The Decline of Persian Dress

THE DECLINE OF PERSIAN DRESS

by Sahar Zarafshan

EVERY COUNTRY HAS ITS OWN STORY of how the period of “modernization” caused their cultural clothing to go into decline, perhaps only occasionally coming back out into normalized wear for festivals or cultural celebrations. In my research, I have found that the Iranian case is unique. Every Norouz, I see pictures of jili kurdi and Afghan traditional dress, and can’t help but wonder what happened to our clothing after the Qajar dynasty, with their veils secured by headpieces, dresses and low-sitting belts, and detailed earrings.

I have found, firstly, that most of the sources regarding Persian traditional dress revolve around women, and often, the laws mandating compulsory veiling and unveiling. There I discovered the violence we Iranian women were met with when our choice did not fit the agenda of either Reza Shah or the Islamic Republic. I grappled with the incredible hypocrisy of the former — claiming to be “liberating women” while Iranian women who did not want to follow the fascist law had to relegate themselves indoors, save for hopping the fence of their village’s communal bath in the cover of darkness, which was the only way to clean themselves since the home did not have a place to bathe. What’s more, it makes clear what every Iranian woman knows to be true: that our bodies are politicized to either make us appear more “Western” and palatable to the European power concentration, or “non-Western” as a pendulum shift from that stance, neither stance taking into account that women have our own individual, well-thought out, intellectual thoughts that inform the choices we make in our daily and spiritual lives.

Secondly, I have found that ample archival and current traditional clothing exists for the various tribes and ethnic minorities in Iran. The Kurds, Gilakis, Lors, Bakhtiaris, Arabs, Armenians, Qashqais, Azeris, and Balochis all have traditional clothing that is alive and well despite the “modernization” laws (of which an analysis is forthcoming). Conversely, the traditional clothing of the Fars Persian majority has faded even from cultural celebrations. This article will specifically explore the decline of Persian Fars clothing among the majority of the Iranian population.

The decline of Fars clothing can be traced back to a series of laws rolled out between 1932 and 1953 by Reza Shah, in his attempt to modernize and unify Iran, as European powers grew their involvement in Iranian affairs, namely in the oil industry. The first of these laws was the requirement for all men to wear suits in public and for women to look like “the civilized women of the world.” (Chehabi, 1993) This required compulsory unveiling (at the risk of beating) and the shedding of Qajar-era clothing. Violators would be subject to a fine or jail time. These laws were largely supported by upper-class Iranians and were enforced until Mohammad Reza Pahlavi permitted the choice of veiling and no longer enforced Western clothing through punitive measures. But at that point, traditional clothing had generally become a rare sight.

But what’s more telling of why the decline resonated and lasted is the reasoning behind the creation of these orders in the first place. The most candid explanation for these laws came from a conversation between Hedayat and Reza Shah, with Reza Shah stating “that he wanted Iranians to become like everybody else [i.e., European imperialist powers in the Middle East] so that they would not be made fun of.” This remark, combined with his competition with Ataturk’s Turkey over the status of Europe’s favorite “modernized” Middle Eastern country, sounds more like children quarreling in a playground than cultural discourse happening on an international stage. It requires us to take a look at why we saw our clothing as “backward” and “shameful”, to quote Reza Shah. Who decides what is forward? Does wearing a beret instead of an araghchin (skullcap or prayer hat) constitute a greater thinker? Hafez and Rumi await your answer. What’s more, is Ataturk, a virulent nationalist and conductor of the Armenian genocide, the person whose footsteps we’d like to be following?

A particularly interesting law to highlight was the requirement of men to wear “Pahlavi Hats.” These hats mimicked the French and English fedora, yet the monarchy claimed they were the “ancestral headdress of Iran” in the Sasanian period. This reflects a bastardization of Iran’s pre-Islamic history in order to seem connected in root to Europeans and to be distinguished from our neighbors. My largest qualm with the above inferiority complex—that we allowed to carry us into culture loss—is the shame we felt for our culture, including the exchanges among our Arab and Middle Eastern minority neighbors, which have shaped all the color that is to be Iranian in our 3000-year history. We have deeply intertwined and well-documented history and shared knowledge with our neighbors, from our ancient capitals, our stunning places of worship, our wealth of scientists and poets, and our exchanged legends, loanwords and translations.

At a conference in Berlin five years before the Second World War, in Nazi Germany, we asked foreign diplomats to begin calling us “Iran,” as in the “Land of Aryans,” and to begin to “purify” our language from Arab loanwords. Beyond the obvious psedoscience and inaccuracy of race theory and what has become known as “the Aryan myth” for Iranians, the chilling similarity to Nazi rhetoric and the Nazi sympathy Reza Shah possessed creates an easily traceable reason why our clothing was seen as “barbaric” and Western clothing “civilized.” There is massive tragedy in the painting of Iranian history with one simplistic, White supremacist brush within which we will never truly fit. It erases thousands of years of our history. There is a stark difference between the natural ebb and flow of empire, cultural exchange that has enriched the Middle East, and modern westernization. For years, the elite of Iran had wanted the approval of Europe, the concentration of global power. An essential part of examining the decline of Persian traditional clothing is recognizing why we felt ashamed in the first place.

Looking at our country’s history, we can see that Iran is not at all exempt from the same global power imbalance that our neighbors and region suffer from, so we might as well be unapologetic about everything that comes with being Iranian — including dress. That could start with correcting our fabricated nationalist narratives and taking back what we shed as a misguided and ultimately futile attempt to increase our global power.

So we have to ask ourselves, what did we stand to gain from shedding what makes us outwardly Iranian, and what did we stand to lose from keeping what makes us different? To wear our traditional clothes for Norouz or Yalda requires us to make an active effort toward reviving our clothing, and to shed the toxic mindset that being closer to European culture is better, or that it will save us from exploitation.