nike pro hijab case study

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Nike unveils Muslim women athletes

2019, Feminist Media Studies

We analyze the Nike Pro Hijab Spring 2018 marketing campaign and how it commodifies a product intended for Muslim women consumers to make it palatable to white audiences. Although Muslim designers have been selling sports hijabs for over a decade, the Nike marketing team positions the Nike Pro Hijab as cutting-edge and innovative by targeting professional athletes. The Nike Pro Hijab advertisements and websites discursively reconstruct Muslim women’s gender to mark the Muslim athletic body as secular and therefore safe. To this end, the Nike Pro Hijab marketing campaign circulates rhetorics of blackness to recast the Muslim woman body as athletic, and thus able to participate in national identity performance. Through our analysis, we establish how the Nike Pro Hijab marketing campaign deploys whiteness to render Muslim bodies and texts safe, palatable, and “moderate” in an increasingly anti- Muslim landscape in the United States.

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Promoting wearing of the hijab by active young consumers is one method of showing respect for the human rights of Muslim women. Some international sportswear corporations such as Nike, Adidas, Under Armour UA, and Haute Hijab HH have been targeting modest athletic wear as new clothing lines to empower veiled athletes and increase their consumer base. This study analyzed four international sports brands’ advertisements on their official YouTube channels aimed at promoting modest sportswear for veiled women. The study investigated the discourse and semiotics used in the advertisements to persuade customers to make a purchase. Methodologically, the study conducted qualitative content analysis to review the ads and explore the extent of viewers’ interactions. The findings determined that the Nike and HH ads were most reached ads, followed by the UA ad, while the Adidas ad was the least reached. Two strategies played a significant role in the success of hijab sportswear ads: cultural ide...

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Nuraan Davids

In Cleophas, F. (Ed.) Ex ploring decolonising themes in SA sport: Issues and challenges. Stellenbosch: African Sunmedia. Pp. 47-54. Abstract Whether in its physical or symbolic state, women's bodies continue to dominate a sustained and inimitable fascination-whether in abject sexualisation, subjectification or oppression. For a Muslim woman, this fascination traverses not only the physical embodiment of their role as woman, wife and mother, but indeed also of her personification as the custodian of Muslim values. Her centralised role in terms of Qur'anic exegeses has ensured that the debates surrounding Islam and Muslims have remained largely focused on her-and not only in Muslim majority countries. The preoccupation of liberal democracies to curtail and regulate the dress code of Muslim women, as in banning the hijāb in public spaces, for instance, has added not only to the criticality of Muslim women in and for Islam, but indeed also their vulnerability. It is against this background that one, therefore, has to consider the debate (presuming, that there is one) of Muslim women in sport. Seemingly, the issue is not so much about the reconcilability between Muslim women and sport, as it is between hijab-clad Muslim women and sport. Subsequently, the interest of this chapter is threefold. Firstly, it commences by offering a hermeneutical interpretation of the theological centrality of Muslim women, which might be fundamentally at odds with normative (and patriarchal) interpretations. Secondly, it considers the extent to which the 'debate' about Muslim women's participation in sport is, in fact, an extension of the ongoing public/private debate in relation to the role of Muslim women. And thirdly, the chapter concludes by paying particular attention to the much publicised launch of the "Nike Pro hijab", and considers whether its surrounding controversy is yet another instance of preventing (Muslim) religious identities from entering the public discourse.

Journal of South Asian Popular Culture

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Muslim women’s personal relationship with the body beneath and beyond the veil has received little attention, especially in the sporting literature. Instead, talk of sporting Muslim women has been more frequently animated around a monolithic Orientalist narrative that sensationalises the veil, and asserts the oppression of Islamic thinking on gender equality and female sexuality. Similarly, discussions of South Asian Muslim women’s participation in sport have been more routinely informed by ethnocentric stereotypes about the ‘passive Asian woman’. In this paper I engage postcolonial feminist thinking to move beyond uncritical dichotomous re/presentations that have systematically denied diverse sporting Muslim women an identity or bodily presence outside of the discursive identity of the veil. I focus on British Muslim Pakistani women who play basketball, and explore the multifarious, dynamic ways in which these women negotiate and perform various discourses pertaining to idealised yet dramaturgical notions of ‘hetero-sexy’ femininity on and off the court. By drawing the fe/male ocular away from the visual aesthetics of the veil and Islamic theocracy in shaping their engagement in sport, I seek to unveil something more personal about the relationship these sporting Muslim women have with the body that they own and an identity which they are actively carving out.

