Paris Chic, Tehran Thrills

PARIS CHIC, TEHRAN THRILLS
ZETA SERIES IN ANTHROPOLOGY & SOCIOLOGY

VOLUME I
Series Coordinators
Vintilă MIHĂILESCU, senior editor
Raluca MOISE, junior editor
Scientific Board
Pierre BIDART anthropology, Bordeaux 2
Charles-Henri CUIN sociology, Bordeaux 2
Ellen HERTZ anthropology,
Universite de Neuchatel
Olivier GOSSELAIN anthropology,
Universite Libre de Bruxelles
R. ZEEBROEK anthropology,
Universite Libre de Bruxelles
ALEXANDRU BĂLĂŞESCU
PARIS CHIC, TEHRAN THRILLS

AESTHETIC BODIES, POLITICAL SUBJECTS
preface by Vintilă Mihăilescu
¤
Alexandru Bălăşescu holds a PhD in Anthropology from the
University of California, Irvine (UCI, 2004). He taught at the UCI,
American University in Paris, UC Critical Center in Paris, and RUW
Bahrain. His publication appeared in several Academic journals such
as Fashion Theory, Gender and History, and the Journal of Material
Culture. He also publishes regularly in “IDEA – Arts and Society”
and in several other popular culture magazines (ZOO).
He is currently in Bucharest, activating as independent researcher, and
guest assistant at the National School of Political and Administrative
Studies.
¤
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ISBN: 978-973-87980-2-1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .ix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xi
PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
INTRODUCTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
CHAPTER 1: FASHION
AND THE ETHNOGRAPHIC SUBJECT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Body Practices and Subjectivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Urban Methods, or How to take the Metro to the field . . . . 37
Objects of (for) Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Trajectories and Mediations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
CHAPTER 2: ON THE TIMELY SUBJECT OF FASHION . 49

The Fabric of Fashion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
License Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Techniques of Fashion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Blaise, or a Brief Presentation of the Process of Production . 55
The Fabric of Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
Brand New Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
CHAPTER 3: ORIENTAL FLAVORS. DESIGNING FOR

THE MIDDLE EAST IN PARIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Reliable Clients . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
Orientalism and its discontents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

(A)political representations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Dress: Practice and Representations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
Brand Orientalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
Inside Out Dress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Visible Subjectivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Latent Orientalism and Feminist Critiques:
Inside the Modern Middle East . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
CHAPTER 4: SPACE, TIME, DRESS, AND AESTHETIC

AUTHORITY. FASHION AND MODERNITY IN THE
URBAN SPACES OF TEHRAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
Modern Dressing in Iran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
Clothing Reforms in Iran between 1920 and 1940 . . . . . . 128
Moral Dress and the Islamic Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
Urban Spaces in Tehran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
Dressing the Muslim Women’s Bodies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
Spaces, Dress, Places . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
Fashion, Time, Consumption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
CHAPTER 5: GENDERED SPACE AND FASHION

CATWALKS: PARIS AND TEHRAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
Lotous Fashion Show. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
Mozaique reflections, 10.14.2003 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
CHAPTER 6: TRADITIONALLY MODERN:

THE HAUTE COUTURE IN TEHRAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
Time for Fashion in Tehran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192
Mahla or Fashion as Business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
Shadi or the Cosmopolitan Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
The Privilege of Exoticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
TABLE OF CONTENTS vii
CHAPTER 7: AFTER AUTHORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229

What Is a Copy? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
Signature, Mark, Territory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
“Everybody Is a Copy” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
Art for Designers, Copyrights for Business. . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
Authors, Power, Territory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254
CHAPTER 8: PICTURED BODIES: PHOTOGRAPHING

FOR FASHION IN TEHRAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260
The Ideal Body of “Modern” Photography . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
CONCLUSION: MODERNITY IN MOTION . . . . . . . . . 277

Forms of Mobility, Forms of Modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282
REFERENCE LIST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289

LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 2.1 Fashion Designer Workshop in Paris . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

Figure 2.2 Gap Store in Saint Germaine, Paris . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Figure 3.1 Fashion Catwalk at Paris “Grand Mosque” . . . . . . . 83
Figure 3.2 Fashion Fare in Paris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
Figure 3.3 A “chav” at a Parisian Fashion Show . . . . . . . . . . . 102
Figure 4.1 Everyday Scene in Qaem Passage, Tehran . . . . . . . . 146
Figure 4.2 Tehran young chic, Spring 2003 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
Figure 4.3 Women on the Street in Northern Tehran . . . . . . . 157
Figure 4.4 Everyday Scene in Golestan Passage, Tehran . . . . . . 160
Figure 4.5 Choosing the Fashionable Headscarf . . . . . . . . . . . 161
Figure 4.6 Shopping Scene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
Figure 4.7 Boutique in Tehran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
Figure 4.8 Boutiques during sales period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
Figure 5.1 Advertising banner for Lotous Fashion Show . . . . . 180
Figure 5.2 Advertising banners for Samsung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
Figure 5.3 Lotous catwalk ready for use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
Figure 6.1 Private Showroom in Tehran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194
Figure 6.2 Cover for the Second Issue of Lotous . . . . . . . . . . . 201
Figure 6.3 Shahla’s Workshop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
Figure 6.4 Page of Lotous Journal No.2/ 2003 . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Figure 6.5 Shadi’s Workshop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
Figure 7.1 Luxury-like Boutique in Tehran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
Figure 7.2 Brand-name Tags for Sale in Tehran. . . . . . . . . . . . 244
Figure 7.3 Reproduction of a Portrait in an Art Boutique . . . . 247
Figure 7.4 Fashion Journals Inspiration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
Figure 8.1 Advertising for e-cut brand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
Figure 8.2 Two fashion boutiques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260
x LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 8.3 Advertising for Vacuum Cleaner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265

Figure 8.4 Private Fashion Shot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
Figure 8.5 Sofra Posing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
Figure 8.6 Entries in two fashion shops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
Figure 8.7 Banner for the Motion Picture “Ghogha” . . . . . . . 276
Figure 9.1 Entry in Wonderland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284
Figure 9.2 Skateboard Simulator in Wonderland . . . . . . . . . . 286
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank to all those directly involved in the mak-

ing of this work: to Bill Maurer, my advisor to whom I owe more
than just endless intellectual debates; to Karen Leonard who criti-
cally followed the development of my argument; to James Ferguson
who offered me through conversations not only plenty of insights,
but also the humor necessary in any endeavor; to Liisa Malkki who
inspired the courage to let my mind flow; to Teresa Caldeira for
her stylish remarks; to Soheila Shahshahani who facilitated my first
visit to Iran, and guided me throughout the fieldwork; to Susan
Ossman for inspiration; to Annelies Moors for her comments
and encouragements; to Valerie Steele, for her appreciation of my
work; to all my colleagues who listened and selflessly gave me their
comments on my work; to Andrés and Riccardo; to Jean-Phillipe,
Marcia, Shadi, Mark, Rita, Darja, Maryam, Hadi, Atoosa, Mahla,
Christian, Pascal and many others, all my interviewees who shared
with me part of their world. My deep gratitude goes to Vintila
Mihailescu who first showed me the “anthropological way”, and to
my parents who understood my desire to follow it.
In France I have greatly benefited from the friendship of re-
markable persons, and from intellectual interactions with many
researchers: Fariba Adelkhah from CERI, who gave me the key to
Iran fieldwork; Jean Francois Bayart whose intellectual approach in-
spired me greatly: this is my hai-ku; Bernard Hourcade, Jean Pierre
Digard, and the “Iranian World” team from CNRS Ivry; Nilufer
Gole for endless conversations and for the intellectual challenges of
her seminars at EHESS; Cecile Debise who took pictures for me
at the Grand Mosque of Paris; Julie Thomas and Waddick Doyle,
who listened and gave me the chance to continue my work in Paris;
Ray Vernon. The mechanics of fieldwork would not have been pos-
xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
sible without my friends in Paris, who helped me find shelter, both

physical and affective: Maria Vivas-Contreras and Gilles, Anne and
Stephane, Patrick, Stephanie and Boris, Dani, I wish to thank you
in this way. Also, I would like to thank to Isabelle Eshraghi who
gave me many addresses in Tehran.
I would like to thank in a special way to Ghassideh Golmakani
for her assistance during my fieldwork in Iran, and for facilitating,
along with Houshang and Forough, my second coming to Tehran.
Maurizio, thank you for everything! A “thank you apart” I owe to
Janet for her careful reading, editing and commenting of this text
and to Jarred for his inspiring and active presence in the last phase
of the writing process. Michael Tingay, thank you for final touches
of English subtleties.
The entire research would not have been possible without finan-
cial support. I would like to extend my thanks to: the Wenner Gren
Foundation for Anthropological Research; the School of Social
Sciences and the Department of Anthropology at the University of
California, Irvine who sustained this project all along my graduate
studies; the French Center of Research in Iran, who offered me not
only a short term fellowship, but also housing in Tehran; the UC
Center in Paris.
It is impossible to give a complete list of all the people I met
and whose assistance I appreciated during this project. I apologize
for my omissions, and I am deeply indebted to all of you, named
or un-named above.
Some chapters of this book were previously published under

modified forms as follows:
CHAPTER 6 appeared as “Haute Couture in Tehran: Two
Faces of an Emerging Fashion Scene” in Fashion Theory. The Journal
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xiii
of Body and Culture, Volume 11, issue 2/3, pp. 299-318. Oxford:
Berg Editions, 2007
CHAPTER 7 appeared as “After Authors: Sign(ify)ing Fashion
from Paris to Tehran” in Journal of Material Culture, Volume 10(3):
289–310 London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi: SAGE
Publications, 2005
CHAPTER 8 appeared as “Faces and Bodies: Gendered
Modernity and Fashion Photography in Tehran.” in Gender and
History. Visual Genders, Visual Histories. pp.219-251 edited by
Patricia Hayes, 2006, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
In Memoriam Aurelian Popescu
Preface
Undressing the Social Body
Buying a dress and writing are somehow a similar bet, one never
knows how dress re-creates one’s body, nor how writing reorganizes
one’s thinking. And finally this written material, this discursive
reorganization of experience takes the place of the fieldwork ex-
perience itself, re-evaluates it, along with the time lived through
it, as dress takes the place of the bodies that inhabit it…
Doing his fieldwork on three continents, Alexandru was pop-

ping up from time to time, here and there, each time carefully
dressed in another way. His nomad desire was offending our more
sedentary taste, a bunch of wishful-thinking anthropologists, know-
ing each other intimately for quite a while: Alexandru is showing
up, playing the fool, staging himself, well, he’s different! – were the
dominant statements. And so he was.
But was it really about being differently dressed? Just about
clothes? Obviously not. It was rather about what everybody would
call a different look – and what the connoisseurs prefer to name
style. But how else could it have been? He was doing an anthropo-
logical work on fashion, he was getting more and more involved
with this fluid community of designers, he was discovering the dis-
course of fashion and trying to translate it into the description of
anthropology; and he was taking all these seriously, meaning that
he was sharing our fundamental assumption about anthropology as
being first of all a way of living. So he had to be himself a work in
2 PREFACE
progress, experiencing fashion in his own body, loving his object as

himself – as Zizek would put it.
But there is something more in this story: each time we were
(also) friendly mocking at him, he was (also…) smiling at us, some-
times embarrassed, sometimes glancing in the blue. As he is largely
commenting in this book, fashion is, indeed, a topography of the
social space, in-scribing the social body; in our late modernity dress
takes indeed the place of bodies, “dressing” being a social agency
which has the force of fate. But he was not taking all this as his
personal fate too. There is still room for alternatives, for playing
with these discursive forces. There still is the possibility of irony!
That is why, working on his thesis, he was also playing around with
himself… and with us.
As reminded by the author, “fashion has been approached from

two perspectives, semiotic or hermeneutic. The latter treats cloth-
ing as indicators of social position, thus engaging in an intellec-
tual tradition that starts with Simmel (1971) and Elias (1994), and
continues with the works of Hebdige (1979), or Bourdieu (1979)”.
Going much beyond the external visibility of fashion, Bălăşescu is
personally much closer to the second approach, but with a strong
touch of Foucault’s heritage: “my argument – Bălăşescu states – is
that fashion constitutes a biotechnology that shapes recognizable
bodies and recognized subjects”. The book is thus a discourse about
the subject, about himself, about ourselves. Or, in a more detailed
and down to the earth description, he declares to be interested in
“who makes the clothes and in their fabrication from inception to
reception and use. Who makes, and how actually are clothes made?
How does the designer decide upon the form and the aesthetic of
UNDRESSING THE SOCIAL BODY 3
dress, and how will s/he procure the necessary materials to make
it? What factors are at play in this decision? What are the channels
of distribution of clothing? How do consumers from Tehran gain
access to designer clothing made in France (or elsewhere), and who
has access to this clothing?” One the way to these topics, Bălăşescu
meets a complex new world…
But things are not only complex, they seem to be scaring too:
Castel, quoted by the author, is thus warning us that “there is, in
fact, no longer a relation of immediacy with a subject because there
is no longer a subject!”
Alexandru Bălăşescu is not going around the bush in this re-
spect, pointing from different perspectives to this danger of disso-
lution of the classical “subject”. But he does not want to be scaring
himself too. He doubts many of the statements he refers to, he is
balancing many others. He finally reassures us that “the subject is
subjected to new practices and governed in different ways but does
not disappear. Rather, what is disappearing is the liberal Lockean
subject of property, appropriated and subjected to risk profiling, as
Maurer puts it”. He is part of the story – as all of us – but a critic
and tonic “subject”, having learned to practice “la bonne distance”
when facing this “object” of common concern and desire. This is,
probably, the “key” in which this book should be read.
A book about oriental(ist) fashion, about trendiness in a con-

