All Her Glory: Modest Fashion and the Cosmopolitan Condition

This ethnographic paper explores modest fashion (MF) among Muslim and Jewish women in Israel as a lens to situated, everyday practices of cosmopolitanism in a Middle Eastern setting. We find that, through its spread across offline and online spaces, MF creates unexpected interactions between Jewish and Muslim-Palestinian women, whose communities are, by and large, mutually hostile. Drawing on participant observation, netnography, and interviews, we argue that MF fosters a vernacular cosmopolitanism facilitated by a shared habitus of conservatism, communitarianism, and respect for orthodoxy regarding body and modesty. Unlike liberal cosmopolitanism, which praises individualism and the blurring of collective boundaries, their cosmopolitanism is rooted in an illiberal worldview, which, somewhat counterintuitively, facilitates a relaxed sense of cultural closeness to Others without wishing to blend with them. This refusal to romanticize Difference is an attribute that makes pragmatic cosmopolitanism more resilient to the extreme nationalism and separatism defining today’s illiberal turn.