Geoff Harkness

A brief sociological take on Muslim sportswoman and the hijab.

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Chapter 5: Just Wear It: Media Coverage of the Nike Pro Hijab

• First Online: 19 November 2020

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• Adrianne Grubic 5  

Part of the book series: New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures ((NFDPSC))

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When Nike announced, in 2017, that it made a Pro Hijab, it touted how empowering it would be for Muslim female athletes. The garment won the most important design of the year in the 2017 Innovation by Design Awards and was also named one of 2017’s best inventions by Time magazine. However, Nike was not the first to make a hijab for female athletes. This study examines how the media reported on the global launch of the Nike Pro Hijab and what language was imparted in that coverage.

• Female athletes

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Grubic, A. (2021). Chapter 5: Just Wear It: Media Coverage of the Nike Pro Hijab. In: Fuller, L.K. (eds) Sportswomen’s Apparel Around the World. New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46843-9_6

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How Nike’s hijab sports gear is taking on Islamophobia and patriarchy

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In March, when sports manufacturer Nike launched its “Nike Pro Hijab”, it made obvious business sense. What Nike - perhaps inadvertently ̶ has done, is to legitimise the hijab across two very different narratives.

One is in response to hostile liberal democracies that are adamant in modernising Muslim women by stripping them of their hijab. The other is in response to some interpretations of Islam, which consider the traditional dress and role of Muslim women as irreconcilable with the modern arena of sport.

Nike has countered the position of liberal democracies because, implicit in its action is that if Muslim women are supported in wearing the hijab while participating in sport, then what can be so wrong about it being worn in other contexts? By introducing the “Pro hijab”, Nike is legitimising the wearing of the hijab by Muslim women in sport, and it’s also legitimising the wearing of the hijab in a public space.

The preoccupation of liberal democracies to curtail and regulate the dress code of Muslim women, such as banning the hijab in public spaces, has added to the vulnerability of Muslim women. What liberal democracies demand of them is to de-veil so that they become publicly acceptable.

In these countries, the hijab is designated as a symbol and image of oppression and backwardness. Sports sociologist Jennifer Hargreaves writes in her book Heroines of sport: The politics of difference and identity (2000),

The veil is a symbol of cultural difference. For non-Muslims it conveys the idea that Western women are liberated, and Muslim women, by comparison, are oppressed. The veil represents the ‘Otherness’ of Islam and is condemned in the West as a constricting mode of dress, a form of social control, and a religious sanctioning of women’s invisibility and subordinate sociopolitical status.

Secondly, what Nike has done is to counter the Muslim patriarchal view that justifies the relegation of Muslim women to the private space. They do this on the basis that women’s participation in the public domain necessarily compromises their modesty and values. In recognising Muslim women’s participation in sport, the “Nike Pro Hijab” has symbolically placed the role of the Muslim female body in the public sphere.

But sport transcends the boundaries of geographical and political spaces. It has both the means – and the end – of bringing together different ways of thinking, being and competing. Sport also cuts across culture, religion and language like no other industry.

Muslim women and the public discourse

High end designer names, such as Oscar de la Renta, Dolce & Gabbana, Versace and DKNY already tap into a formerly untraversed market of Muslim money, epitomised by the wealth found in the Gulf region. In this sense Nike’s latest clothing attire has been dismissed as nothing else but opportunistic.

Nike’s “Nike Pro Hijab” has been welcomed by some – mostly Muslim women. But it’s also been criticised harshly for endorsing the oppression of women. Criticism on social media have promoted tweets of dissent with the hashtag #BoycottNike.

