One high school student, Maahum Chaudhry described this globalizing trend for the ethnic news agency, the New America Media blog, recalling, “As I would go to pray at the holy mosque, I saw many young women wearing brand named hijabs. I remember one women in particular wearing a Christian Dior headscarf with Gucci shades while carrying a black coach bag…After seeing her, I had to buy a brand name scarf, so I got a Calvin Klein one with CK printed all over it” [4].
Within a broader historical context, this tendency towards pervasive branding followed the 1990s when “the branding of culture took an especially strong step forward” [5]. As Naomi Klein writes in her book, No Logo, “the effect if not always the original intent of advanced branding is to nudge the hosting culture into the background and make the brand the star. It is not to sponsor culture but to be the culture” [6]. Consider this image of black veil worn by a Saudi woman bearing the Yves Saint Laurent logo with the claim made by Meyda Yegenoglu that the woman’s body “is not simply inside of the veil: it is of it; she is constituted in and by the fabrication of the veil” [7]. Following this logic, the woman’s body is both branded by and constituted in the commodity status of the hijab.
That Princess Hijab brings together the veil, branding/tagging, and Western advertisements for luxury goods through the hyper-fetishization of the hijab is no coincidence. Postcolonial and critical race theorist, Sara Ahmed, draws out the significance of this confluence of cultural forces in her discussion of the commodity and its resonance with the figuration of the “stranger” in Western society. In her equation, the stranger becomes a fetish consumed as something the object simply has [8]. In other words, the perception of objects as having difference is itself an effect of the very processes of production and exchange embedded in consumer culture. This process of exchange, Ahmed explains, marks a shift from biological racism to cultural racism that is endemic of the 20th and 21st century [9]. Princess Hijab's signature tag inclucates the wearable details of cultural racism and its mode of circulation via advertisements, consumer goods, and capitalist desires.