Hijab Style gets a mention in this article about Indonesian fashion, and is apparently 'wildy successful' according to Australia's The Age. Here's an excerpt:
Indonesian designers are looking beyond the Islamic nations with their chic but modest labels. Fashion editor Janice Breen Burns reports.May 22, 2009
[...] Earlier this week, in the elegant forecourt of Melbourne's Indonesian embassy, six models posed in designs by Pelangi and veteran Jakarta fashion identity Iva Lativah. The designers were here with a traditional dance troupe and small contingent of Jakarta journalists for a fashion show hosted at the Grand Hyatt by Indonesia's consul-general for Victoria and Tasmania, Budiarman Bahar and its ministry of culture and tourism. This day, Pelangi's heavily draped caftan and kimono-style dresses, tunics and coats moved languidly in a weak breeze and her models, even taller in their elaborately twisted turbans, stork-stepped on gold-painted bootlets with heels high and thick as house bricks. Fashionable indeed. Pelangi's own jewellery designs — thick, beaten gold wrist hoops stacked in twos and threes, and elaborate lace metal pendants big as butter plates — would not look amiss on a Parisian catwalk. In halting English, Pelangi, in leather jacket, maxi skirt and vivid tie-dye scarf knotted under her hijab, carefully explained how the gowns were fashioned from hand-loomed silk. Pelangi's pretty colours were also tie-dyed into swirling, clashing patterns by hand, and her turbans and hijab headscarves loomed and dyed to match. "I am always creative, trendy and fashionable," she finished shyly.In a mostly non-Muslim market such as Australia's (just under 2 per cent of Australians are Muslim), many of Pelangi's "trendy, youthful" designs and, even more so, Iva Lativah's elegant, streamlined silk abayas in rich jewel colours, are more likely to appeal to mature women. In common with young Muslim women, they are often at a personal crossroads, likely to choose fashion that emphasises feminine modesty and classic elegance than flesh-centric mainstream trends.Read the rest
here.