servative – if not “fundamentalist” – society? Yes, indeed, this is
where and how it starts. In order to enter this universe too, one
may take a shortcut and start by having a look at the photo on a
fashion catwalk at Paris “Grand Mosque”. Many stereotypes and
“prêt-a-porter” ideas we all share will be shaken by this image. Then
4 PREFACE
the reader can follow the author in Iran, where he tried to order a
suit of clothes. The result turned out to be a large dress, floating
around his body “in the normal way”. “I felt that my body had lost
its shape!” – the author complains. One may remember on this
occasion Edward Hall’s “proxemics” stories about the Arab people
breaking into each others “personal spaces”, and thus offending the
European sense of individuality and intimacy. Just as this kind of
recent European dressing that shows the body instead of “dress-
ing” it may offend the local taste. Body, individuality, dress, space
and time thus seem to be in a much more complex relation than
one could have guessed: “The relationships among architecture, liv-
ing space, dress, and the bodies that inhabit them are the starting
point of my reflections on fashion” – the author confesses. Step
by step, he is pointing at and reconstructing for us some of these
lines of difference between the two worlds he tries to bridge by his
approach.
On the other side, all these more or less visible and deep-rooted
differences are hard to understand if keeping too close to them, in
the space of the local context. Globalisation is not a ghostly word or
just a macro-economic reality. You can meet it at any corner – and
in fashion maybe even more so than in other realms. For anthro-
pologists, it is what a group of French scholars like to call “contem-
porary worlds”, meaning that they can not be put any longer on a
unidirectional time axis as more or less primitive/ civilized or more
or less developed, as all the classical theories of modernity used to
do, but have to be perceived and interpreted as co-existing in time
and deeply interconnected throughout space – even if still being,
maybe, distinct “worlds” in some respects. The ways of modernity
have thus to be seen from this different kind of perspective.
The present book is regarding France and Iran from this perspec-
tive too, revisiting the meaning of modernity in the two societies.
What will probably surprise some of us is the fact that “the Iranian
modernity and its link with the Islamic political organization are
revealed not as a contradictory relationship but as an intertwined
existence, in which one does not exclude the other.” Even more:
“it seems that fashion designers have understood ahead of others
that fashion – and thus modernity – does not belong exclusively
to the Western hemisphere. Although the idea that real fashion is
produced in Western locations is still present, there is a sense of
the “equality of individuals” facing fashion. To be more specific,
this equality is understood in terms of being modern, and does
not apply to other categories/sources of inequality like gender or
class. In other words, there exists a series of systemic processes that
renders a clothing item “fashionable”, that are found in Paris, New
York, London, or Milan, and to a lesser extent Tokyo. In parallel,
there is the level of daily social practices lived as “fashion”, present
extensively around the world.”
One of the benefits of reading this book will thus be the fact
that the (Iranian) Muslim world and the European one will not
seem any longer to us as opposite – if not conflicting – worlds, but
rather as distinct modernities of the same intertwined common
world.
But is this book, after all, about fashion or not? – one may won-
der after reading these lines. What is it, in fact, all about? What is
its object of concern?
Good question! Yes, indeed, it is about fashion, but not only,
not alone. It could not be. It is about what one could name, in the
steps of Marcel Mauss, a total social object, dressing being in this
view a “technique du corps”, as suggested by the French ethnolo-
6 PREFACE
gist almost one century ago. But “body” may be misleading in this
respect, supposing a distinction between the body and something
else that would be the subject – a distinction the visionary Mauss
already tried to overcome. Or, as reminded by Jean-Pierre Warnier,
“a subject does not ‘possess’ a body. It is a body”. This “total object”
Bălăşescu is concerned with starts with the body, is concerned by
fashion as biotechnology and the ways this is shaping bodies, and
ends with the subject – or rather with subjectivation, i.e. an object
in motion. In Bălăşescu’s view, fashion is thus “part of the matrix
of subjectivation that encompasses both body and subject as an
entity”. It is not just this body “out there”, dressed in the “visible”
way of fashion, but rather a long chain of mutual implications the
anthropologist has to follow and go through: “Fashion practices
constitute a map of the social body, expressed by different styles.
(…) styles become markers of identity. At the same time they are
signifying practices that ultimately refer back to the subject. The
social space always already has a multitude of styles from which a
person could choose, but the choice of a style is translated in the
social imaginary as the expression of the interior self, and it becomes
the self. Marketing activities codify the multitude of styles, and the
appearance of rebel or contestatary styles is more and more rapidly
integrated in the “normality” of fashion, sometimes with a simple
word game: “shock is chic”. Initially, a counter-style contests the
existing identity-models by repositioning and recontextualizing the
commodities, and subverting their conventional uses. They claim
an identity position that is not (or not yet) normalized. But, in the
process of integration, the new models of rebellious subjects are
appropriated and objectified by the system of power.”
Norbert Elias has convincingly described the ways and extent
to which the “process of civilization” was also a European means
of domesticating and finally mastering the “natural” body, this un-
worthy partner of the spiritual, and “true” subject. From this longue
durée perspective, the “subjectivation” (in fact, a recent and reactive
re-building of the subject) Bălăşescu is speaking about goes beyond
– and even against – this long lasting process of civilization. In this
respect, it can be considered as a post-civilization phenomena. Its
critical approach has to be welcomed. In return, its excesses, risking
to throw out the baby with the bathing water, have to be fought
against and prevented as much as possible.
Fashion-making in Paris and Tehran, dressing (and un-dress-
ing) the social body on two continents (and worlds), are the means
Bălăşescu has chosen to find a way through this labyrinth of self-
critical, late modernity. For most of the Romanian readers it may
be a surprising way, but it will become obvious while reading the
book that it is also a fertile and fascinating one.
All these links and processes do happen, indeed, in Paris and

Teheran, where they are described and questioned by the author.
But, like it or dislike it, Tehran – not to speak about Paris – is just
next door, so that it should be no surprise that most of these things
happen elsewhere too. No surprise either that everything in this
book also concerns all of us. Don’t you feel concerned, for instance,
by the following general outcome of this particular anthropological
journey between Paris and Tehran: “we are facing a form of social
organization based on ‘ready-to-wear’ citizenship”? If yes, then look
also for the other genuine findings of this rich book!
VINTILĂ MIHĂILESCU
Introduction
The (co-)Motion of Aesthetics from France to the Middle East
The ideas of exchange, of devaluation,

of inflation invaded his book little
by little like theories of dress crept
into Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus – where
they usurped the place of characters.
André Gide ()
Hossein Chalayan is a London-based fashion designer who is

well known for his avant-garde cutting edge seasonal collections.
For the spring 1998 collection seven models presented his cre-
ations. While the first model was wearing only an eye mask, those
who followed her came on the catwalk gradually covered, starting
with the head. The seventh model came out fully covered in black1.
Her dress was a clear reference to the Middle Eastern black chador
and niqab.
This text is a story of the intertwined play of the real and imagi-
nary, of promise and the actual, of desire and fulfillment, of value
and over-value. How could it have been otherwise, since fashion
and body were the focus of my gaze? If one watched the sun long
enough, one would start seeing light-spots of questionable mate-
riality. Does this make them less real, since we do see them, even
with our eyes closed? When one watches a person, one first sees the
dress. But if a naked model walks on a catwalk (as happened in
Hossein Chalayan’s collection), one also sees the dress, or its imma-
terial promise. Nonetheless, the promise and its fulfillment do not
1 With deep thanks to Jean Philippe Pons for this, and much other,
information.
10 INTRODUCTION
always coincide. The context of Chalayan’s show prepared the pub-

lic for a fashion presentation. While the context made it a fashion
presentation, the final dress – a ‘simple’ chador – was imaginarily
assimilated to a non-modern space, the Islamic Middle East. The
process of presentation was part of the fashion’s industry conven-
tions. Was the outcome ‘less’ fashion?
The following pages propose an exploration of the world of
fashion in two apparently opposite places: Paris, the recognized
capital of chic, and Tehran, a city that hardly makes one think of
fashion. If anything at all, Tehran and fashion seem to be mutually
exclusive. The two-year research, between 2002 and 2004, taught
me otherwise. Important ethnographic moments2 in Paris occurred
while presenting my research to different people during small con-
versations. The mention of fashion and Tehran prompted strong
reactions. There was the condescending or doubting smile, usu-
ally accompanied by “is there such a thing as fashion in Tehran?!”
This was the reaction of a significant majority. The juxtaposition
of non-western places (Iran) and modern practices (fashion) dis-
turbed what Bourdieu would call the doxa of these persons, their
unquestionable, taken for granted, conviction referring to geog-
raphy, clothing, and modernity. For many, fashion – the herald
industry of Paris and the unspoken mark of modernity – could not
be conceived as having a significant association with Tehran. The
loss of sense is partly linked with the imaginary movement of a
practice from one place to another (or to the apparent impossibility
of this mental move, for that matter). Clearly, fashion does exist in
2 I use the term “ethnographic moment” in the sense that Marilyn Strathern
gives it (personal communication), that is, a moment usually accidental,
which may last no more than one second, or the time of a short dialogue
exchange, but which has a tremendous explanatory power for the social
situation in which one may find herself.
INTRODUCTION 11
Tehran, both as a creative practice and as a practice of consump-

tion. As Susan Ossman observes “[m]oving from one world to an-
other might turn the “significant” into “nonsense”, but it could also
introduce changes in both. Worlds are constantly in the process of
sharing, copying, critiquing, and altering each other’s values and
meanings” (Ossman 2002:138-139). These processes are mostly
overlooked in the effort to create and emphasize difference, and
to accentuate identitary landmarks – prompted in illusory identity
discourses (Bayart 1996). Through looking at fashion in Paris and
Tehran, this text is less interested in “essential” differences between
the two locations, and more in the reciprocal processes of sharing,
critiquing, and altering the signification of fashion. It also proposes
an analysis of this phenomenon through ethnological eyes, which
at the end makes place to politically significant conclusions.
Today, while Paris appears in the news only as the site of endless
political dispute between a shaky left and a populist right, Tehran
is the focus of attention: deemed one of the centers of the Axis of
Evil by the US president Bush, and as if to confirm the fear ali-
mented through media channels, Tehran allegedly aims to become
a military nuclear power. Iran will surely be a civil nuclear power
in shortest delay. In the attempt to export democracy by means of
sanctified bullets and blessed bombs, at only two years distance,
Bush administration opened fronts both in Afghanistan and in
Iraq. Any pretext was used to justify military action. I happened to
be in Tehran in March-April 2003, when Baghdad fell and Bush
declared victory from a US carrier in the Persian Gulf. In Tehran,
the feelings where split. Historical enemy, Saddam Hussein was not
deplored in Iran. However, many lips whispered in those moments:
“we are next”. Ever since, a feeling of helpless expectation trans-
pired in my conversations with friends in Tehran. And in many
political and media discourses, beyond the nuclear ambitions of
12 INTRODUCTION
a presumed fundamentalist government in Tehran, the ultimate

argument for the necessity of military intervention stays women’s
black dress, the chador. Simultaneously, dress of fashionable young
Iranian women and men are presented as heralds of resistance
against Ahmadinejad’s government, and implicitly support of any
American or Western action against Tehran. Beyond theories and
descriptions, the following pages analyze the roots of this simplified
(and erroneous) assumption in an attempt to shed more shades of
colour on a black and white picturing of the world.
Fashion creates material objects (dress) invested with signi-

fications that, in turn, create a certain discursive, always already
imaginary, order in the social body; ethnological research creates
and objectifies experiences, puts them on a material support (tapes,
photography, notes) and reorders them into a more or less coher-
ent theory, advancing hypotheses, reorganizing the discourses in,
and about, social space. The fulfillment of desire is the promise of
fashion, and the possibility of writing is the promise of fieldwork.
A fashion brand name does not secure us against the disappoint-
ment that the actual wearing may cause. And any fashionable dress
is ultimately disappointing, since it does not magically transport
us into the realm of pleasure it promises. The ethnographic mate-
rial produced during the research cannot possibly guarantee the
satisfaction of well-written material. Buying a dress and writing are
somehow a similar bet, one never knows how dress re-creates one’s
body, nor how writing reorganizes one’s thinking. And finally this
written material, this discursive reorganization of experience takes
the place of the fieldwork experience itself, re-evaluates it, along
with the time lived through it, as dress takes the place of the bod-
ies that inhabit it; in fact, those bodies cannot be read otherwise
but through dress, they are made real by their coverings, or rather
INTRODUCTION 13
by the value and signification we attach to those coverings. The

complex anatomy of the field is knowable only through the written
pieces, through the disposition of signs that in their turn re-create
the field.
During the time of my research, my body moved between two
sites, Paris and Tehran, covering a wide range of urban spaces and
giving them new significations. It is not without importance that I
knew Paris well before my fieldwork, while Tehran was an entirely
new discovery. My previous knowledge of Paris was a bodily one;
I experienced living in this city at repeated intervals starting 1997.
Tehran was for me a story told by members of the Iranian diaspora
in Southern California, a story that made me curious and eager to
see and explore it. The story was not told only through words, but
mostly through bodily expression. The particular elegance and care
of the self of Californian Iranians drew my attention ever since I
became acquainted with the community. My Iranian friends always
had a particular style, fashionable dress, up to date hairstyle, and
concern for displaying brand names (on their bodies, or attached
to their persona, e.g. designers’ signatures clothes, or car brands).
Nothing surprising, maybe, but all these made me want to see the
urban landscape in Tehran.
With this baggage of a priori knowledge I installed myself in
Paris in the summer of 2002, and I alternated between the two cities
until the Fall of 2003. Nevertheless, the experience was deeply un-
balanced: in Paris I lived a punctual existence, constituted through
meeting certain people, listening to their stories, and recording
their impression about Middle Eastern clients in the fashion world.
I strove to understand the functioning of the fashion industry and
its relation to the Middle East. The process of designing along with
the channels of communication and distribution of commodities
were the focus of my interests. Secrecy proved to be an unbreakable
14 INTRODUCTION
barrier, so exact numbers regarding fashion markets are absent. The

question of copyright reverberated through almost all the inter-
views and pushed me to rethink the myth of authorship.
On the other hand, Tehran offered me, through fashion prac-
tices, the image of the whole. This may be the normal result of
my methodological approach: in Paris I looked for specific issues,
armed with my targeted gaze, while in Tehran I was open to a va-
riety of experiences. Being directed by my emergent interests I was
also trying to understand everything that was happening around
me, so I mixed my observations on fashion with the discovery of a
previously unknown urban space.
In both locations I closely followed the process of clothing cre-
ation. I was interested in the techniques of producing the mate-
rial dress, since dress and body are in a symbiotic relationship. As
my own body moved between Paris and Tehran, I was forced to
acknowledge changes in conceptions of socially acceptable habits,
postures, and, closely related to them, dress. In Paris, considering
the density of population and scarcity of space, the body has to be
more restrained; in the metro, one has to sit straight, often with
legs crossed in order to leave more space for others. People from
Tehran have much more space at their disposition. However, gen-
der distinction prescribes bodily postures in Iran: men do not have
any social restrictions concerning their body postures, at least in
public spaces3. Thus, in Tehran, even if men and women share a
small space, e.g. a common taxi, men tend to occupy the entire
seat, and leave little space for their female seatmates.
In both locations I have observed a striking correspondence
between body postures and clothing. Paris ready-to-wear features a
large choice of clothing items that are close to the body, centered,
3 For a discussion of public bodily postures, see Shahshahani, in press.
INTRODUCTION 15
reducing the space between the textile and the anatomy itself. There
is a shift towards this kind of fashion in Tehran’s public spaces that
I will discuss later, but the general rule is that clothes tend to be a
little larger, for both men and women, obscuring the contours of
the body.
I was also swept into this bodily dynamic as I moved between
Paris and Tehran. Newly arrived in Tehran, I was trying to give
others as much space as I could on the seats of public transporta-
tion. By the end of my second sojourn I surprised myself trying to
occupy more space, spreading rather than restraining myself on the
seat of the taxi.
During my first sojourn in Tehran I went to a tailor in order
to have a pair of trousers made. Although I came with a model,
European-made trousers, I was unable to convince the tailor to
make the pants tighter than he did. That is, from my perspective,
at the seat of the pants the fabric exceeds largely the shape of my
anatomy. Ultimately, he argued that this is “the model”, and he
could not do anything about it. I felt that my body had lost its
shape. This first hand experience made me think about the archi-
tecture and the environment. Contours and shapes create our field
of visibility, and obviously I experienced a major change between
Paris and Tehran.
The drabness of the streets in Tehran reminded me of the com-
munist period in Romania, when colors were banned from daily use,
and buildings were gray and dirty. I remember the words of some
French ethnologists discussing their first impression of Bucharest,
in the early nineties. In their account, there was a constant impres-
sion of a lack of contours, of defined shapes and separation lines.
The poverty in the range of colors was mainly responsible for this
sensation. Similarly, my notes on my first arrival in France in the
mid-nineties describe the clarity of contours and the visible sepa-
16 INTRODUCTION
ration between asphalt and bare ground in the countryside. I had

