Diasporic Connections Revisited: Modest Fashion and Digital Fashion Activism

ABSTRACT This invited commentary responds to the power and residues of Irene Hardill and Parvati Raghuram's 1998 Area article ‘Diasporic Connections’. It makes three interlinked points on connection/disconnection and visibility/invisibility of female labour that trace the development of British South Asian and modest fashion. First, increasing complexity in migratory patterns alongside a hardening of right‐wing and anti‐immigration politics means a turn away from more hopeful narratives of transnational diaspora that foregrounded connectedness and exchange. Second, intersections of sexism and racism continue to shape transnational supply chains and labour hierarchies in the fashion industry, extending into the territorial return to onshore production championed in the UK: ‘Made in Britain’. Third is a wider point on gender, labour and agency that gives articulation to the transformation of fashion and migration studies through digital technologies. Digital platform labour explored through the vector of modest fashion offers opportunities for minority female fashion careers by amplifying voices and tools to build networks and cosmopolitan spaces of belonging. I use the term creative activism to refer to the circulation of cultural artefacts including fashion and digital content that enhance knowledge of difference, resist discrimination and mobilise international marketplaces for income security. However, this commentary advances that digital platform labour used for marketing fashion generates greater visibility and exposure to online abuse particularly for racialised minority Muslim women. Since the writing of Hardill and Raghuram's Area piece, digital technologies have intensified the body and home as spaces of production and consumption within a broader context of gender and racial injustice.