But lost in this discontent are three significant facts and factors. Firstly, the participation of Muslim women in sport is not new. Secondly, Muslim women, who participate in sport, and who wish to maintain an Islamic dress code – as in wearing the hijab – have already done so. Thirdly, the impression that Nike is the first to promote a hijab, specifically geared at athletes, is misplaced.

The first person to design and market an “athletic hijab” was Dutch designer, Cindy van den Bremen , who did so in 1999. Today, smaller companies, like Van den Bremen’s “Capsters”, Canadian-based “ResportOn” , as well as a range of Muslim-owned companies, have been selling sports hijāb all over the world. In fact, a specific hijab design by “ResportOn” was one of the reasons that the International Taekwondo Federation allowed Muslim women to compete in recognised tournaments.

Both “Capster” and “ResportOn” submitted prototypes that formally overturned the football umbrella body, Fédération Internationale de Football Association’s (Fifa) hijab ban in 2014. These companies carved out a space for Muslim women when their participation was challenged. Nike’s introduction of the “Pro hijab”, therefore, is not a groundbreaking endeavour – regardless of what their campaign might infer.

But what Nike has achieved in promoting its “Pro hijab”, is that a globally recognised brand has mainstreamed what is generally considered as an oppressive and marginalised garment. Within a context of intensifying levels of Islamophobia increasingly directed at Muslim women, it’s inconceivable that Nike would not have expected the inevitable political and social backlash. Indeed, the ensuing controversy might very well be the best marketing for the latest Nike product.

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The Nike Pro Hijab has become one of the world's most popular clothing items

It sits alongside gucci trainers and fendi handbags as one of this year's most-wanted fashion items.

Emirati figure skater Zahra Lari wears Nike's Pro Hijab. AP

Nike’s sports hijab has become one of the most searched-for clothing items in the world.

Since its release in December 2017 , interest in the lightweight head-piece has been steadily growing, according to fashion search engine Lyst.

But during the first quarter of 2019, its popularity rose by 125 per cent, seeing it enter the top 10 most-wanted items in luxury fashion.

Nike spent years working on the Pro Hijab alongside a host of Muslim female athletes including American fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, Emirati figure skater Zahra Lari, and UAE weightlifter Amna Al Haddad, who provided the brand with feedback on its prototypes.

“You have no idea how important this is,” Amna Al Haddad said at the time. “It's going to inspire girls worldwide to follow their passion for sports."

Nike designed its hijab to tackle performance problems associated with wearing a traditional veil during sports. Several other modestwear labels, such as Siya and Raqtive, also sell active hijabs as part of their collections.

Lyst suggests the rising popularity of the Nike hijab could have been caused after French retailer Decathlon abandoned plans to launch a sporting hijab following complaints.

According to analysts, controversy around the issue boosted Nike’s social mentions by 4,900 per cent.

The Nike Pro Hijab came in at number seven on Lyst’s quarterly Hottest Women’s Product Index, which also featured the Gucci Ace sneakers, the Fendi baguette bag and the Sandy Liang shearling jacket.

The Alexander McQueen oversized sole sneakers are proving to be the most popular item in women’s fashion this year.

The full top 10:

10. Chloe Sawyer slides

9. Proenza Schouler tie-dye turtleneck

8. Gucci Ace sneakers

7. Nike Pro hijab

6. Fendi baguette bag

5. Sandy Liang shearling jacket

4. Gucci logo belt

3. Jacquemus Le Chiquito bag

2. Prada stud-embellished headband

1. Alexander McQueen oversized sole sneakers

What marketers can learn from Nike “Pro Hijab Collection” for female Muslim athletes

Nike was the goddess of victory in Greek mythology, Nike as a brand just proved that it got strong believes in human diversity and cultural competence than some political leaders.

Nike just introduced a performance hijab for Muslim women athletes and it’s called the “Nike Pro Hijab”.