a contrasting impression to France at my arrival in Tehran. I no-
ticed a lack of defined contours, of both buildings and bodies. In
fact, some of the middle-aged women whom I interviewed told me
that the trend toward weight gain among the Tehranian population
dates to after the Islamic Revolution and the imposition of manto
or roopoosh (overcoat compulsory for women in Tehran’s exterior
spaces, see Chapter 4). The everyday use of large shapeless dresses,
I was told, lessens one’s awareness of one’s body shape, thus losing
the shape itself. This is not, however, true for everybody, as many
young women from Tehran display a refreshing urban style with
tight overcoats (manto), and talk about maintaining their weight,
the gym halls they frequent, and the diets they try to follow.
The relationships among architecture, living space, dress, and
the bodies that inhabit them is the starting point of my reflec-
tions on fashion. Through the observations summarized above, it
came to my attention that the relationships I am talking about are
far from being unidirectional. That is, dress (and similarly, archi-
tecture) is not designed for a pre-existing type of body, no more
than bodies adapt blindly to those designs. Thus, the large clothes
worn by women in Tehran were eventually “filled” by the bodies
that gained weight and at the same time, newer, tighter styles are
coupled with preoccupations with fitness and dieting. In Paris, fit
bodies, contained attitudes, and tight dresses are coexistent, but it
is hard to say which came first.
First chapter of the book positions the theoretical approach on
fashion and subject formation. It briefly summarizes previous theo-
retical approaches on fashion, and it proposes a furthering of anal-
ysis with tools provided by anthropological approaches on body
and subjectivity. The second part of the chapter is dedicated to the
question of methods. This entire theoretical chapter is written for a
INTRODUCTION 17
specialized audience, and may be easily skipped without lessening

the book’s content.
Second chapter describes fashion production as Parisian young
designers (createurs) see it. A brief overview of fashion industry
opens the chapter, positioning the createur in the political economy
of fashion. Fashion production practices point to the creation of the
all too changing aesthetics of fashion, and to their underlying can-
ons. Technical constraints such as fabric texture, and standardiza-
tion of sizes participate actively in the processes of creation. Dress
is not necessarily the embodiment of a designer’s unique vision,
but the result of a series of procedures that imply the concurrence
of multiple agencies. The question of exoticism in fashion appears
when categorizations of styles are discussed. Styles borrow names
mainly from historical epochs or decades, and from geographic lo-
cations. The association of styles with geographic locations gives
birth to an aesthetic mapping of the world that borrows from fash-
ion characteristics: seasonal changes and fluidity encounter the rel-
ative fixity of aesthetic canons. One may observe how geographical
stereotypes emerge and are simultaneously questioned in dress cre-
ation dynamic. Fashion appears as space organizer.
Time is another dimension discussed in the process of dress
production. At first presented as a technological constrain, time ap-
pears both as organizer of fashion industry, and as organized by it.
Divided into seasons, shared between fashion glamorous presenta-
tions and sales period, fashion’s time is both anticipatory and passé,
but it never seems to concern the present. Anticipation of trends is
a mark of distinction both among designers and among consumers.
Access to styles “ahead of time” becomes a mechanism of distinc-
tion in the fashion/class system. Chapter 2 finishes with reflections
on the relation between fashion, time, and body, which analyze the
emergence of a new type of subjectivity: the brand subjectivity.
18 INTRODUCTION
Chapter 3 looks at the links between fashion industry and the

Middle East in two manners. First, the text presents the mode of
construction of Middle Eastern exotic imaginary present in cer-
tain fashion trends. After recounting a specific career trajectory
of a designer from Paris who proposes “Oriental” collections, the
text moves on to designers who have a direct contact with Middle
Eastern clients. Their practices of production and sales bring up
specific modes of imagining and constructing an “ideal-type” of
Middle Eastern fashion customer. Designers and fashion profes-
sionals (some of whom are of Middle Eastern origins) have a va-
riety of opinions regarding the Middle Eastern clients. However,
these clients’ patterns of buying indicate to fashion professionals a
certain mode of relating to brand names. The relation with brand
names turns out to have moral undertones, especially if we look at
how different uses of prestigious brand names also mark Western
subcultures like “the chavs”.
Some selling showrooms in Paris are seasonally created to accom-
modate Middle Eastern clients (see also chapter 5). Descriptions of
the “ideal-type” of Middle Eastern client from fashion profession-
als perspective offers the possibility to revisit Orientalism, and to
reflect on the role of dress and fashion in organizing space and
creating subjectivities. Taking into account clients’ preferences for
conservative or avant-garde fashion, and re-considering stereotypes
about Middle East, Parisian fashion designers venture to character-
ize the mode of spatial organization in the places of clients’ origins.
An analysis of space and political organization along the lines of
visibility ends this chapter. This analysis reopens the question of
public and private, and masculine and feminine from the stand-
point of scopic surveillance.
Chapter 4 introduces fashion practices in Tehran. The ques-
tions of space and time are discussed in a different social setting.
INTRODUCTION 19
The chapter opens with a short history of dress reforms in Iran,

starting with the beginning of 20th century. The present period is
characterized by new forms of spatial segregation introduced or
accentuated by the Islamic regime, and their reflection in dress
habits. Different dress styles indeed mark different spaces, but not
along the simplified line of public and private, a system in which
the public would be pervaded by Islamic rules of dress, while the
private would be “free”. In fact, the empirical observations show an
interlaced structure of different spaces, class organization, ideas of
citizenship based on personal empowerment, and the presence of
different agents and degrees of surveillance that traverses all urban
spaces in Tehran. Women’s spatial mobility rather than an abstract
idea of freedom turns out to be a better explanatory category, and
a mark of modernity. Advancing the idea that modernity has a spe-
cific repertoire reflected by fashion, Tehran appears as an urban
space with a specific regime of modernity. This idea is sustained by
the last part of the chapter that discusses time and consumption.
Fashion’s specific organization of time intersects other timeframes,
such as the Iranian New Year, or Islamic Republic’s holidays and
celebrations. This gives birth to a particular timeframe that does
not opposes a modern (fashion) and a traditional (celebration)
time, but constructs a specific calendar, not more nor less modern
than let us say a Parisian’s timeframe. A short presentation of the
networks of fashion commodities circulation shows the practical
way of synchronizing styles between Paris and Tehran.
A showroom in Paris and a fashion public presentation in Tehran
illustrate the mirroring images that fashion practices construct. A
sumptuous fashion show in Tehran offers an image of how Western
practices of fashion presentation are re-interpreted in Tehran, and
how certain elements of the modern repertoire are critiqued and
developed with this occasion. A select Parisian showroom reunites
20 INTRODUCTION
twice a year avant-garde designers who show their collections for

sale exclusively to Middle Eastern clients. Showroom’s spatial orga-
nization and its policies for personnel selection are as many expres-
sions of interpreting spatial and sex segregating practices in Middle
East. These images are arranged face to face in chapter 5.
Chapter 6 returns to Tehran for a presentation of high-fashion
practices in this city. Three designers’ careers illustrate different
understanding of fashion. Along these presentations, ideas about
modernity, tradition, and the West are reworked along the lines of
designers’ aesthetic approaches. In the process of designing, body
mobility reappears in the center of these stylists’ preoccupations.
The dynamic of class system based on access to fashion becomes
evident. The connection between Western sensibilities and high
classes in Tehran is re-worked through the observations on the sta-
tus of Iranian traditional aesthetics. Dress inspired by traditional
clothing is at high esteem among the privileged classes in Tehran.
Chapter 6 sketches a map of the formation of taste and circulation
of desire cross-class and cross-borders. In this dynamic access to
Western taste and desires rather than Western dress informs high-
class subjectivities in Tehran.
Chapter 7 offers an overview of the intersection of fashion
practices and legal spaces through the lenses of copyright laws and
attitudes towards authorship in the two cities. A short historical
background of copyright and licensing practices in Paris reveal the
importance of practices that preceded and informed the legal space
pertinent to fashion industry. The legal spaces of the two cities dif-
fer in the regulations regarding copyrights. Nonetheless, authorship
practices reveal similar approaches. Tehran’s designers find them-
selves in a position of inferiority when competing on the interna-
tional market. Many times their work is not endowed with author-
ship qualities, only because it originates in a place that is associated
INTRODUCTION 21
with lack of originally-designed dress. Fashion practices in Western

hemisphere operate as if an overarching anonymous “tradition” is
the “author” of Tehran designed dress. Fashion practices reveal the
power relations associated with the meaning of “authorship”.
Fashion photography is the focus of the last chapter of this
book. Photography is a representation of an ideal type of body; in
Tehran, fashion photography, as it is now, meets a series of regula-
tions concerning women’s bodies’ representations. Interviews with
fashion photographers in Tehran, and observations in two photog-
raphy studios reveal the contested meanings of women’s mobility
in the specific spatial and social structures of Iran. When com-
pared with historical changes of regulations for women’s bodies’
presence in public, the contemporary requirements of the Islamic
regime have a striking similarity with older meanings of a modern
woman’s body in Iran.
The conclusion reconsiders the way in which fashion practices
reflect subject formations in the two sites of the study. The mean-
ing of modernity in Iran and in France is revisited, putting subject
formation practices at the center of the analysis. Thus, the Iranian
modernity and its link with the Islamic political organization are
revealed not as a contradictory relationship but as an intertwined
existence, in which one does not exclude the other.
Chapter 1
Fashion and the Ethnographic Subject
Body Practices Subjectivation

Those who see any difference between body and soul
Have neither
Oscar Wilde, Complete Works (no year)
In the last chapter of History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault

(1990) theorizes “biopower” as the form of power that governs
modern society. He describes it in contrast with “sovereign power,”
or the power over death that governed during the “classic period.”1
The main expression of sovereign power is the capital sentence,
as death is the only way in which the sovereign could express and
display his power over his subjects. Foucault argues that along with
a series of transformations in everyday practices, and a new concep-
tualization of the social body, biopower emerges as a new system of
regulation for life – both individual and collective:
power over life evolved in two basic forms; these forms were not
antithetical, however; they constituted rather two poles of develop-
ment linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations.
One of the poles -- the first to be formed it seems -- centered upon
the body as a machine [...] ensured by the procedures of power
that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human
body. The second, formed somewhat later focused on the species
of body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving
as the basis of social processes: propagation, births and mortality,
1 Foucault identifies the «classic period» as the historical moment that finishes
around the French Revolution.
24 1: FASHION AND THE ETHNOGRAPHIC SUBJECT
the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the con-
ditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected
through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a
bio-politics of the population. (Foucault, 1990:139)
The appearance of the anatomo-politics of the human body
forms the domain of the microphysics of power, and it is extensively
treated in Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1979). The point that
will be emphasized here is that the constant exercise of power cre-
ates its own subject: the individual. Foucault defines discipline as
“methods which made possible the meticulous control of the oper-
ations of the body, which assured a constant subjection of its forces
and imposed upon them a relation of docility-utility” (Foucault
1979:137). At the same time2 as the social body was conceptual-
ized by philosophers as the aggregation of independent, monadic
subjects-participants in the “social contract”, discipline was a prac-
tice that pervaded various domains of life, in schools as well as in
the family, in the army as well as at the working place. Discipline
has a major role in the “practical” creation of individuality, while
the theoretical role belongs to philosophers: “The individual is no
doubt the fictitious atom of an ‘ideological’ representation of soci-
ety; but he is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of
power that I have called ‘discipline’” (ibid. p.194). The striking dif-
ference between the ‘ideological individual’, and the ‘individual as
product of discipline’ is the status of the body. For the former, the
body is a possession upon which s/he can exercise the will, while
for the later, the body is always already possessed (because of being
created) by and through the exercise of micro-power. The exercise
of this power forms its own “objectified subject”. In order to oper-
ate with the form of power described, it is also necessary to rethink,
2 From the end of seventeenth throughout eighteenth century
BODY PRACTICES SUBJECTIVATION 25
and moreover renounce the idea of separation between subject and

object. The focus of any analysis would shift thus from the subject
to the practices of subjectivation.
Foucault is tracing the genealogy of the individual, the human
being as we know it now, from the relations between body and sur-
rounding instruments, tools, spaces both constraining and enabling
for the movements, be they physical or mental. He intentionally
chooses the example of imprisonment and torture, for reasons both
of political engagement and literary effect. Foucault’s examples are
strikingly visual, one can easily imagine the torsions of the bodies
under the instruments of the executioner, or the confinement of
young pupils into their school benches.
The double relationship body-object/body-subject is of central
significance. Inasmuch as objects directly influence movements, at-
titudes, and body positions, and subjectivity is the result of bodily
motions, one has to reexamine the subject in its relation with sur-
rounding objects. Or, as Jean-Pierre Warnier better formulates the
matter:
[...] the word “bodily” induces a distinction between the body
and something else, that would be the subject. Or a subject does
not “possess” a body. It is a body. Talking about the motion con-
duits [conduites motrices] of a subject we avoid the trap of the
dualism hidden behind the vocabulary of body. (Warnier 1999:
10, my translation and italics)
Warnier provides a basis for a theory of the subject, through a
rethinking of the very relation between subject and objects. Warnier
places the objects (material culture) at the center of this theory,
and in their relation with the body – that is, with the subject. The
mediators between objects and subject are the “motion conduits”,
a term that the author prefers to Mauss’s “body synthesis” (Mauss
1992) for reasons explained above. “Body synthesis” or “motion
conduits” refer to the integration of movements necessary to oper-

