Politicizing the site of fashion: Conversations with designing women in Dhaka

Fashion and consumption are culturally coded ways through which systems of class reinscribe and reproduce legitimacy by articulating, regulating and monitoring hierarchies of culture, class and consumption. Fashion and clothing are not only about presentation, they are also the means by which identities and power relations are produced and contested in local-translocal-global spaces. In this article based on ethnographic research, I discuss how fashion entrepreneurs in Dhaka, Bangladesh, are engaged in (re)articulating social and class relations through fashion. They do this by claiming a local and authentic fashion against a hybridized transnational trend. At the same time, dominant modes of fashion are challenged and reappropriated, giving way to negotiations in power dynamics. In this site of cultural production fashion is a fluid system where agency and subjectivity are actively negotiated.