For Muslim Women, Fashionable Modesty Can Be Tough

c. 2006 Religion News Service ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS, N.J. _ When Brooke Samad converted to Islam, convincing her Sicilian Catholic mother and Russian-Polish Jewish father that she knew what she doing was hard enough. Harder still was finding something to wear. “I always considered myself a fairly stylish person,” said Samad, who lives here. “When I […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS, N.J. _ When Brooke Samad converted to Islam, convincing her Sicilian Catholic mother and Russian-Polish Jewish father that she knew what she doing was hard enough.

Harder still was finding something to wear.


“I always considered myself a fairly stylish person,” said Samad, who lives here. “When I became a Muslim and had nothing to wear, for a few years there I was really unstylish.”

To fill the niche created by women like her _ young, professional, fashion-conscious but committed to dressing modestly _ Samad founded her own design firm, Marabo, a year-and-a-half ago. Recently she launched her fall and winter line.

“I try to echo what’s out there,” she said, “and tailor it so it’s wearable for my market.”

Samad was always interested in fashion, but since her parents were not keen on the idea of a fashion career for their daughter, she majored in international politics at New York University and did an internship for the State Department.

After graduation in 2001, she took a job at an insurance company but also started taking night classes at Parsons School for Design. She then enrolled in an intensive, one-year program at the Fashion Institute of Technology, which she began shortly after marrying her husband, Omar Samad, and officially converting to Islam.

“I knew I wanted to pursue this idea of clothing for Muslim women,” she said. But after FIT, she took a job with the Swatch group and put her own line on hold. Seven months later, the urge to create “began gnawing at me. I decided I’m going to do this.”

She sketched the clothes she knew would appeal to young Muslim women, and then set about learning the business _ finding reputable manufacturers, selecting fabric, pounding the pavement.

“It’s trial and error at first,” she said. “You learn a lot from mistakes, which is expensive.”


Two years ago she took her clothes to Chicago to a conference of the Islamic Society of North America, and found a waiting market.

“People were buying,” she said.

She still does a lot of business that way _ by traveling to where the customers are, including house parties _ but she also does online sales through her Web site, http://www.maraboonline.com.

“Now I know my customers,” she said. “Young professionals, working mothers.”

Her biggest seller is an ankle-length denim skirt, which she wore the day she welcomed visitors into her home-based studio.

“It’s really a practical line I’m trying to do,” she said. “Pretty, classic, something you can wear over and over and get your money’s worth from.”

Her line includes kimono-wrap blouses, empire-waist tunics, blouson sleeve tops, mandarin collar, button-down blouses, long skirts with kick pleats and even pants.

“I’m a big pants person,” she said. But like the rest of the line, the focus in pants is on modesty. “Low-rise jeans were a disaster for a lot of us.”


She hasn’t yet begun designing head scarves _ too much fabric-shopping for the entrepreneur who also works three days a week at a photo studio in Manhattan _ and she says that when she begins her summer line, she’ll stay away from swimwear, a tricky area for Muslim women.

“I wasn’t interested in reinventing the bathing suit,” she said with a laugh. “Maybe some day I will.

But she is looking forward to giving summer fashions an Islamic tilt.

“Summer is skimpy by nature,” she said. “It’s a good opportunity for me to make everything with sleeves and lower hemlines.”

KRE/JL END PALMA

(Leslie Palma-Simoncek writes for the Staten Island Advance in Staten Island, N.Y.)

Editors: To obtain photos of Samad and her clothes, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

See related stories, RNS-VEILS-EGYPT and RNS-VEILS-FRANCE, both transmitted Nov. 7.

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