ate or use any object; this is not always a conscious process, but it
is omnipresent in the dynamic rapport that the body has with the
surrounding material world, and with itself.
In both cases [motion conduits vs. body synthesis, my note] we
deal with the same phenomenon, that is to know the capacity of
the subject to memorise or integrate motion conduits perfectly
adapted to the dynamic of the relation with the objects and the
environment – conduits, meaning the assembly of finalized mo-
tion actions. (idem)
In fact it is this very dynamic that interests Warnier. There are
two main reasons for this: firstly, the author is able to review an-
thropological theories regarding human evolution, and secondly
because of the relevance that access to and the use of objects have
for the socially positioned subject formation. I am interested in
exploring this latter implication.
The objects one manipulates are different from person to per-
son, depending on the place, class position, career, hobbies and
so on that one finds oneself engaged in at a particular moment
of one’s lifetime. This observation not only allows an understand-
ing of individual differences, but also of the dynamic character of
subjectivity, understood as subjectivation. It would also explain
the formation of specific subject similarities of in-group members
through the similar motion conduits they develop while manipu-
lating similar objects. These new dynamic lenses allow Warnier to
reevaluate the previous analysis of material culture, coming from
both the side of semiotics and from the structuralism and analysis
that take the object as an indicator of the social condition.
Dress and fashion could acquire the analytic capacity if ap-
proached with the instruments proposed.
In other words, I propose a theory of material culture that takes

into account everything that constitutes its specificity in rela-
tion with all other systems of signs: its materiality that is the
essential protagonist of motion conduits as matrix of subjectiva-
tion (ibid. p.14).
An approach to the materiality of objects and their relation to
the body will clarify the range of movements they enable and the
constraints they impose upon the body. That is, the researcher will
be able to understand the constituents of the motion conduits pre-
scribed into an object; the ethnographic observation would clarify
the actual use of the object, and the individual and social variation
of this use. Next, the analysis could further explore the way in which
the assemblage objects/movements gains social significations, the
ways in which they are associated or already inscribed into grids of
social lecture in terms of class/gender/age/ethnic identifications.
The object closest to the body, surrounding it constantly and
making it readable in social space, is clothing. Clothes can be re-
stricting or comfortable, cheap or expensive, and they are judged
through eternally changing aesthetic canons. They impose manners
of wearing, attitudes, that is motion conduits, and they offer a sys-
tem of signs readable in the social space. Even a glance at a news-
paper demonstrates the way in which people are described through
their attire. Nevertheless, fashion (and material culture in general,
as Warnier warns us) has been approached from two perspectives,
semiotic or hermeneutic. The latter treats clothing as indicators
of social position, thus engaging in an intellectual tradition that
starts with Simmel (1971) and Elias (1994), and continues with the
works of Hebdige (1979), or Bourdieu (1979).
From the perspective of fashion socio-analysis, these two ten-
dencies clearly manifest themselves, delimit, and simultaneously
transgress one another’s borders. There is first the systemic approach
to fashion, inspired by linguistics and which draws its origins from

Barthes’s analysis (Barthes 1967). The other approach, which may
be called the hermeneutics of fashion, concentrates on the social
practice of dressing. The English school of Cultural Studies and
its followers offer the best examples of such analysis. Evidently, as
Davis (1992) has observed, one cannot strictly delimitate or cat-
egorize the authors in these two tendencies.
The systemic analysis of fashion (and of material culture) ap-
proaches fashion as a system of signifiers, and clothes as a textual
form as readable as any other text. The gender/class/race structure
is read on (the form of ) the garments, on the designer signature,
and -- not the least -- on the price tag. The semiotic approach to
fashion (and to material culture in general), which emphasizes the
phenomena of alienation has its ultimate expression in Baudrillard’s
texts (Baudrillard 1993) where ‘the real’ is altogether banished from
his analysis (“The Murder of the real” – lecture at University of
California, Irvine, Spring 1999).
From the semiotic vanishing point, the visible form of the bodies
is shaped by the fashion trend and inscribed in their couture, which
tells us in a kind of reversed vivisectional manner what is inside the
clothes, and what is acceptable to be inside them3. Clothes reflect
both the social body and gender and racial body politics. “Clothes
make, not man but the image of man [...].” (Hollander 1978: xv),
and through this image they create ideal identifiable bodies (see
also Kidwell 1989). Thus the signifiers of fashion translate the self,
and this idea is traceable directly from the physiognomists – for de-
tails, see Joanne Finkelstein (1991). Although both seductive and
3 This idea applies not only to the human body; it showed its utility in computer
industry as well. In 1998, Macintosh launched on the market iMac. Even
though its technical parameters are not superior to any other computer already
existing on the market, its design assured it an unprecedented success.
productive, the semiotic perspective privileges the sign, sometimes

to the point of a complete dissolution of the signifier (as Hollander
does in her affirmation). In my opinion clothes do make the man
(or woman for that matter), but the question remains: how does
the subject emerge through this process?
The hermeneutic approach to fashion privileges the perspec-
tives of social stratification and clothing (or objects) as indicators
of social position. Georg Simmel ([1904]1971) proposed an inter-
esting type of link between fashion and the modern individual. In
“Fashion”, he saw the contradictory desires of the individual both
toward separation and recognition of its unique character, and to-
ward assimilation in a social group (or class). Thus the idea of indi-
vidualization and individuality refines itself in the modern era.
Georg Simmel established a direct relationship between “the
rhythm” of the changing of fashion and the political organization
of society:
Segregation by means of differences in clothing, manners, taste,
etc., is expedient only where the danger of absorption and oblit-
eration exists, as is the case among highly civilized nations.
(Simmel, 1971: 301).
This type of argument is taken up by most of the social think-
ers that reflected on fashion (or styles displayed through objects),
like Elias (1994), Weiner (1989), Finkelstein (1998), or Hebdige
(1979). Bourdieu’s theory of distinction is a structuralist synthesis
of this approach (Bourdieu 1979). Simmel pointed out that “[t]he
frequent change of fashion represents a tremendous subjugation of
the individual and in that respect forms one of the essential com-
plements of the increased social and political freedom.” (ibid.: 318)
Thus fashion, responding to the inner desires of individuals, acts as
a regulatory practice of segregation and differentiation in a highly
democratized and mobile society – the modern society – that offers
increased (material and symbolic) means to erasing inequalities4.

Similarly, Elias shows how the aristocracy’s continuous renewing
of customs, objects, or clothing, serve to reintroduce distinction
that counterbalances the process of diffusion of those very objects
to lower classes.
As Warnier observed, those theories of social stratification (and
the hermeneutics of fashion that relies on them) consider con-
sumption as the dependent variable of social stratification. In other
words, the inherited cultural capital (Bourdieu) is responsible for
the patterns of consumption in different social strata. What the
social theorists overlooked, but the social intelligence of the ac-
tors always already knows, is that consumption, together with pro-
duction and diffusion, are the mechanisms of social stratification.
The elite’s preoccupation of constantly changing, innovating, or
modifying the use of objects (to which Elias alludes) is an expres-
sion of the fear that the appropriation of these objects will in turn
create appropriation of class position itself. Speaking of the court
society, Warnier hypothesizes that “social stratification is partly ac-
complished through aesthetic practices. It is by giving to itself its
objects, its background, and its tastes that the court society became
what it was” (Warnier ibid.:121). The author further makes the
case for studying the very mechanisms of production, diffusion,
and consumption as means to understand social stratification and
the processes of individual subjectivation.
With a similar project in mind, and focusing on fashion, I took
my ethnographic inquiry into the world of fashion designers in
Paris and Tehran, and consumers in Tehran. Being fashioned is not
only the following of desire, but also consenting to the social struc-
4 Some contemporary thinkers (Lipovetski 1994), disregard the power of

differentiation embodied in fashion as practice, and accentuate only on its
seemingly democratic and universalistic quality.
ture that the fashion reflects, and constructing the self in terms of
its politics. In fact, today one may speak of the politics of desire and
anticipation. My argument is that fashion constitutes a biotechnol-
ogy that shapes recognizable bodies and recognized subjects. It is
as much an anatomo-politic of the body, as it is a bio-politics of
the social space, constituting as it does the population in different
readable categories (racial, class position, gender, and/or age). The
discipline of this technique is applied both upon the body (because
wearing different clothes implies different prescribed attitudes),
and upon the self (as the manipulation of the signifiers of self con-
stantly creates and actualizes the self ).
To revisit Warnier’s thesis, clothes are one of the most visible
objectifiers of the subject; most people wear clothes most of the
time. Not only do the form, color, and cuts differ from person to
person (expression of aesthetic choices), and from one social class
to another, but also the very manner of wearing clothes can also
differ. As I previously emphasized, the form of dress has a tremen-
dous influence on the body and its motion conduits (i.e. on the
matrix of subject formation). Who makes, and how actually are
clothes made? How does the designer decide upon the form and
the aesthetic of dress, and how will s/he procure the necessary ma-
terials to make it? What factors are at play in this decision? What
are the channels of distribution of clothing? How do consumers
from Tehran gain access to designer clothing made in France (or
elsewhere), and who has access to this clothing?
In other words, I am interested mainly in the designers of the
matrix of subjectivation through the study of fashion practices
both on the side of creation and on the side of consumption. Miller
(1997) observes the need to explore the articulations between com-
modity production, advertising, and retail. I chose this angle of ap-
proach to study a series of commodities that are closest to the body.
And since the body is the subject (both of exterior actions, and of
the objectifying of the subject), the following pages can be read as
a story of subjectivation through fashion. One can thus reevaluate
Gide’s affirmation about “dress usurping the place of the charac-
ters”. For it is dress, and the character’s objectivation through dress,
that makes them what they were. Dress does not take the place of
characters, but creates them through the actions of desiring, buying,
and wearing that particular garment.
As one can observe, the subjectivation, the creation of characters
in Gide’s terms, takes place by means of actions upon oneself and
upon others’ actions (what Foucault called manifestations of pow-
er): actions upon oneself through desiring, actions upon self and
another through buying and wearing, not to mention actions upon
others’ desire through designing and proposing aesthetic choices.
Thus, fashion (and object) designers are in a relatively privileged
position, they design the matrix of subjectivation, or at any rate,
parts of it. This is why at some point in text I refer to “aesthetic au-
thorities”. I use the word authority void of its implicit agency. One
should not conceive of this matrix as a fixed geometrical figure, nor
should one think of designers as necessarily conscious of objects’
power to impose motion conduits, and thinking about how they
will rule the world through imposing motion conduits to every-
body. Rather, just as the body does not completely conform to the
form of dress, neither does the dress take the form of the body. As
in any form of power, resistance is generated within its own field.
But let us not anticipate the argument too much.
Movement
This is an ethnography of both subjects in movement and
of dress in movement; it is about clothes moving with the body,
and of clothing moving from the creation desk to the store and to
MOVEMENT 33
the client’s wardrobe. It is also about the movement between the

two cities, and the account may be disrupted at places, as was my
experience.
Originally I intended to follow the commodity (dress) in its
trajectory from the places of inception to the markets in Tehran.
Shortly after starting my fieldwork in Paris, however I understood
that I was not best positioned for this kind of approach. It would
have been much easier to start with the end point of the chain of
distribution, that is, with the place of selling. Influenced by the
persons I met in Paris, and through early revelations of the field
(among which was the discovery that, despite of my best efforts, I
did not know anything about fashion creation), my project and the
approach soon changed. It seemed more interesting in Paris to ex-
plore fashion creation and distribution to Middle Eastern clients in
general, while Tehran offered a point of comparison for the social
practices of fashion creation, as well as the observation of fashion
diffusion in a geographic location that is imagined in the West to
be associated with Islamic practices (allegedly mutually exclusive
with fashion).
My own subject position as an ethographer in movement ques-
tioned the association of space and practices in the disciplinary
field of anthropology, or the disciplinary creation of the field. All of
my fellow students, both in France and in the United States, would
ask if I was Iranian upon hearing that the geographic location of
my field was Tehran. Because of my accent, I was visibly neither
American nor French in the eyes of my colleagues. But what made
me Iranian? What prompted this reaction? I will use again my past
practice as a student of anthropology in Romania, and my rela-
tions with French school. I have observed that in the politics of
student exchange between Romania and France, while the French
students were studying Romanian topics, Romanian students were
expected to study Romanian topics (with the notable exception

of the Tempra5 exchange program with Rhone-Alps region, 1997-
2000). Further along the way of my studies, during conferences
or browsing through references, I noticed that it is often the case
that researchers who are not nationals of Western countries tend to
study topics linked with the place of their national origin. There is
an undeniable hierarchy in this distribution of geographical areas
of study among researchers. For example, while an American re-
searcher is seldomly asked if he is Indian because he studies India,
an Indian researcher studying, say, Patagonia creates a disturbance
in the disciplinary order. It is troubling that, even while arguing
for the deconstruction of power discourses, the disciplinary for-
mation of the social sciences perpetuates the very practices that
create the relations of power it propounds to challenge. Many fel-
lowships or aid for research are designed specifically in this logic.
While they may encourage research coming from the areas in fo-
cus, they discourage the complete dissolution of the hierarchical
relations (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). In the article “The Shaping
of National Anthropologies” Gerholm and Hannerz extensively
develop the specifics of the disciplinary formation in anthropology,
showing not only the divide between “metropolitan” and “periph-
eral” anthropology, but also their historical formations (Gerholm
and Hannerz 1982).
5 This three-year-long program consisted in an exchange of student at Masters
or Ph.D. level between University of Bucharest and University of Lyon II.
Each year the French student was expected to develop a research project
about a Romanian social reality, while the Romanian student was expected
to reflect on a subject at choice from French society. I am deeply indebted
to the organizers of this program for the opportunity I had to develop the
anthropological tools acquired in my student years in Bucharest.
MOVEMENT 35
This question goes largely unquestioned among young research-

ers, the students who are directly affected by it. In her article “You
Can’t Take the Subway to the Field” Passaro (1996) points to one
of the basic (if not the main) assumptions of anthropology as a sci-
ence: the existence of bounded cultures, with identifiable features.
The perpetuation of the “imperial nostalgia” (Rosaldo 1989) of
cultural areas has practical import for academics, as it sustains the
“legitimation of disciplinary authority.” This “nostalgia” is perpetu-
ated through practices of the type exposed, through which scien-
tific authority is gained, and legitimacy maintained.
In my research, I did “take the metro to the field” (just like
Passaro took the subway while studying homelessness in New
York), and I linked both subjects and areas through a back and
forth movement between sites. Movement and mobility between
two research sites raises a series of questions: multi-sited ethnogra-
phy, although recommended by many anthropologists like Gupta
and Ferguson (1997), Hannerz (1998) and Appadurai (1986), and
practiced by some (Ossman 2002), remains an unorthodox ap-
proach in anthropology, with a methodology that remains to be
developed. George Marcus proposed a comprehensive analysis of
the methodological problems and theoretical implications that
multi-sited research raises. Emerging from the collapse of the dis-
tinction life-world/ world system, multi-sited ethnography poses
three major challenges to the production of ethnographic knowl-
edge: “testing the limits of ethnography”, “attenuating the power
of fieldwork”, and the “loss of subaltern”. In my case I have been
mainly concerned with the first two aspects of this methodological
approach. My fieldwork design closely follows Marcus’s definition
of multi-sited research:
Multi-sited research is designed around chains, paths, threads,
conjunctions or juxtapositions of locations in which the eth-
nographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence,

with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection
among sites that in fact defines the argument of the ethnogra-
phy. (Marcus 2003, p. 105)
The multi-sited approach is present, logically, in the case of top-
ics related to movements of people or commodities. This research
is multi-sited not only from a national perspective, but also as an
urban experience of following designers, fabrics, or ideas about
fashion that traverse neighborhoods, spatial locations, and people’s
imaginaries. During a multi-sited research project, one may find it
difficult to balance the importance attached to movement between
the sites, and that of the sites in itself. This is not a zero sum game.
That is, emphasizing the motion of people, or objects does not take
away from the importance of places, does not “standardize” the
experiences or erase borders. On the contrary, the ethnographic
description of places gains the dynamic character of the objects
and bodies traversing them, whithout compromising their indi-
viduality. Simultaneously, borders become “much more” material,
or they materialize through the practices one has to follow in order
to cross them. In fact, the moment of crossing the border is much
less significant for individuals than the preparation for doing it.
Borders are objectified by the practices of the visa, which can be an
interesting introduction to the place one is about to visit or live for
a period of time. Applying for a visa could also introduce a death
moment in one’s research, in that it is a moment of suspension, a
liminal stage if you will, that in my case lasted from ten days (my
visa for a long sojourn in France) to two months (my first visa for
Iran). Producing the necessary papers for obtaining a visa is a pro-
cess of objectification (mis en objet) of the researcher. The researcher
is subjected to international bureaucracy, and this moment is also
part of the subjectivation of the researcher. I will discuss this sub-
URBAN METHODS 37
jectivation of the researcher, his/her total “mis en objets” in the fol-

lowing section dedicated to methods of research.
Urban Methods or How to Take the Metro to the Field

