Catwalks, Iranian Style

The style preoccupations of Iran’s younger generation are by now well-known, documented by regular Tehran fashion shoots and breathless coverage in the Western media that revels in how Iranian women are pushing back against the state’s strict Islamic dress codes. But amidst the fascination with how Iranians – despite the West’s prurient expectation – actually have fashion, an aspect of Iranians’ enterprising style has been overlooked: models.

It’s models in the end who showcase the designs and trends, who offer their bodies up to the cameras, at some considerable risk, to participate in the country’s evolving culture of commercial and designer fashion. Modeling in Iran is a burgeoning business these days, with private modelling schools emerging in cities across the country promising to turn already reed thin girls into catwalk ready stars, able to maintain a stony gaze and taut posture with the best of them.

The perils of modelling, however, under an Islamic state with an extremely ambivalent relationship with women’s fashion were made clear this week when authorities on 13 July banned a fashion show organizer and a modelling agency for staging a World Cup themed show with models dressed in the colours of the Iranian flag.

The modeling agency in question, Violet, calls itself Iran’s "first modelling agency’" according to press reports, but in the world of Iranian fashion, nearly every catwalk show is the "first" and nearly every agency that sets up to attract and train models also claims to be a trailblazer. I remember attending back in 2000 what I excitedly wrote about in Time magazine as the ‘first’ fashion show since the 1979 revolution, so keen were organisers to hype their event and so taboo it was back in those days to hire models to parade down a real catwalk.

But all these years later, so much in the world of Iranian fashion remains the ‘first,’ despite fashion shows now occurring as frequently as Tehran’s high-smog alert days, and models having become a fixture on Facebook. Iranian designers have a range of muses to choose from, a range that spans from classically surgically-altered noses to Parisienne style women with thick eyebrows.

I’m interested in how modeling is evolving in Iran alongside a fashion industry with an ever-widening market, and how those changes are also marking an erosion of social taboos around what models do (and importantly, don’t do). Even fashion designers themselves say the state’s red lines around what sorts of fashion shows can be staged and what sort prompt the authorities’ ire are unclear. Amidst this, what is the legal status of modellng under an Islamic state?

In a series of instalments to follow, my colleague Shima Sharabi and I will be exploring the state of modelling in Iran, whether it’s a hobby for the socially ambitious or a viable way to earn money in Iran’s urban centres. How professional are the modelling agencies that charge sometimes high fees for ‘training’ young women, and what are they teaching? Most importantly, perhaps, what is the relationship between modelling and fashion – do they exist in the same milieu, populated by people devoted to style? And what are the implications of modelling functioning, to a large extent, underground, while fashion itself has seemingly pushed its away onto the national stage, despite limitations.

Finally, and not least, what does the rise of Iranian modeling mean for conceptions of women in Iranian society, and models’ conceptions of themselves? Are there fatwas governing modelling, and if so, does anyone care? This will be an evolving project, so please send ideas, thoughts, or lines of inquiry through IranWire’s Facebook page, as all feedback welcome.