Eman B Fendi, 33rd St, New York

Philadelphia Street Style: Khaalidah, 18th St

Philadelphia, says, Khaalidah, is a good place to be a fashionable Muslim. There is a burgeoning Muslim community in Philly, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people, depending on which report you consult, 85 percent of which are African-American, and a growing number of fashion boutiques that cater specifically to them. "There are Muslim fashion stores everywhere," she told me. "So it's really easy" for her to find clothes.  "This dress," says Khaalidah, "is just a regular black dress I got at a fashion store in West Philadelphia. And the scarf I have on is from an Indian store." She got the jewelry from a mall out in New Jersey, but she doesn't remember the name of the store. Khaalidah describes her style as "classy." I would too. She is quite striking in her modest, simple, all black look. 

Bandung Street Style: Rinanta and Rininta, Paris Van Java

This darling duo managed to have the most improbable, and impossibly cute, combination of names: Rinanta and Rininta. Rinanta's scarf is by Hermès, but everything else she's wearing is unbranded. Rininta's scarf, on the other hand is unbranded, while everything else she is wearing is Mango. 

Bandung Street Style: Siro, Paris Van Java

Bandung is about a two-hour drive or three-hour train ride from Jakarta. It's at a higher altitude than the capital city and is usually a few degrees cooler. It's also cooler in the other sense of the word, with a reputation as something like the San Francisco or Portland of Indonesia. Bandung is home to some of the most prestigious universities in the country, and feels a bit like a college town. It's also the center of the indie music and fashion scenes, with more hipsters per square mile than anywhere else in Indonesia. That said, it has nothing on Portland in that regard. They still constitute a small minority. But Bandung no doubt boasts more metalheads and gutter punks than even the Pacific Northwest can muster. In the Dutch colonial days (lasting from roughly the 15th Century to 1942), Bandung was known as "Paris Van Java," or the Paris of Java, for its lush gardens and European architecture. These days, that comparison is a bit of a stretch. The European architecture is still there, but its competes with ramshackle huts with tin roofs, plastic tarp food stalls (angkringan), and gaudy new construction factory outlets of various fashion brands made in the city. Bandung is ground zero for outsourced garment manufacturing in Indonesia. Ralph Lauren has stuff made here, as does Hugo Boss, and The Gap. Chances are, you have something made here too. It is this garment-manufacturing infrastructure that has made Bandung the nation's hotspot for new and exciting local clothing brands. I'll be featuring some of them in the coming week or two.

I took these shots of Siro at the "Paris Van Java" shopping center in the Sukajadi neighborhood of Bandung. It's a California-style outdoor mall, replete with fake Parisian buildings. This is NOT what most of Bandung looks like. It's more of a hyper-real monument to what Bandung residents imagine it used to be. 

I love the way Siro combines Muslim modesty with an urban edge in these shots. She had no idea (or interest) in what brands she was wearing, but she clearly knows how to pull a look together.

Jakarta Street Style: Dicka, Mal Pondok Indah

Dicka described her style to me as "Apa aja yang ada di lemari" (whatever is in my closet). Not an unusual answer to that question. And yet it still seems worth remarking on that this is what she has lying around her closet. I love the incorporation of tie-dye into busana Muslimah (pious Muslim clothing). Indonesian Islamic fashion, you may have noticed, is anything but staid and static. 

Jakarta Street Style: Indah, Mal Pondok Indah

This is Indah, looking bright and chic in a hijab and modest (though colorful) Muslim dress. Her name means "beautiful" in Indonesian, and the mall I shot these in, appropriately, is the mall of Pondok Indah, a neighborhood in South Jakarta, Indonesia, that translates to "Beautiful Corner."  

For the next three weeks, I will be shooting street style in Jakarta and Bandung, two of the cities in Indonesia, for those of you keeping track, where I have previously done ethnographic fieldwork. As always, it's surreal to be back here.I get this strange sensation of continuity between my trips, like I've never actually left in the first place. Meanwhile, Jakarta keeps changing around me.

Shooting street style in Jakarta is a funny thing, though. In fact shooting on the streets themselves is a virtual impossibility. Why? You ask. Because they look like this.

And this.

And the sidewalks look like this. 

There is nowhere to walk. The streets barely move. There is, frankly, no place for style to conceivably take place on them. So style happens at malls instead, where the middle class can escape the noise and particulate matter that saturates the air. Jakarta's developers were unable to fix the streets. So they built an alternative city indoors. 

Shooting in malls makes for a very different street style experience than I'm used to. It's not my favorite, I have to admit. But I had fun anyway. The three people I photographed today were incredibly kind and gracious, if a little uncomfortable with the whole thing, some white dude with long hair, a beard, and a beanie walking up to them carrying a big ass camera. I can speak Indonesian, so that helps, and they had no trouble understanding the concept of what I was doing. Indonesia has more bloggers per capita than just about anywhere. One in four Indonesians with Internet access has their own blog. And that's not counting the number of Indonesians who microblog. Indonesia is now something like number two in the world for Twitter users and fifth for Facebook. 

For those of you who know nothing else about Indonesia, here's a (very) brief primer: It's the world's fourth largest nation, with a population of some 230 million people spread out across 17,000 islands in Southeast Asia. I'm only going to be on Java for the duration of my trip. Java, however, accounts for half the country's population. Most of you have probably drunk coffee from here. Most of you probably have at least one item of clothing manufactured here. Indonesia is also an incredibly diverse place, with some 300 hundred ethnic groups speaking hundreds of different languages. There are dozens of religions practiced, though most Indonesians (around 90%) claim Islam on their identification cards. That would make it the country with the world's biggest Muslim population. It's got beautiful beaches and some of the densest rainforests, oil and minerals, orangutans and tigers. Most Americans, however, know it for two other things, if they know it at all: tsunamis and terrorism. Hopefully over the next few weeks of my style survey, your impression will have expanded.  

Philadelphia Street Style: Dayana in Philly-Style Muslim Chic, Walnut St

For the last few months, one of my primary goals for this blog has been to capture the variety of sartorial sensibilities that make up the city of Philadelphia. I feel like I've done a reasonably good job with that, but I'm well aware that a number of styles have continued to elude me. One of the styles I have been most keen to depict has been that of the numerous African-American Muslim women that lend such a distinctive look and feel to this city. I've seen no shortage of African-American Muslim women while shooting for this blog, but I've carefully maintained one simple rule for myself: I am not allowed to photograph someone simply because they fit a particular demographic. They must also be stylish and visually striking. They must be someone, in other words, I would have photographed whether they fit that demographic or not. Now don't get me wrong. There are lots of stylish African-American Muslim women in this town. It's just that I've happened to encounter fewer of them when I've had my camera out. I am working to correct that oversight right now. Dayana is the first of many shots I hope to get of Muslim chic, Philly-Style.