“Means and ends are convertible terms in my philosophy of life.
The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree, and there
is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the
end, as there is between the seed and the tree.
They say “means are after all means”. I would say “means are af-
ter all everything”. As the means, so the end. There is no wall of
separation between means and end. Indeed the creator has given
us control over means, none over the end. Realization of the goal
is in exact proportion to that of the means. This is a proposition
that admits no exception.” (Mahatma Ghandi, Means and Ends,
p. 37, undated)
Reading Gandhi in the light of the material culture theory that

Warnier proposes sheds a new light on anthropological fieldwork
theory. Indeed, one may wonder, what is the importance of meth-
ods in the creation of anthropological theory? What is the meaning
of the fact that half of my fieldwork I spent on the phone, trying
to get appointments, in taxis or on the way to my appointments?
What is the significance of the fact that I was not allowed to take
pictures in some cases? What is the importance of secrecy for some
fashion designers and how does it influence my work?
And, most importantly, what were the means used by the author
for data production? What were the objects surrounding me, how
did they transform me into an urban anthropologist, how did they
create the data, how did they play into my interactions in the field?
Objects of (for) Research

The urban fieldwork is quite a challenge, that is, the delimitations
are very vague, and one does not know exactly what to consider
fieldwork and what not. The contact with the environment is of
course continuous, but the environments are multiple, and not
necessarily the same for the researcher and the persons in his/her
focus. The fieldwork slips through one’s fingers just like (cologne)
water, leaving after it a discrete scent, easy to feel but complicated
to theoretically grasp as a coherent image.
This is a fragment of a letter I sent to my advisor, Bill Maurer,
after my first three weeks of fieldwork in Paris. Fragments taken
from my personal journal, notes and letters will punctuate the en-
tire book in order to give the reader a sense of the moment. The
fragment above depicts a state of mind quite far from Malinowski’s
(1978) experience sitting of on an empty beach with the image of
the boat sailing away and leaving the ethnographer all alone with
his field (and obsessions). I would say my experience has been quite
the opposite of his, because the urban researcher has to find her or
his Coral Gardens among billions of activities taking place in the
city. First one has to find the urban gardeners and approach them.
In my experience, the agreed-upon mode of conversation in the
urban space is the interview. The legitimate activity of the research-
er in the public eye is the interview. So, for the first appointments I
always asked for an interview. However, even this formulation can
be problematic for reasons to be explained.
Interviewing itself is a method that has been repeatedly dis-
cussed and contested by anthropologists. There are two main cri-
tiques concerning this method: one is the distance between verbal
discourse and action. My objection to this is that verbalisation is
an action itself, and may be analyzed as such. The second critique
is concerned with the form of interview itself. The interview has a
OBJECTS OF FOR RESEARCH 39
meta-communicational level, and it is not presupposed by all the

cultures. It institutes arbitrary norms of communication that are
not universally recognized, and implies sometimes-unshared back-
grounds with direct consequences on an event. Briefly this is the
critique that Briggs (1986) makes of the interview.
While I agree with most parts of this critique, I would like to
point out that simple conversation is something that easily replaces
the interview. I prefer the term “interviewees” to “informants”.
Informant is reminiscent of a unidirectional relation of power,
in which the ethnographer is the passive receiver of the objective
information. During my face-to-face encounters I attempted to
create a conversational atmosphere; I would not hesitate to give
my own opinion on subjects discussed, or to share my experience
with the interviewees, in order to create a stress-free environment.
I would add these observations to Charles Briggs’ proposed schema
for understanding and interpretating the interview, taking thus a
wide range of variables into account: social situation, social roles
(assumed or not) of interlocutors, message form, channel and code
of transmission of the message, and the referent.
This proposition is close to Geertz’s methodological “thick
description” (Geertz 1974). In his vision ethnography as practice
offers the key for understanding anthropology; Geertz maintains
that the interpretive character of anthropology is obscured by the
way anthropological knowledge is shaped. The fieldwork data “are
really our own construction of other’s people constructions of what
they and their compatriots are up to.” (Geertz 1974: 9) – a fact
often obscured in anthropological writing. This effacement gives
the false impression that anthropology is an observational more
than an interpretive science. Therefore “[a]nalysis[...] is sorting out
the structures of signification” (idem), not the identification of ac-
tual, real, social structures. At the opposite pole of Geertz one has
the French circle of pragmatic anthropology, which embodies the

extreme form of methodology derived from these critiques. It pro-
poses the complete renunciation of the interview method in favor
of direct observation.
I would position myself close to Geertz’s (and others’) perspec-
tive of understanding anthropology as an interpretative science.
While I agree that fieldwork does not allow one to collect raw data,
as Willis (1980) also pointed out, but rather to produce data start-
ing from a grid of perception (the methodology) and using specific
tools (the methods) I am less sure about the multiple layers of in-
terpretations. That is, that social structures are made visible in the
process of subjective interaction, and one can understand social
phenomena beyond “structures of signification”.
Since I desire theoretical coherence, I will begin with an exten-
sive list of objects that constitute the paraphernalia of the research-
er in an urban environment. This constitutes both the indicators
of the objectification of the researcher and the materialization of
the field experience. The reason why the list appears here and not
in the appendix is precisely because of the explanatory importance
that objects have in analyzing the subject of research and the sub-
jectivation of the researcher. Along the lines (and shaped by) my
theoretical choice, I place tools, objects, and artefacts at the core
of my interpretation. In different social context, the objects of an
ethnographer play a major role in shaping his/her relation to the
field and to the persons s/he interviews. Not everybody relates in
the same way to the objects such as the tape recorder. The most
telling example among these objects is the photographic camera. It
will become obvious how in different situations my findings were
shaped by my (mis)use of the camera (see Chapters 4, 5, and 6).
These objects may be facilitators as well as obstacles during the
fieldwork, depending on the particular configuration of power re-
lations in the specific moment. Consequently, a better understand-

ing of the methods of urban ethnography is generated through an
ethnographer’s tools. In other words, these objects are my fashion.
The tape (minidisk) recorder comes first on the list. Considering
the fetishism of discourse, from which most anthropologists suffer,
this is the first object one is bound to buy. The smaller the better,
because the urban researcher has to cover long distances in the same
day, keeping different appointments and has to record in places that
sometimes do not offer much physical space. Its smallness is also ben-
eficial in interactions with interviewed persons, making its inhibitory
presence less apparent. The recorded tapes or minidisks are literally
the material expression of fieldwork interview. I had to get used to us-
ing the recorder in a most discreet manner, changing the tape in ways
that did not disrupt the conversation (although it inevitably did). The
most interesting things one hears are after the recorder is off.
Batteries are equally important. During my first interview with
the manager of Paul Smith showroom in Paris my batteries dis-
charged. I did not have any spare batteries to recharge. Ever since, I
always have one set of batteries with me when going to interviews.
Similarly, the tapes have to be abundant, since interviews can last
longer than one hour (although in the fashion business they are
typically shorter, since people are extremely busy).
The daily agenda allowed me to make appointments with my
interviewees, to take notes, and to make observations on the “re-
gime of time” in the two cities that constituted my focus of research
(I will get back to this point). The agenda, after its utilization, is
a memento of the field, of the rhythm of the meetings, and of the
fragmented character of urban fieldwork. It may become a sort of
retrospective temporal chart of the field. The agenda sets the time
of the researcher, and marks the territory of the field, through the
addresses one is supposed to meet the future interviewees. If it is a

little bigger, it can substitute for a notebook.
A cell phone was indispensable. Even before having a perma-
nent address, the urban ethnographer is pushed to have a fixed cell
phone number. It is the object that facilitates the illusion of perma-
nent contact with the field. With the cell phone one can potentially
contact future interviewees, the persons that are significant for the
research, or just the new friends one is bound to make in the city.
The persons I contacted always asked for my cell phone number
in order to cancel the appointment if necessary. Also, it may be
important to consider that the communication fees are sometimes
elevated, and they may be mentioned in the research budget.
A photo camera is the second eye of the ethnographer, and the
main eye of the field. Like the recorder, it transforms the visual
impressions into images on material or virtual support. The use of
a camera can create various problems. Many types of camera us-
ers, from paparrazi to tourists, populate the urban space. Since the
object gives the measure of one’s subjectivity, it is hard to delimit
oneself from the other types of users. While tourists are innocent in
the eyes of the photographed subject, it is better not to be confused
with journalists or paparazzi. Photography is a delicate matter, to
which I will often return (see also Susan Sontag, 1977).
A detailed plan of the city, with means of transportation is nec-
essary in order to identify the addresses of appointments, and to
create a global image of the urban space covered during the re-
search. Along with this, if the city has a good network of public
transportation, the weekly or monthly ticket is recommended. In
Tehran this was not the case, and I had to try the whole range of
transportation, from buses to common taxis. Each of the transpor-
tation systems had its unique particularities. For example, the com-
mon taxi in Tehran is a town car shared by four to five people of
both sexes. Considering the relative segregation of the urban spaces

in Tehran, I had to figure out the rules of occupation of the interior
space of the taxis. That is, in no case may a woman passenger sit
between two men. At times, this involved a complicated chess-like
movement of the passengers. While in Tehran women generally
chose to travel as separate as possible from men, a general gender
segregation rule is omnipresent in many aspects of life in Iran.
In Paris I preferred ground transportation, as opposed to the
metro, because it gave me a sense of the geography of the city. The
bicycle was a healthy alternative, and it proved very useful when
strikes in public transportation could have interfered with an al-
ready agreed upon appointment6.
Cities usually have libraries. A library card is something that I
have always tried to procure, for many different reasons: libraries,
even if do not always have books related to one’s research, always
give a space for study that recreates somehow the atmosphere of a
campus. Also, I found any book interesting, regardless of the topic;
local novels, when they are not means to evasion, gave me the idea
of how literary authors look at the same space I was in the process
of observing. The literary sensibility may be helpful in constructing
an appealing narration of the field. In libraries one is also likely to
meet interesting people, who can offer fresh perspectives on one’s
approach. Although it did not happen to me, that does not rule out
this possibility.
A bag for carrying around all these objects, and that offers an
easy access to each one of them was essential. I found it better to
have a different bag adapted to the chosen mode of transportation.
6 Business cards might be useful, although I have never understood why. It is
true, a business card gives one the air of seriousness, although the exchange
of business cards may not be appropriate in all of the cases.
A small backpack is ideal for biking, but in bus or taxi it may cause
discomfort each time one needs to take it off or put it on.
A suitcase on wheels, not too big, but not too small either was
needed because I had the habit of carrying books with me. Also, all
the materials listed above, and the papers one is bound to produce
during the fieldwork can be particularly heavy. The urban space
has the advantage of being accessible to wheeled suitcases. In none
of these cases did I find a big backpack useful. A backpack can be-
come really heavy and hard to manoevre in many situations. While
it may be useful while visiting remote places, in an urban settings,
wether Paris or Tehran, a big backpack is less versatile.
It took me some time to figure out all the objects I needed.
Field situations (like the one described in the case of batteries) re-
veal the need for different types of objects. Also, my tendency to
lose pens put me in sometimes-awkward situations, when I did not
have a pen to take notes or write phone numbers.
These tools are not only mediators between the field and the
researcher. For, to treat tools as mere mediators would be to imply
the existence of an objective reality of the anthropological subject
that waits to be recorded. The daily manipulation of these objects
in fact creates the anthropological knowing subject (the researcher
in the field), and produces data that objectifies the subject of re-
search. The recorded tapes, the photos, the notes are all material ex-
pressions of the interactions that lead to the constitution of knowl-
edge, and of the knowing subject. I can say the field has molded
me as much as the field has been molded by me. At the same time,
one has to keep in mind that tools, both theoretical and material,
are as much enabling as they are constricting. The combination of
senses and memory is what we are building on, and both of them
are tricky. The theoretical tools previously acquired help us orga-
nize not only the observation we already made, but also allow us to
TRAJECTORIES AND MEDIATIONS 45
consider the ways in which we are observing. Often the tools act as
sure guidance, at other times they push us to create things where
there are none, or to overlook highly important details.
Collecting and combining the data seems to me more like a
process of production, that is, ‘collecting data’ may be an innapro-
priate term for what we are doing. The theory we are producing is
highly dependent on what we are precisely doing in the field. And
since I was mainly interviewing people (when I was not running
around to catch them) the theory I will be able to abstract from my
data combines movement with verbal discourse. There may also be
an issue of urban fieldwork. Most of the time people prefer to meet
the researcher in neutral places (call them public spaces) like cafes
or bistros. This takes away the possibility of observing the process
of creation of data itself, but it may gain on the side of analyzing
the specific areas or places people chose.
Trajectories and Mediations

