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Heather is currently conducting research for her PhD dissertation on the history of Somali dress and how items of dress for sale at two Somali "malls" in Minneapolis-St. Paul connect with global trends in Western, African and Islamic dress. A chapter on Somali women in Minnesota will be published in a forthcoming anthology on dress and nationalism in Africa and the African diaspora from Indiana University Press.
The metropolitan area of Minneapolis-St. Paul is home to the largest community of Somali refugees in the United States. As they have made their way from Somalia to refugee camps in East Africa to resettlement in the diaspora, changes in culture, politics and lifestyle have been reflected in and shaped by the dress of Somali women.
So what does this have to do with fashion? We argue that fashion systems are about far more than just change for the sake of change. In this paper, we reflect on the case of Somali women's dress to evaluate Herbert Blumer's theory on fashion. In his article, "Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective Selection" (1969), Blumer outlines six criteria for the existence of a fashion system. In this paper we discuss how the dress of Somali women in Minneapolis-St. Paul does and does not fit these criteria and offer suggestions for how Blumer's theory might be reconsidered. Although his theory had not previously been tested, Blumer's focus on fashion as a mechanism of "collective selection" that channels reaction to rapid social change appears to be viable as a way of describing and analyzing the experiences of Somalis in the diaspora. Price
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