Hijab, Glamour, and the Ramadan Dilemma

Ramadan in Asia has a peculiar way of turning down the volume on some parts of life while turning it up everywhere else. Days are slower, appetites are disciplined, screens are (ideally) dimmed, and the calendar fills with the kind of evenings that make you grateful for community: iftar invitations, late-night grocery runs, prayers, family visits, and—right on cue—an annual flood of “Ramadan collections” and “Eid edits” that treat the holy month like a global fashion season. In 2025 and 2026, lifestyle and fashion coverage described luxury and high-street brands timing capsule drops to Ramadan with the same confidence they bring to year-end holidays: a predictable moment when people want clothes that look ceremonial, feel comfortable, and photograph beautifully under warm restaurant lights.

This is where “modest fashion” stops being a niche label and starts functioning like an industry. It has its own silhouettes, supply chains, influencers, and now, very clearly, its own retail calendar. Market reporting tied to the State of the Global Islamic Economy has repeatedly framed modest fashion as a fast-growing consumer sector, forecasting Muslim spend on apparel and footwear climbing into the hundreds of billions of dollars over the coming years—numbers that help explain why every platform and brand wants to be “part of the conversation” by the time Ramadan begins.

In Muslim Asia—especially Indonesia and Malaysia—the conversation is not simply about “covering up.” It’s about what covering means, who gets to define it, and how women move through public space with clothing that is never just fabric. In big cities, you can see the Ramadan wardrobe problem in motion: airy, long-sleeved pieces that won’t feel punishing during fasting hours; outfits that transition into night-time social life; and a final, carefully chosen look for Eid/Raya. That practical logic—comfort, breathability, movement—sits beside aesthetics: the desire for elegance, softness, and celebratory detail without feeling “too much.” Retailers have learned to package this as an aspirational “day-to-night modest glamour” story, making Ramadan a seasonal moodboard of flowing sets, dresses, kaftans, and abaya-like layers.

But the deeper story, especially for Muslim Asian women, is negotiation. Across Indonesia’s hijab scenes and online communities, researchers have described how piety and style are not opposites so much as co-produced in public life: women navigate family expectations, peer norms, workplace rules, and social media aesthetics, shaping what “proper” looks like in ways that can shift by neighborhood, class, and generation. The hijab can be devotion, identity, belonging—and also trend, entrepreneurship, and self-presentation. In other words, modest fashion isn’t just clothing; it’s a language women use to speak to multiple audiences at once.

Ramadan intensifies that multi-audience reality. The month is already saturated with moral attention—more prayers, more talk about discipline, more reminders about humility—so what you wear can feel like a louder statement than it does in, say, October. Some women lean into simplicity as a private spiritual reset. Others treat Ramadan as the one time of year when dressing beautifully feels socially expected: you will see relatives you haven’t seen in months; you will take photos; you will host; you will visit; you will be visited. In Malaysia, for example, “Raya outfits” are not a small detail; they are a whole category of family ritual, from coordinated “sedondon” sets to classic baju kurung and modern kebaya variations. And e-commerce platforms have become the megaphone—campaigning, curating, and pushing local brands into a nationwide “festive demand” machine. In early 2026, coverage of Shopee’s Ramadan/Raya campaign explicitly positioned local Muslimah brands and marketplace tooling as a way to scale festive collections rapidly.

Which brings us to the contradiction at the heart of your theme: luxury “Muslim” fashion. The hijab and modest dress are often framed, in Islamic ethics, as practices aligned with humility and restraint. Yet the Ramadan fashion boom includes precisely the opposite energy: exclusivity, premium pricing, status signaling—sometimes delivered in the soft, polite language of “quiet luxury.” A silk abaya can be cut to flow modestly while still performing wealth through fabric, finish, and brand aura. Even when logos are minimal, the message can be loud: not “look at my body,” but “look at my access.”

Luxury brands have leaned into Ramadan capsules with remarkable consistency, and the editorial framing often tells on itself: billowing silhouettes, shimmer for the night, garments “to illuminate” iftar evenings—Ramadan as aesthetic atmosphere. The business logic is simple: affluent Muslim consumers are a global market; Ramadan and Eid are concentrated spending moments; and “modest” silhouettes are easy to translate into premium drape and embellishment. The moral logic is harder. When modesty is sold as a luxury fantasy, the spiritual message can feel inverted—like humility becoming a premium lifestyle, curated for those who can afford it.

Muslim women are not unaware of this tension. Some solve it by separating intentions: beauty is allowed; celebration is allowed; generosity is encouraged; the key is the heart. Others critique the whole spectacle: Ramadan should be about the hungry and the hidden, not a shopping marathon. And then there’s a third, very contemporary stance: if mainstream fashion wants to profit from Muslim consumers, it should also reflect Muslim women as full people—diverse in race, body type, and interpretation of modesty, and included behind the scenes as stylists, designers, and decision-makers, not just “Ramadan campaign faces.” The modest fashion mainstreaming story has been accompanied—especially in Western contexts—by political hostility to Muslim dress, which makes the commercial embrace feel both validating and cynical at the same time: your hijab is “controversial” on the street, but “market opportunity” in a campaign deck.

In Muslim Asia, this plays out with local texture. Indonesia’s “hijrah” currents and influencer economies can fuse piety with consumption so tightly that “religious glow-up” and “shopping haul” start to share the same visual grammar. Researchers have even used language like conspicuous piety to describe how religious expression and consumer culture can reinforce each other under modern social media conditions. During Ramadan, that fusion becomes extra powerful because the month rewards visible discipline—yet risks turning visibility itself into the prize.

So the rise of modest fashion brands and Ramadan collections isn’t just a retail story. It’s a story about women building a livable space inside competing demands: faith and fashion, restraint and celebration, community norms and personal agency, spiritual sincerity and digital life. And the luxury contradiction isn’t a simple hypocrisy. It’s a pressure point that reveals how modern devotion is lived in public—where even modesty can be commodified, and where Muslim women keep doing what they have always done: interpreting, adapting, and deciding for themselves what piety looks like, one outfit at a time.