In contacting possible interviewees, I very seldom, if ever, used
a direct means of contact. There was almost always an intermedi-
ary, a second level of communication, a secondary path one had
to use to arrive to the site of research; the first mediators were the
telephone, the e-mail, contact letters, or in my case public relation
offices. As underlined above, the material object mediation is of
first importance: it facilitates entering into contact and at the same
time it preserves the impersonality of the first exchange.
I find this an interesting mirror for the impersonality of the
urban relations. The ethnologic trajectory reveals the subject/object
of research along with its “materiality”: both material objects part
of the research, and the visible network of relations established on
the field. In keeping with the metaphor of Coral Gardens, one may
run accross the gardeners in different situations while in the city. In

my research, there were three different ways in which I found my
interviewees.
First, and the most usual, was starting from a person that I al-
ready knew, many times a researcher in the field, who pointed me
to a series of other people who became thus linked through the ob-
ject of my research. Also, directly writing a letter of introduction or
sending an email was another way of meeting future interviewees.
Most of my appointments were generated this way; alternatively,
I met some of my interviewees only by frequentations of urban
spaces or events.
There were moments of direct unexpected contact with relevant
persons or situations in which one had to improvise, and approach
the ‘urban gardener’ informally. The most telling moment of this
nature in my fieldwork was a fashion catwalk I witnessed at the
Grand Mosque de Paris. Here is a fragment describing this particu-
lar experience: “the field is ‘jumping on you’ when least expected
– such is the case of the fashion catwalk organized at the Grande
Mosquée of Paris. Suddenly, one feels that the tools at hand are
not enough to gather whatever one wants (back to the researcher
kit). That evening I was with a couple of friends out for a tea at the
Mosquée. I had to run to a bookstore and buy a pen and a note-
book. As for the photos, I directly asked a photographer in the hall
to send me some pictures. She was kind enough to do it, so I do
have images from the show. They are probably not what I would
have taken, but they are nevertheless a good document to analyze
and to refresh one’s memory.”
The third modality, which is less frequent, is ‘to make the field
come to you’. That is, by simply mentioning one’s research topic
in a gathering, for example, one may encounter people who are
interested in it, or who may point to their knowledge of places
TRAJECTORIES AND MEDIATIONS 47
and persons directly linked to the topic. The reason I insist on

the dismantling of these trajectories is a methodological one. My
fieldwork in Tehran started well before my leaving Paris. I tried
to contact persons from the Iranian Diaspora in Paris who may
have had contacts in my field of interest. A well-known Parisian
photographer, working in Iran on subjects linked to youth and
women, proved to be the source of most of my contacts in Tehran.
After we have met several times (once with the occasion of her
exhibit entitled “Being twenty in Tehran”) I found myself in pos-
session of a well garnished list of phone numbers of artists or styl-
ists from Tehran. Conversations with the photographers, as well as
with different persons familiar with Tehran constituted a precious
introduction to the field, even in its physical absence. The Internet
is also a source of information that contributed to my familiarity
with the field, which proved to be useful later in my encounters.
An interesting observation is that, while in Tehran the fashion de-
signers are located in a small area of Northern Tehran, the Parisian
ateliers are dispersed through the city, and the mobility of links and
interactions in the industry is even greater.
The network one builds when creating the research became vis-
ible to me. While moving between spaces and people, I came into
contact with a great variety of persons from different social catego-
ries. All of them seemed interested in other interviewees I had met
before, or conversely often I had an obligation – almost a moral
constraint – to tell them about my previous trajectory; a trajec-
tory which in fact created the knowledge I had about their field of
work and their persona. Most of the people I met were introduced
to me by others. That is, every call I made would begin with me
saying: ‘I am calling you at the recommendation of...’. This clearly
shaped the interactions I had with my new interviewees. S/he al-
ready placed me in her own network of affiliations and somehow
formed an idea about who I might be or what I might ask for, what
were the fields of my own interest. This happened starting from her
previous knowledge of the persons who made the recommenda-
tion. This is common sense, but what are its consequences for the
data production process?
Chapter 2
On the Timely Subject Fashion
POLONIUS :
[...] For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are most select and generous, chief in that.
William Shakespeare (2002)

Hamlet ACT I scene iii, p. 31
Paris remains the imaginary reference for high fashion, the

capital of chic among other centers of fashion like London, Tokyo,
Milan, or New York. A great quantity of ink has been used, and
continues to be used, to describe, characterize, analyze, worship or
criticize, Paris fashion. From seasonal critiques to historic accounts
or social analysis, literature abounds on the subject.
Far from giving an exhaustive description of the fashion indus-
try of Paris, this chapter (re)presents an ethnographic perspective
on practices of creation and selling, and those practices’ link with
the Middle Eastern clients or with an imaginary linked to them.
How does one create a piece of clothing? What kind of creation is a
dress? Does the designer imagine different clientele? Does it influ-
ence the designing practices? These and a series of other questions
will be explored in this chapter.
The Fabric of Fashion

Today, fashion industry in Paris (and elsewhere) operates with
a major distinction between couture and ready-to-wear (prêt-à-
porter). Couture refers to the luxury dress produced by designers
who are more often than not considered also artists, and who lately
50 2: ON THE TIMELY SUBJECT FASHION
have something of an aura of a superstar attached to their name.

(Saillard, 2002 exposition “Le Couturier Superstar” Museum of
Fashion, Paris). The houses of couture dress (maisons) bear the
name of the designer (e.g. Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, etc.) and they
sell their creations to private clients. A tradition started in the 18th
century, couture began losing its clients after the First World War
(1914-1918), and ever since, couture fashion reorganized its pro-
duction, expanding its markets and appealing to a more popular
clientele (Taylor, 2000). The invention of the prêt-à-porter lines is
one of the modalities of adapting to the social changes and securing
profits of the Couture Houses in the context of a declining private
clientele. Another modality of profit increase is the licensing of
different products (e.g. perfumes, cosmetics, accessories) with the
name of the house (see also Chapter 7):
Until the mid-1990s there was little debate which explained that
since the 1970s nearly every couture house in Paris had run at a
financial loss. There was little public acknowledgment that the
main function of a couturier over the last thirty years has been
to create the glamorously seductive house image used to launch
the million-dollar global manufacture of over-priced ‘designer’
products. (Taylor 2000: 122)
In between the two world wars the private clientele for fashion
houses decreased, and couture houses began reorienting towards
more cost effective creations. While French economy encouraged
the luxe industry to produce and sell, and equated luxury with
French national identity, many fashion houses became more flex-
ible, and adapted their creations. The sumptuous couturiers who
could not adapt died away, like Lucile, who identified the new boy-
ish style for women not as an expression of social change but rather
of economic scarcity:
THE FABRIC OF FASHION 51
The boyish look was the perfect solution. Rather than see-
ing the new garconne style as a creative, flexible response to
a new mood of feminine modernity sweeping through the
world of fine and applied arts, Lucile condemned it dismis-
sively. “No woman…could cost less to clothe.” (ibid. 126)
A closer look at the intertwining of consumer patterns, eco-
nomic context, industry’s strategies, and aesthetic choices reveals
the complex relation between subjectivation and material culture.
The patterns of consumption of high-end clients changed, causing
couture houses loss of private clients. Renouncing excessive orna-
mentation and accessories, the couturiers simultaneously reduced
the costs of production, maintained clients, and created a new aes-
thetic canon. Maybe Lucile was right. The new clothes created the
new liberated woman. Freed from the constriction of excess of fab-
ric, women’s bodies mobility accrued in public space. Trousers for
women have, since the nineteenth century, been associated with
women’s movement for political and social rights. Women from
upper classes engaged in the women’s rights movement had tak-
en up wearing pants as an expression of their political allegiance.
Trousers were common among working class women, and this is
the way that they came to stand for the right to work and a public
presence.
The dynamic from the 1920s and 1930s was slightly different.
While trousers could have been easily identified with political en-
gagement, light clothing and the reformation of the dress after la
belle époque were assimilated with new aesthetic canons, desirable
and attainable for more women, now that the clothes were cheaper
to produce. These “flexible” clothes potentiates the increased mo-
bility of women in public who became less constrained by the ex-
cess of fabric and accessories. Thus, women’s bodies became more
“flexible” (just like production), and new spaces of the city became
more accessible (e.g popular dancing salons). The new clothing

style enabled the mingling of high and low classes in Montparnasse
famous restaurants and cabarets in the 1920s. One may venture
to say that, once the motion conduits acquired new shapes, a new
model of femininity imposed itself and became desirable. Aesthetic
canons proved to be more powerful than explicit political engage-
ment in the shaping of the new political subject. Associated with
desire because produced by prestigious fashion houses, the new
women’s clothing formed the new (woman)/subject, characterized
by higher mobility and visibility in public, that is, a different use
of the public space.
License Power
At the end of the 1930s, Schiaparelli started licensing clothes
and other products, thereby opening new profit bringing paths
for famous couture houses (see Chapter 7). The post-war period
is characterized by the increased flexibility of the fashion industry.
In the context of the development of trade agreements and stan-
dardization of ground and sea transport, it became much easier
to delocalize production to places were cheaper labor existed, thus
creating the sweatshop phenomena (Rosen, 2002, Bender and
Greenwald 2003).
Based mainly on the exploitation of women’s labor, sweatshop
production completely changed the face of the fashion industry.
Famous fashion houses could easily open a ready-to-wear line pro-
duced through subcontracting work in the sweatshops. The name/
brand license secured the success of the line. Associated with the
image of the designer superstar, the couture houses can overprice
the ready-to-wear line in order to partially cover the loss of couture
clothing. The couture shows have since had the role of creating the
desirable brand name.
LICENSE POWER 53
Some theorists call the increased accessibility of a larger public

to branded products or clothes the “democratization of fashion”
(Lipovetski 1994), eclipsing the production moment. Nonetheless,
in the mid-1960s, Yves Saint Laurent, then a promising young de-
signer formed by Dior, created a ready-to-wear line, and, break-
ing with the elitism of the Golden Triangle, opened a boutique on
Paris’ Left Bank. The Left Bank was also the site of the emergence
of Paris’ student movement, which only a few years later swept
the city. Once more fashion “preceded” rather than “reflected” the
social mood of its time.
Another visible result of the new type of “flexible production”
is the appearance of brand-names that are not associated with a fa-
mous designer’s name. Brands like Hilfiger or Benetton rely on this
system of production and target a large population selling relatively
cheap clothing with the air of prestige attached to them (Phizacklea
1990). The success of these brands is not based on the prestige of
the designer name, but on the modality of attracting a larger clien-
tele body through aggressive and effective marketing. Their modal-
ity of attracting clients is the reversed image of the couture fashion
houses strategy. These producers appeal to lower-end clientele, and
later try to “move up” (Taylor, ibid.). Recently, pop stars brand
their names for clothing and perfume products, a phenomenon
already widespread in the United States (e.g. Jay Lo sneakers1).
Once the practices of licensing spread widely, fashion houses
merged in order to optimize the ratio of investment to profit. The
big mergers produced a large variety of fashion articles and acces-
sories keeping the prestigious name of each of the brands part of
the group. The most well-known example is the LVMH group that
unites more than 50 prestigious names under its label. The letters
1 With thanks to Dimitri Bogasianos for the suggestion.
stand for Louis Vuitton and Moet Hennessy. Fashion houses prefer
to “delegate” the production of branded accessories to these kinds
of groups. For example in LVMH group one finds Dior, Kenzo, and
Givenchy perfumes, wines and spirits, cosmetics, jewelry, watches,
etc. Other fashion houses combine enough name prestige and fi-
nancial power to create their own group, like Chanel or Armani.
They tend to enlarge their production to include accessories and/
or cosmetics, interior design, etc. branding, packaging, and selling
lifestyles rather than “just” clothes.
Those who attempt to create an independent label form a spe-
cial category of designer. This type of enterprise is very difficult in
the face of the financial power of the big fashion groups. This type
of designers, also known as createurs, constitutes the focus of my
research in Paris, my port of entry into the field.
Techniques of Fashion
Paris was the first location of my fieldwork. It is important to
mention that in my account of fashion creation in Tehran, Paris
remains the unspoken reference; the techniques used in Paris con-
stitute the benchmark when presenting the techniques of tailoring
in Tehran. It is also important that, although Paris is my primary
reference, I am not intending to establish a hierarchical relation
between the two sites. I do account for the power relation and the
symbolic ascendancy Paris has over Tehran in the fashion realm,
however.
This section will start with an ethnographic description of the
process of clothing production in one of the workshops I visited ex-
tensively. Afterwards I will concentrate on the process of designing
and on the selling strategies, illustrating with examples from the
designers I met. They belong to the same type of fashion designer :
le créateur, a category of designer that appeared in the 1960s, who
BLAISE, OR THE PROCESS OF PRODUCTION 55
usually started an independent brand, sometimes with less money

than the minimum of $ 250 000 which experts consider necessary
for such an enterprise. In many cases, the createurs work in big
couture houses to fund their independent venture (see Crane 2000:
144-147). The focus of this chapter is the temporal dimension of
production.
My interviewees belong to different generations, and their
workshops represent different types of spatial and productive or-
ganization as well as retailing strategies. Each of the designers sells
to, or had past contact with, Middle Eastern clients, thus each is
used to the specific practices of creation and selling required by
these clients.
Creating for fashion in Paris is a stressful and time-pressured
activity. I was not able to spend more than one and a half hours (in-
cluding the interview) in any workshop, there was scarcely any op-
portunity for a return visit. Brevity characterized the contacts estab-
lished. Many times my subsequent phone calls went unanswered.
Blaise, or Brief Presentation of the Process of Production

