Hijabistas Now June 2014 | Page 6

Hijabis and Fashion

By: Manahil Sami

Do you believe that because Muslim women wear the hijab, it limits their ability to be fashionable and express themselves? If you do, that is not true. There are several ways in which we hijabis can be fashionable and follow the latest trends. There are endless possibilities to style the hijab and make it work with an outfit. Not only are there different ways in which we can wear the hijab, but the hijab comes in a huge variety of colors and designs. There are a lot of hijabis on Youtube who make videos on how to style the hijab and wear it in various ways. These people have Youtube channels solely for that purpose. There are even hijabi fashion designers who design modest clothes that will work with the hijab as well. One example is a young woman named Dina Torkia aka Dina Tokio on Youtube (shown below).

She started off not being very conscious about how she was presenting herself or how she looked when she wore the hijab. When she got into her late teens, around my age, she started to realize she would be more fashionable and stylish with the hijab. When I first began to wear it, I didn’t really pay attention to how I could style the hijab either. Part of it was probably because I was only about 12 years old and I didn’t know how I could even go about styling it. But I always looked at the older girls and how they wore their pretty long skirts or maxi dresses with the hijab. I knew I wanted to dress like that when I got older. Now when I watch people like Dina online, I am able to find new ways to style my hijab and create outfits that I feel are expressive of who I am.