YOUNG, BRITISH & MUSLIM

In 2011, I was working in fashion — covering major fashion weeks, spending spare afternoons wandering Oxford Street. It was there, not in the shows, that I started noticing something more interesting: young Muslim women wearing hijabs in ways that were inventive, confident, and entirely their own. At a time when modest fashion was largely invisible to the mainstream and the hijab remained the subject of widespread prejudice and suspicion, these women were doing something quietly radical with clothing. Since my perspective was still rooted in fashion, my instinct was straightforward: I wanted to show how good they looked. What began as an eye for garments slowly opened into something larger. In numerous cosmopolitan cities throughout the West, a younger generation of Muslim women is increasingly choosing to express their identity and faith through the hijab and modest dress. The veil remains one of the most visible symbols of Islam and, simultaneously, one of the most contested. This generation, now proudly reclaiming the headscarf, consists largely of women in their early twenties — young adults raised in the post-9/11 era, a period marked by heightened public and media hostility toward the dressed bodies of Muslim women. In Europe, this phenomenon is particularly visible in Great Britain, given its multicultural character and the absence of formal regulations regarding religious attire. The majority of these young women were either born in the UK or have spent most of their lives here. Like any other British women of their age, they shop at mainstream retailers such as H&M and Primark — yet they often feel unrepresented by mainstream fashion, and do not fully identify with the traditional dress of their mothers' generation. Every day, they navigate the conflicting expectations of their parents, peers, the Islamic community, and wider society. As a result, they have become highly articulate and self-conscious about their clothing and the social complexities it carries. By experimenting with mainstream trends, they develop individual styles that reflect their complex backgrounds and interests, and in doing so, challenge the stereotypes that still surround Muslim women in the West. The digital world has been central to this shift. Through blogs, online shops, YouTube tutorials, and social media, these women share ideas on how to be fashionable and observant simultaneously — producing a vibrant variety of styles on British streets: from traditional forms of covering such as the niqab, to colourful combinations of headscarves paired with loose or fitted modest outfits. These stylistic experiments signal the emergence of what has come to be called "Modern Western Islamic Fashion" — a movement that contributes to a broader shift in Muslim dressing practices and sparks vital debate within Islamic communities, while drawing the attention of non-Muslim society and prompting wider reflections on immigration, multiculturalism, and the relationship between Islam and Western culture. Key figures in this space include the British-Egyptian influencer Dina Tokio and fashion designer Sarah Elenany, known for creating inclusive scout uniforms suitable for both Muslim and non-Muslim girls. What I glimpsed on Oxford Street in 2011 was, it turned out, the beginning of something.