The new Nike spring 2018 Pro Hijab Collection sends a strong message about the nobility of sport that shouldn’t differentiate between any skin color, gender or race.

Sports only knows passion, ambition and dedication.

- Advertisement -

Nike do not believe in Islam, Nike believes in Market Insights!

If marketers have one lesson to learn from the Nike Pro Hijab. It should be about how a brand should adapt itself and the products offered to meet the customers’ need. We shouldn’t expect the consumers to change their lives to meet the brand’s product or fashion line!

Empowering women with more than just a product, but rather a solution to their needs while both professional and everyday Muslim athletes helped create the Nike Pro Hijab.

Do you remember the huge social media buzz during Rio Olympics about Egypt’s Beach Volleyball player in hijab?

Back in Rio 2016 Summer Olympics, Doaa Elghobashy and her partner Nada Meawad made history as they played in the Copacabana beach court, becoming Egypt’s first ever Olympic team to compete in a beach volleyball tournament.

The social media buzz was not about the historic event for Egypt’s beach volleyball team. The buzz started when Team Egypt’s Doaa Elghobashy appeared in hijab on the beach volleyball court!

Instead of just watching the game, some insightful minds should have spotted an opportunity to open new markets and develop a new product lines for consumers who are already ready to use!

Nike the sportswear giant knows how to innovate to inspire, develop and introduces not just products but adventures, experiences.

In Nike’s pursuit of enhancing every Muslim female athlete’s life, it has just came first in the innovation race, channeling the Greek Goddess of Victory (Nike) and winning over millions of Hijab-wearing women all over the world, not only in the Arab world.

Nike Hijab Commercial

Nike-sponsored Olympic weight lifter Amna Al Haddad from the United Arab Emirates helped inspire the company to develop the hijab after she had difficulty finding a head covering that was comfortable and would adhere to competition standards, according to the New York Times. Haddad appeared in a Nike advertisement in April 2016, wearing a hijab without a logo. Now Nike’s signature swoosh is displayed prominently on the side of the Pro Hijab.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51EafVvqrxY

2 days before International Women’s day 2017, The official YouTube channel of Nike Women released an advert asking a rhetorical, discouraging question that is often asked whenever a female is going to do something “against the norm” of the society.

There is always this fear of what will the people say about her doing this or that. Following one’s passion is up to the public’s opinion.

The advert gained 922K viewership, was shared 5K times and has 26K likes.

“The film aims to highlight the stories of amazing athletes to encourage and inspire others,” Hind Rasheed, Nike’s communication manager in Dubai, told CNN.

The advert features Emirati figure skater Zahra in the sportswear and also, Tunisian fencer and Olympics medalist Ines Boubakri, Emirati Parkour trainer Amal Mourad, Saudi singer Balqees Fathi and Jordanian boxer Arifa Bseiso.

Nike Pro Hijab Spring 2018 Collection:

After the release of the advert and on the International Women’s Day, Nike released a statement announcing their new Pro Hijab Collection will be available in the Spring 2018 Collection.

The much awaited sportswear from Nike after the Plus size collection, Hijab wearing athletes were always facing an extra challenge with training in their normal garment’s weight, the potential for it to shift during action and its lack of breathability disrupted their focus.

So Nike has developed its first high-performance ‘Pro’ hijab, made from a sportswear mesh fabric, the lightweight polyester features tiny, strategically placed holes for optimal breathability, in neutral colors.

“The Nike Pro Hijab may have been more than a year in the making, but its impetus can be traced much further back, to an ongoing cultural shift that has seen more women than ever embracing sport,” Nike said in a statement.