Blaise was the first stylist I knew in Paris, and with whom I have
been in contact with since the summer of 2000. He is one of the
numerous designers of ready-to-wear from the Sentier neighbor-
hood. Sentier is traditionally known as the Paris neighborhood in
which the biggest number of ready-to-wear fabricants are concen-
trated, of all levels or “gammes” : low-end (bas de gamme), middle-
end (moyen gamme), and high-end (haute de gamme). There is a
fourth level of ready-to-wear, produced by luxury fashion houses,
which is called “ready-to-wear de luxe”. The combination of cloth-
ing quality, prices, and clientele establishes the “level” of the ready-
to-wear fabricant.
Blaise’s workshop occupies the ground level and part of the first
floor of a building; the entrance is through a bland commercial
space, which he uses as depository for rolls of textile, fabrics, wrap-
ping materials, etc. The back of the commercial space is used as
storage for the finished clothing. Metallic rails sustain hangers that
carry the clothing of the last and the current collections. Each col-
lection has between thirty and fifty models, organized around a
generic theme. The clothes are chemically cleaned, covered with
the plastic transparent sacs in which they arrive from the manufac-
turer. They are classified by types, are labeled, and ranged into col-
lections. For the labels, each designers develops her/his own code,
but usually the label contain letters indicating the season, the name
of the collection, and numbers for the model, size, color, etc. For
example S G R 02 (spring, ghetto rose, 2002).
An interior staircase brings us to the first floor. On the right
side, the big workshop is a room of about 40 square-meters, with
a view of the street. This is the workshop for cutting the fabric,
which I will describe along with the work procedure. On the left
side, two rooms communicate with each other. The first room has a
small working table, a lot of tracing paper2 all over the place, small
designs on the table and around, and a wooden mannequin at the
right side of the room. On the walls, there are plenty of newspapers
and magazine clippings of reviews of Blaise’s work, old and new
sketches, phone numbers jotted down in a hurry, pieces of fabric,
etc. During my other visits in Parisian workshops I had the occa-
sion to see the same practice of using the walls as integrative part
of the designing process. Even in the single case of a designer who
did not draw sketches, the walls of his workshop were a sort of
ambulant notebook, or agenda. I will call this room the modelist
2 Paper of a special quality used in clothing design in the process of modelling
(see below), but also in architecture and other industrial design.
BLAISE, OR THE PROCESS OF PRODUCTION 57
room, since it is here that Jacqueline, Blaise’s modelist3 works. The

modelist room and the downstairs room were the places in which I
had most of my conversations with Blaise, some of them recorded.
The access to the second room on the first floor is secured through
the modelist room. The office has a desk, on which one can see the
administrative papers, order forms, a fax machine, and a computer.
The office belongs to Blaise’s wife. She is in charge of the material
side of the business, the buying and selling of orders, the payments
to the fabric and accessory suppliers, the deliveries to boutiques.
While I was present in the workshop, I was witness to small ten-
sions between Blaise and his wife regarding business practices. She
admonished Blaise at one point because he ordered a series of flow-
ers/accessories without consulting her.
During one of my first visits, in 2001, I found Blaise brushing
faux fur collars and end-sleeves. He explained to me: “I am like a
chef of a restaurant. I need to check every plate before it is served
to the client.” I find this metaphor, although unusual, quite expres-
sive for the clothing creation process in which Blaise is involved.
Further, I will present the stages of “clothing cooking” for Blaise,
detailing those that are relevant for my research. There certainly are
variations of these stages of production among all the fashion de-
signers. I will comment extensively on Blaise’s practices, and only
briefly for the other designers, indicating significant differences
when they are relevant.
Blaise starts, always, by designing a silhouette, a shape, a body
image. He discusses with Jacqueline the model and the possibility
of “making it real”. In fashion creation, the modelist is the person
whose craft it is to create three-dimensional models of the dress
design. S/he is also the person who adapts the model, the prototype
3 See below for the explanation of the modelist’s role in design. Jacqueline is
Blaise’s modelist.
to the different sizes that clients order. This model (“la toulle”) is
made out of thick, cheap, disposable cotton. The two-dimensional
sketch is deconstructed and reconstructed in pieces that will form
the three-dimensional model. The pieces thus created are assembled
together on a wooden mannequin, with a standard size (between
36 and 38, for women). The modelist and the designer together
adjust the pieces. After they agree, the modelist deconstructs the
toulle, and transcribes each piece of the garment to be on tracing
paper. This forms the patron, and the procedure is called patronage.
The tailor or the cutter uses the patrons as models for tailoring the
final garment. A first model of the garment is thus produced, in
the size 36-38. After Blaise and Jacqueline add the laces, occasional
ornamentation, or accessories, the product is ready to be exhibited
in showrooms for the clients.
Blaise works with a different workshop for the laces or the or-
namentation of the garment; the lace design raises interesting ques-
tions about the aesthetic imaginary, and authorship. The most fa-
mous producer of laces in Paris is the house Le Sage, with which all
of the famous Parisian designers of the twentieth century worked,
and even had long lasting relationships (e.g. the friendship between
Yves Saint Laurent and the later baron Le Sage). Blaise is not part
of those designers, and Le Sage laces have prohibitive prices; I will
talk in due course about the laces, aesthetics, and authorship.
While first models are entirely sewn in Blaise’s workshops, the
orders from clients, which can range from ten to several hundreds,
are sewn in an outside factory. In all of the cases, Blaise’s workshop
cuts the fabric. In the upstairs cutting room, two tailors work, a
woman and a man. The woman marks the fabric using the patrons,
in order to be cut. Big rolls of fabric of different qualities and colors
surround her. She works on a big table, aproximately 4m/6m. She
unfolds the fabrics, consults the color codes, arranges the patrons,
THE FABRIC OF DESIGN 59
and passes the fabric to the man. Against the wall of the window
there is a big cutting table. On one side of the table there are mech-
anisms that fix the textile on the table. Layers upon layers of fabric
can be put on the table, permitting thus a multiple cut. There are
fifteen fixation points, and fifteen patrons are fixed on these points,
covering the fabric. The man fixes the fabric and the patrons while
the table is in a horizontal position. Afterwards, he turns the table
into a vertical position, with the fixation points at the top. The cut-
ter cuts following the patron models.
The showrooms are the moment in which Blaise receives orders
for production, in terms of number of pieces, models to reproduce,
and their sizes. New patrons are produced for every ordered size,
and for every model. The modelist again has a central role in this
stage, as s/he needs to adapt the design to the different dimensions
of the clothing. After the patrons are produced, they are multi-
plied using the fabric for the final dress, numbered in order of their
future assemblage, and sent to the tailor or manufacturer to be
sewn. After cleaning, the end product arrives back to the work-
shop, where Blaise checks it for the final touches, and from where
it travels to boutiques or clients. Each phase is important, but the
focus is on the creation part, the aesthetic choices, the ornaments,
and the showroom moment.
The Fabric of Design

Visiting the createurs in Paris made me realize the complexity
of the process of dress production, in which designing is only one
part among others. Nevertheless, designing is the seed from which
the clothing springs, and the designer is the person who ideally has
a complete vision of the end product.
In Blasie’s workshop I could witness the making of an acces-
sory, a flower that should ornament the sleeves and the collars of a
dress. It was a naïve-styled model, inspired by a drawing he found

at the flea market. Here follows an excerpt of my notes:
I was though lucky enough to witness in the making of a flower,
future embroidery for a new dress model, that will appear in the
summer collection. Blaise does two collections per year, winter
and summer. The calendar is very tight: collection presentation
at the beginning of Fall; beginning the production for the com-
mands they receive; in parallel, the conception and creation of
the new collection, and then the cycle starts all over again.
Back to the flower: After he designed it, he showed me a post-

er that inspired him, a cover for some children’s event or book.
He first talked to the modelist, Jacqueline, and then he slightly
changed the shape of the corolla, and then faxed it to the em-
broiderist. Blaise winked at me and said: “the phone will ring any
minute and he will start telling me that this is impossible, that
we cannot do it, that there is no way this will work.” Then, while
we were talking about other things, he started taping the phone
with his finger: “come on, ring!...”
Finally Pascal called, and they had a discussion that exactly ful-
filled his expectation. A model never takes the shape of the ini-
tial idea, it always changes in the long process of creation. There
are a series of people participating in its creation, each making a
little contribution, without neglecting the technical constraints
in themselves.
In fact, the material side of creation is highly important; what I
have called “technical impositions” are the active parts that non-an-
imated objects take in designing procedures. Those objects may be
both enablers and constrictors in the dress making process. Fabric
qualities give the consistency of any piece of dress, and while de-
signing the createur thinks about the material that will go into the
creation. As part of the original design, some designers not only
carefully choose the fabric, but also create their own. Thus, other
two young designers I visited in Paris, Mark and Darja both de-
veloped their own fabrics, and their own approach on texture and
materials (see also Chapter 7).
Like many createurs, Darja does more than one activity. In order
to maintain her financial stability, she is the artistic director at the
designer house Leonard in Paris. Thus, Darja works an average of
ten hours a day, splitting her physical presence between her work-
shop in the 9th department of Paris, and Leonard in the 6th. She has
an important clientele from the Middle East, and I had been re-
ferred to her by the organizer of Mozaique, a luxury ready-to-wear
showroom from Paris dedicated to Middle Eastern clients.
Darja’s workshop is on the first floor of a building, north of
Boulevard Strasbourg. I have entered only in the kitchen and in the
first room of the workshop, containing a cutting table, textiles, and
shelves, as well as hangers for the finished dress. Darja works with
five to six interns, students of fashion schools, some of them com-
ing from her natal Berlin. For sewing her clothes, she has a tailor to
whom she sends patrons and the already-cut fabrics.
During our interview, Darja clearly explained to me the rela-
tionship between textiles and design practices. Many other design-
ers whom I talked repeated her description almost verbatim:
It depends. Sometimes I have the idea in my head, and I make
sketches, sometimes I have the fabric on the table and I see what
it gives [qu’est que ça donne], the fabrics act very different, and
sometimes they are the sources of inspiration for the design... In
this case, I go to the mannequin and see what it gives. I inspire
myself like this. Or I put them on myself, and I look what it gives
on the body. This gives me ideas.
In this fragment, what interested me the most is the way in
which fabrics act. They are not only an integrative part of the
creation act, but actors, agents, sources of inspiration that “give”

something to the designer. They act differently on the mannequin
and on the body, because fabrics inter-act with movement.
In Rule of Experts, Mitchell (2002) makes a strong critique of
the “economic” view of the world, based among others on the fol-
lowing principles regarding agency: all humans are rational agents,
and only humans can be agents. Analyzing the transformation in
Egypt due to the Aswan barrage construction, Anophaelus invasion,
German invasion, and nitrates use in agriculture, the author shows
how in economic reports (and social analysis for that matter) a
series of non-human agents are obscured or neglected (along with
the violence of economic reforms). The non-human agents kept
my attention for a number of reasons; at the level of micro-analysis
of the design and body I propose, one of these agents resurfaces:
the fabric. Fabric, through its texture, creates or inspires the design;
also the fabric directly influences the body that will wear the dress
and its movements. The fabric is not neutral, if one wears linen;
another cotton, or yet another silk, each individual’s movements
and attitudes are changed. Also, each texture signifies differently
in different social contexts. In this chapter, and throughout the
book, I will identify a series of other non-human agents deeply
involved in the practices of fashion, and with a strong influence on
the dynamic of the industry. Darja has patented, for one of her col-
lections, a fabric of her own creation, which combines textile and
fabric in a pattern that varies in thickness, and transparency. She
used this fabric for a whole collection, and the fabric itself inspired
(if not dictated) the theme of this collection.
Mark is a young createur, with ten collections under his name
(meaning five years of activity). I contacted him at the recommen-
dation of a curator at the Fashion Museum of Paris, because he was
said to have an important Middle Eastern clientele. Mark agreed to
see me one morning, and I arrived at his workshop after a Metro

ride around eleven A.M. At the ground floor of a building on rue
Sauffroy, I am invited to wait in the production workshop. Three
women work for the orders after the showroom, all in perfect si-
lence. The radio attuned on “French Culture” talks about the mid-
age crisis of men and women. One of the women prepares the fab-
rics – transparent black and white. On the carton rolls, she marks
the quality and the dimension of the piece (e.g. 4,35 m, already
ironed). She marks it on a white band of paper she is cutting herself
out of A4 printing paper. The room is about 3X5 m, illuminated by
fluorescent tubes. The rolls of fabric thus prepared are sent back to
the tailor along with the patrons and the production specifications.
In the same room, finished clothes are ranged on hangers, and they
are marked to be sent to the clients. Each label bears the name of
the client, model, and size.
After a brief wait in this room I am invited to Mark’s creation
room. At the moment of the interview he was wearing jeans and
a sailor t-shirt, his long grayish hair in a ponytail. There are two
main particularities of Mark’s work: first, he does not design. Mark
arranges the fabric directly on the mannequin, and searches for the
future form the dress will take. He creates the patrons only after he
cuts the material, reversing thus a phase of the classic production
pattern. This is not a novelty in itself in fashion creation. Madeleine
Vionnet, the early twentieth century designer in love with geom-
etry, did not use sketches; she was known for working directly on
small wooden mannequins, or on live mannequins. More recently
Nina Ricci followed her example, but these are rather exceptions in
the sketch-ruled world of fashion design. The contrast with Tehran
createurs is important, as I will discuss in the Chapter 6.
The other particularity of Mark’s work, linked with the first
one, is his treatment of fabric. Mark does not buy the fabric already
treated, but prefers to treat it himself. He does so because the fab-

ric, as he explains, is part of the creative process, and therefore,
M: I work with a modelist and with people who assist me in the
preparation of fabrics. Most of the textiles arrive here in their
raw stage. They are cut, but they are neither dyed nor softened,
they really are in their raw condition. And we wash them and
dye them here.
A : Why ?
M : It is a way to appropriate the fabric, and to have fabrics that
we do not find elsewhere.
For both Mark and Darja, the fabrics created in their own
workshops were personal, or individual marks of the each designer.
While Darja uses her own-patented fabric only in some cases or for
particular collections, the fabric is Mark’s signature.
Fashion design is an activity that takes places in the larger social
complex and reflects a body of knowledge about the human body.
The main referent of the fashion design is the individual, the body,
and his/her (imagined) characteristics. Fashion sketches constitute
signs that precede the referent (the body), and they a priori shape
it, in its absence. In fact the shaping takes place, like in the case of
imagining architectural spaces, in the presence of already existing
assumptions about the human body. The preconceptions of fashion
design impose on the body a set of habits directly linked with the
shape of the clothes. But, like buildings, dress is inhabited in vari-
ous ways, and there is a dialectical, dynamic relation established
between vestimentary practices and the a priori of clothing design.
Fashion designers do not necessarily have in mind categories of
race, culture, or class (although they definitely “think” gender, even
in self-consciously gender-subversive designs), but the use of the
product in the social context may assign (and subvert for that mat-
ter) racial, cultural or class characteristics to certain garments or ap-
parel, like the segregated inhabiting of certain neighborhoods – as

the result of long term social processes – racializes these neighbor-
hoods. Popular knowledge of fashion design may be re-appropri-
ated by designers, recuperated, and reconstructed as typified style,
recognizable in terms of race/class/gender (e.g. the ghetto style) or
geographic location.
Using silks in designs may inspire an oriental collection, while
using light pastel textiles may suggest Mediterranean or tropical
themes. Designers often classify their collection in geographi-
cal terms like “Oriental”, “Indian”, “Afghan”, or “British”. When
asked directly, the designers explained that those references are
inspired precisely by the quality of fabric, colors, and sources of
inspiration for design. This aesthetic nomenclature or categoriza-
tion is very large, categories cannot be reconstructed, because they
change every year. Also, the definitions are fluid, just as fashion is.
One piece or design may be as easily named Indian as it may be
Oriental. The designer of the Parisian house “Impression” told me
in an interview: “I was preparing something ‘Afghan’, and I talked
with my lace maker. While talking she came out with something
else, and we put it together, and at the end it was more Indian...”
Fashion designers develop a whole language that links geographic
areas with aesthetic characteristics, without tracing clear borders
between those areas. In fashion design the fluidity of these borders
allows the construction and reconstruction of these areas through
the discursive4 debate (through practice). During the process of
design, two apparently contradictory tendencies are developing:
first is the aesthetic cartography of the world and the bodies that
populate it.
4 Discursive is used here (and throughout the text) in the sense Foucault gives
it, that is a practice with effects upon the object of the discourse.
Figure 2.1 Choosing the right color; a fashion designer workshop in Paris,
rue de la Garde.
This may be seen as a way of naturalizing cultural characteris-

