The Impact of Globalization on Arab Fashion Trends

Abstract

Globalization is a process that involves higher levels of integration and interaction among people, countries and cultures. This unprecedented growing interdependence of the world’s societies has been significantly driven by international trade, investments and the sophisticated information technologies. Consequently and inevitably, the impact of such high scale integration has had its impact on the world’s politics, economy, culture and even environment. Within this context and with a particular focus on the cultural side, the present dissertation seeks to locate and examine the impact of globalization on one essential element of the Arab culture, i.e. fashion trends. In fact, within the globalization process, fashion trends today are in a continuous substantial change. The analysis of the literature on the impact of globalization on Arab fashion has shown that this impact has positive as well as negative implications. The advantageous side resides basically in the modernization and internationalization of Arab styles. The negative impact, on the other hand, is reflected in both: the new tendencies of Arab fashion towards Westernization and the dependence of the Arab fashion on foreign sources in terms of manufacturing and creative designs.