is Professor of Cultural Studies at London College of Fashion, UAL. Her books include: Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures (2015); Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem (I.B. Tauris, 2004), Edited volumes include: Modest Fashion: Styling Bodies, Mediating Faith (I.B. Tauris, 2013); Gender, Modernity and Liberty: Middle Eastern and Western Women’s Writings: A Critical Reader (with Nancy Micklewright, I.B. Tauris, 2006), and Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (with Sara Mills, 2003). Reina Lewis co-edits with Elizabeth Wilson the Dress Cultures series at I.B. Tauris and the Cultures in Dialogue series with Teresa Heffernan.
Rohit K Dasgupta is lecturer at the Institute for Media and Creative Industries, Loughborough University. He is the author of Digital Queer Cultures of India (2017) and is co-editor of Masculinity and its Challenges in India (2014) and Rituparno Ghosh: Cinema, Gender and Art (2015).