Alexandru Bălăşescu holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine (UCI, 2004). He taught at the UCI, American University in Paris, UC Critical Center in Paris, and RUW Bahrain. His publication appeared in several academic journals such as Fashion Theory, Gender and History, and the Journal of Material Culture. He also publishes regularly in "IDEA - Arts and Society" and in several other popular culture magazines (ZOO).
He is currently in Bucharest, activating as independent researcher, and guest assistant at the National School of Political and Administrative Studies.

In this fascinating and unique book, Alexandru Balasescu explores questions of Islamic dress, modernity and public space in Paris and Tehran. How are we to understand the exclusion of the Islamic dress from public space in France if, at the same time, trendy French women and wealthy Middle Eastern tourists shop for designer-label hijab, apparently accepting its conversion into a (depoliticited, deracinated) commodity? And how are we to understand the creation of "designer label" Islamic dress, when fashionable women recast the meanings and practices associated with veiling, understood by Western observers to be the mark of their subordination to a religious regime, into couture? This challenging book significantly complicates the question of Islamic dress in the modern world, and, indeed, questions hallowed categories of religion, secularism, and modernity itself / Bill Maurer, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine. Author of Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason.  

A book about oriental(ist) fashion, about trendiness in a conservative - if not "fundamentalist" - society? Yes, indeed, this is where and how it starts / Vintilă Mihăilescu