Women from Burnley’s Asian community joined forces with fashion experts at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) to create a range of contemporary headscarves and hijabs, inspired by rare Asian textile samples from the world-class Gawthorpe Textiles Collection.
The project team, incorporating four artists and led by UCLan’s Senior Lecturer in Fashion Design Amanda Odlin Bates and Principal Lecturer in Fashion and Textiles Bev Lamey, worked with an intergenerational mix of local Burnley women for a period of several months, producing contemporary textiles for headscarf designs.
Playing a key role in the growth of ‘modest fashion’, the art of scarf styling is an important outlet of cultural expression. The way a hijab is worn says as much about a Muslim woman as the way a westernised woman would style her hair.