The Pro Hijab collection is inspired by Sarah Attar, the first female track athlete to compete for Saudi Arabia in the London Olympics in 2012, who finished 800m, Dressed in a long-sleeved green training top, long jogging bottoms and a white hijab. She definitely stood out and she was given a stand ovation as she crossed the finish line, almost a full lap behind the others. Along with, Emirati weightlifting Olympian Amna Al Haddad.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BRVISzrBbcQ/

Zahra Lari, the first Emirati figure skater, Dubbed as the “Ice Princess” of the United Arab Emirates. She is one of the athletes featured in the advert as well, she told Nike: “I am covered, I am Muslim, I am from a desert country, but I am doing a winter sport and it’s fine,” She aspires to become a role model through persistence and stamina.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BRXYNUkh8kB/?taken-by=manirostom&hl=en

She was one of the athletes who tested the Nike Pro Hijab along with Nike+ Run Club Coach Manal Rostom, the Egyptian Mountaineer.

Nike are not only inspiring hijab-wearing athletes but also, modest sportswear for any athlete. The diversity and inclusion of any athlete* is opening new doors for Nike, as many females were discouraged to train and exercise due to not available modest attire or a preferable solution to their religious practices.

*Nike believes that if you have a body, then you’re an athlete.

Nike inspires everyone to just Do It.

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Nike Pro Hijab: Marketing Orientation and Plan

Added on   2023-06-10

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Nike Empowers Muslim Female Athletes with Groundbreaking Sports Hijab

Product news.

Finally, female hijabi athletes get the gear they deserve.

• The Nike Pro Hijab was released in December 2017.
• It was designed to solve the performance constraints of traditional hijabs in sports.
• The pull-on design and single-layer Nike Pro cool mesh keep female athletes dry and comfortable.
• The lightweight product comes in XS/S and M/L sizes.

To recognize and empower Muslim female athletes, Nike introduced its Nike Pro Hijab in December 2017. Groundbreaking, this new garment arose from the company responding to the needs of the hijabi community. In short, sports hijabs for women didn’t exist, and traditional hijabs weren’t cutting it for athletics.

With few options, top performers like Ibtihaj Muhammad, a Nike athlete and champion fencer, were forced to improvise garments. In fact, for her entire athletic career, Muhammad, who earned a bronze medal in Rio in 2016 for Team USA, had struggled to find the right fit. So, she’d tied her hijab in the back, pinning the front part under her chin and tucking any extra fabric under her sports bra straps.

Unfortunately, the doubled georgette fabric would become heavy and stiff when she sweated. Along with being uncomfortable, the hijab would obstruct her hearing so much that, sometimes, she’d be penalized for not hearing calls.

Muhammad wasn’t the only athlete challenged by the inadequacies of traditional hijabs for sports. Nike designers had heard similar feedback from many others. To level the playing field, Nike Pro designers (who create base layers, the fabric layers closest to the skin) decided to create a prototype for a sports hijab.

After they developed an initial version, they asked athletes to test it. A panel consisting of pros (including weightlifter Amna Al Haddad and figure skater Zahra Lari, both from the United Arab Emirates) and non-pros (such as Manal Rostom, a Nike Run Club Coach in Dubai, and Zeina Nassar, a German boxer) offered input on its performance and appearance.

Nike refined the product based on the athletes’ feedback gleaned over several rounds of wear testing. The resulting sports hijab is lightweight, soft, breathable, and inconspicuous. Made with single-layer Nike Pro cool mesh—one of Nike's most breathable fabrics—it helps keep athletes cool and comfortable. Meanwhile, both XS/S and M/L sizes ensure the pull-on hijab fits the range of head sizes and face shapes without added bulk from adjustment mechanisms.

Introduced in December 2017, the Nike Pro Hijab is available on Nike.com and at select retailers in Europe, North Africa, North America, and the Middle East. Today, the company offers both Nike Pro (black, $38) and Nike Victory (black, $46) hijabs, the latter for swimming.

More than sportswear, the Nike Pro Hijab symbolizes empowerment for Muslim female athletes. “The Nike Pro Hijab will help advance the conversation around hijabs and Muslim women in sports and further make sports an inclusive space,” Muhammad said when the product launched.

"It's a reminder to us Muslim women that we can achieve anything in the world," noted Lari. "What Nike has done for Muslim athletes is a dream that we never thought would happen."

Words by Dina Cheney

Originally published: February 27, 2024

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