tics, or creating cultural/racial traits through aesthetics. Thus, there
are the “exotic” elements that add to fashionable dress, and point to
an abstract space of otherness, a valuable source of inspiration for
modern dress because they are the issue of a non-modern space.
Secondly, it seems that fashion designers have understood ahead
of others that fashion – and thus modernity – does not belong ex-
clusively to the Western hemisphere. Although the idea that real
fashion is produced in Western locations is still present, there is
a sense of the “equality of individuals” facing fashion. To be more
specific, this equality is understood in terms of being modern, and
does not apply to other categories/sources of inequality like gender
or class. In other words, there exists a series of systemic processes
that renders a clothing item “fashionable”, that are found in Paris,
New York, London, or Milan, and to a lesser extent Tokyo. In par-
allel, there is the level of daily social practices lived as “fashion”,
present extensively around the world.
Fluidity in creating aesthetic categories also comes from the
process of creation itself and leaves a lot of room for innovation.
For example, during the visit at maison Le Sage – the most famous
Parisian manufacturer of lace – my guide explained to me: “this
year Lagerfeld asked for rounds. Result? Black rounds on white
fabric.” The “result” of Lagerfeld’s demand has nothing to do with
the creative capacity of the famous designer, and everything to
do with the human and technical resources of Le Sage. One may
only imagine what happened in Le Sage’s workshops, and how the
Lagerfeld’s word “rounds” became round pieces of black textile on
white fabric (no picture available because of Le Sage’s policy of
secrecy of production).
Time
HAMLET :
The time is out of joint. – O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
Shakespeare (ibid.) ACT I scene iii, p. 33
While fabric participates in design by enabling the creative act,

and in consumption through creating brand or name specificity,
time is an agent that has an altogether different effect on fashion
design activities. Time may thus be considered another technical
imposition, maybe the milestone of fashion design. Besides fruit,
fashion products are the most perishable on the market. Even fruit
may last longer since the invention of freezing technologies.
Fashion designers work on a seasonal calendar that marks the
period of selling and the period of creation. The seasons are com-
pressed into couples, in order to give the necessary time for creation
and production. The Parisian ready-to-wear fashion calendar is the
following: One week at the beginning of March, for the presenta-
tion of fall/winter collections of the current year, and one week
at the end of September for the presentation of spring/summer
collections for the following year. In Paris, the seasons for ready-
to-wear presentations are alternated by seasons of haute couture.
Thus, while spring and fall are for ready-to-wear, haute couture
collections mark winter and summer.
The market logic of this organization is the following: the clients
(boutique owners) want to have the collection in stores at the be-
ginning of the season. In order to do so, they need to allow at least
three months for the production process, starting with the moment
of placing the order (during the fashion week). This is why the col-
lections are presented at least three months before the season.
TIME 69
Due to this arrangement, fashion designers need to organize

their calendar at least six months ahead of time. That is, the collec-
tion for the season needs to be conceptualized at least six months
in advance.
Evidently, it depends. But normally we start (a new collection)
immediately after the current one is sold (e.g. after the orders are
placed), immediately after the winter is sold we start the summer.
But for small enterprises [structure] as mine, this is not possible,
because we are first getting busy with the production, and only
after we start the new collection. (Darja)
This fragment details not only the time arrangement of a fash-
ion year, but also the difference between a “small structure” – the
createur, the type of designer I interviewed – and big fashion houses
or multinationals. Thus, a collection has the following trajectory:
for the established designers, it is first shown on a catwalk, in a
show, that is the kind of fashion presentation the large public is
accustomed to. A défilé is the presentation of the collection for
press and the public. The invitations are sent early, and the crowd,
needless to say, is exclusive. Therefore those who are most likely to
be the future clients of the boutiques, if not the boutique owners
themselves, are the first to have a sensual contact with the dress.
The catwalks take place during fashion week5, and are followed by
the showrooms.
The showroom is the moment of wholesale collection selling,
reserved to clients (usually boutique owners but also private par-
ties). All the prestigious fashion houses have their own showroom,
5 Each season Paris, as well as other capitals of fashion, reserves one week in
which all fashion designers present their collection. The season alternates,
winter and summer are dedicated to haute-couture collections, while spring
and fall are reserved to ready-to-wear.
but young createurs are sometimes brought together in common

showrooms. As Mark said:
The sales happen in a second stage (deuxieme temps), in a
showroom. I do in Mars and Octobre, the showroom is called
“Workshop”. Only haute de gamme, createurs’ collections, inter-
national attendance. (Mark)
Usually agencies or private entrepreneurs host this type of show-
room, or salon, that reunites a small number or createurs. They
rent a space in a prestigious location in Paris – preferably in the
Golden Triangle, the name of the space formed by the boulevard
Champs Elysées, avenue Montaigne, and avenue George V, that
concentrates the most famous fashion houses and retailers in Paris.
The showrooms bring together young designers from Europe, Asia,
and/or America. Each designer has a space to show her/his collec-
tion and proceeds to selling. The space usually has a line of racks
with the new collection, approximatelly thirty pieces, and some of
the designers also display clothes from the previous collection that
have not “fallen out of fashion”. There is also a table with chairs
where the clients and the designer may sit and discuss the order.
The showroom organizer provides live mannequins to display the
dress, and the client chooses the model and the quantity, and then
places the order. Usually the organizer of the showroom is the war-
rant for the good delivery and the timely payment, although the
pay may be delayed (see the detailed description of the Mozaique
showroom in Chapter 5). Many organizers handpick the design-
ers, as Michelle, the owner of Mozaique showroom, told me:
Because our clients always trust us, and immediately that we con-
sider that a product is well finished, original, and out of ordinary,
we present it. Then it is up to the designer to prove herself, mean-
ing to make timely deliveries, and mostly to be able to renew
herself, not to make the same thing always.
TIME 71
There are several elements in this fragment that tell us about

time arrangement in the fashion industry. First, there is timely de-
livery. This requirement is strenuous for the createurs. In a small
workshop there are no different sections of “artistic production” and
“production” itself. That is, most of the time the same personnel,
including the designer, needs to organize and participate in produc-
tion for sale, and only after can s/he start working on the new col-
lection. Sometimes the production may take four months, leaving
only two for the preparation of the new collection. A combination
of time, financial, and spatial factors contribute to these particular
arrangements for createurs. The workshop is small, both as surface
and as financial investment, so there is no spatial separation be-
tween creation and production; they need to be separated in time.
While in big houses production for the current season and creation
for the next one are done simultaneously (also accounting partially
for market success), in small structures there is less time for creation.
This temporal gap may also play in the feeling of déjà vu some small
createurs give in their seasonal design. By the time they start the new
collection, some prestigious names may be already done with it, and
in spite of the secrecy, information may escape.
Time plays a role in the diffusion of style not only among the
consumers, but also among the producers. Thus, haute couture col-
lections precede the ready-to-wear presentations by three months
for the same season: haute couture presents summer clothes in win-
ter, while some ready-to-wear houses present their collections in
spring.
This brings us to the second temporal element of fashion, gen-
erated through market arrangements, and part in the social prac-
tices of class distinction: anticipation. A l’Oreal (hair product line)
advertisement I saw near the Orly airport displayed five manne-
quins and the caption: “257 specialists at l’Oreal invent the beauty
of tomorrow”. The market arrangements previously summarized

make that an aesthetic proposition for a season displayed some
three to six months in advance. Global synchronization of fashion
markets demands a temporal precedence at the moment of creation
that would allow the commodities to arrive at the selling points. In
parallel, this factor became a mean of distinction between aesthetic
canons, between high and low fashion. The distinction emerges
from the anticipation, from the capacity to propose a sustainable
aesthetic before the time of consumption. For designers, access to
early and prestigious salons is more than half of the guarantee to
impose their aesthetic (as Michelle observed earlier, the showroom
offers them access to clients who are themselves trend-setters in
their countries because of their access to these salons). The global
circulation of commodities and the capitalist practices of selling
creates a disjointed temporal framework.
Access to seasonal fashion presentations is reserved to few; this
practice creates the aesthetic elite, that is, the high classes who give
themselves the means to be high classes (see the introduction).
Among the creators of aesthetics (designers) there is a competition
in anticipating the trend (or proposing it before others). L’Oreal
advertising has two main points of grip: the invention of “tomor-
row’s beauty”, and the scientific aura conferred by the 257 spe-
cialists. Access to this “tomorrow” may be obtained today, but it
is reserved to those with the means to consume l’Oreal products.
Science is modern, and a warrant for the truth-value of the pro-
posed beauty. The reverse side of anticipation, the market strategy
that accelerates time and devalues commodities, is the period of
“sales”, or “soldes”.
In the middle of summer and winter seasons, the greater public
has broad access to fashion commodities through price lowering
and heavy marketing. The “month of sales” is a month that reor-
TIME 73
ganizes the entire structure of public space. It is a seasonal feast of

consumption, lived almost as a moment of potlatch by the public.
On the side of the producers, it is a moment of important material
and spatial gain. In the fast-moving fashion industry, no matter
how big one’s store is, one cannot afford to leave unsold the prod-
ucts of the last collection, and a return to the producer would be
un-profitable.
It is not by chance that the sales month starts immediately after
the haute couture fashion week in Paris. Thus, while the elites, the
“beautiful people,” set their attention towards the season to come
in six months, the middle class consumer can access something
that has been seen three to six months earlier, and worn one to two
months in advance by those elites. Sales democratizes for some,
but also accelerates, since the trend-setters need to already invent
newness, and the elites may not display what it is already in sale
without the risk of losing distinction. Sales clear the spatial and the
temporal framework for the new collections to come.
While clothing and body adornment are general phenomena,
fashion is generated by and in relation to the modern order of
things. It expresses a special relation with time (anticipatory rather
than mnemonic) and a particular conception of the individual (ra-
tional, independent and able to re-present and re-invent itself ).
As design (including industrial design) anticipates body shapes, or
creates new molds for the body, and new matrices of subjectiva-
tion, market organization anticipates the social diffusion of beauty
canons. Fashion, through its practices, is the moment of encounter
between human body and social space. This disjointed dynamic of
fashion shows and sales is at the core of the temporal play of fash-
ion, and of the temporal definitions of the modern individual, the
liberal subject.
Brand New Subjects

The study of insurance and risk affords a rich perspective for re-
thinking the liberal subject under the condition of the modern or-
der of things. In “‘Popular life’ and Insurance Technology”, Daniel
Defert (1991) analyzed the changes that occurred in the technolo-
gies of insurance. He concluded that the insurance technology as
we know it today can be considered a strategy of governmentality
applied at the level of population that rationalizes the life of the
social body. In other words, insurance is a modality of managing
life, of stabilizing and rationalizing its variables in terms of risks
and compensations. This can be read as a “solution” that biopow-
er “embraces” in order to eliminate the haphazard of death, and
implicitly its limitations: “For death as a happy stroke of fortune
which liquidates a debt, he [the rentier, using the notion of risk,
my note] substitutes a plenitude of life determined by sex, age,
hygiene, genealogy and family environment”. (Defert, 1991: 218).
“[I]nsurance is like a diagram, a figure of social organization” or
“a generalizable technology for rationalizing societies.” (ibid., 215),
and its subject, the insured, the entity that populates this diagram,
is constituted of the classificatory parameters of his/her life. The
individual is no longer subjected to liberal law, but to its own cal-
culated potentialities (both of risk and of success).
Robert Castel (1991) undertakes a more detailed analysis in the
domain of risk management, from the perspective of the individu-
al. His main argument is that an individual is no longer a subject,
but a series of factors and statistical correlations, easier to manage
from the statistical point of view. On the other hand, these factors
can be normalized, or each of their potential combinations can be
rationalized in a manageable category, which form a special type of
normality. This governmentality finds its way without the imposi-
tion of a particular law.
BRAND NEW SUBJECTS 75
There is, in fact, no longer a relation of immediacy with a subject

because there is no longer a subject. What the new preventive poli-
cies primary address is no longer individuals but factors, statisti-
cal correlations of heterogeneous elements. (Castel, 1991: 288).
One cannot impose a law to a series of factors, but can manage
them as long as one knows and manages the “natural laws” that
govern them.
Bill Maurer (1999) has a detailed historical analysis of the system
of insurance in the financial system, in his article “Forget Locke?
From proprietor to Risk-Bearer in New-Logics of Finance.” He iden-
tifies four historical stages in which the conceptualization of risk had
successively changed, and these stages represent as many shifts in
governmentality. Maurer’s ideas are convergent with the two authors
presented above, and he sketches out the temporal inversion in the
logic of insurance: risk is foreseen, calculated and predicted using
heterogeneous factors that constitute “traces of the future”:
Traces of the future help manage risk and control the unpre-
dictability of temporality. The Lockean and Hegelian subject of
property takes a back seat to a system of statuses based on one’s
investment in that temporality, as ownership itself evaporates
into risk profiles. (Maurer, 1999: 67).
Although I do not altogether agree with the “erasure of sub-
ject”, I tend to see the creation of anticipatory parameters as a dif-
ferent mode of subjectivation. In the analysis of risk and insurance,
one should not forget the daily practices of insurance-making, the
material conditions, and even the body movements one makes in
order to sign an insurance contract, pay monthly or yearly, contact
the agent in different situations, and so on. The subject is subjected
to new practices and governed in different ways but does not disap-
pear. Rather, what is disappearing is the liberal Lockean subject of
property, appropriated and subjected to risk profiling, as Maurer
puts it. The subjectivation practices, rather than the subject, should
constitute the focus of social analysis.
The problematics of risk and insurance policy as forms of gov-
ernmentality raises the problem of the space of political commu-
nality, expressed in each of the three articles above. Defert warns
us that the sense of a common share of danger is lost with the
individual conceptualization of risk and the factorial dispersion of
the individual. Castel depicts the future social space as an already
mapped territory in pre-established “circuits laid out in advance,
which individuals are invited or encouraged to tackle, depending
on their abilities.” (Castel ibid. 295). Similarly, Maurer envisages
the social space as a collection of statuses constructed by the traces
of future that are preserved, and continuously enhanced by the ac-
cumulation of factors. The insurance is a “probabilistic guarantee
that, should all else fails, those statuses are insured.” (Maurer ibid.:
67). The sense of political communality is obviously lost in the
absence of the liberal subject. Nevertheless, this is a thematic that
Foucault also signals in his theorization of biopower:
For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a liv-
ing animal with the additional capacity for a political existence:
modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a
living being in question. (Foucault 1990:143).
At this point, one may wonder what the link is between insur-
ance regulations and the fashion industry. Fashion has been theo-
rized from many perspectives, having been a focus of social science
research for a long time. Most of the approaches to fashion treat
it in terms of its external visibility. Fashion is a system of signifiers
(Barthes, 1967), and clothes constitute a textual form as readable
as any other text. The understanding of fashion is generally based
on this assumption. The gender/class/race structure is read on (the
form of ) the garments, on the designer signature, on the habitus
(Mauss, 1934, Bourdieu, 1979) of the wearing, and -- not the least
-- on the price tag. The visible form of the bodies is shaped by the
fashion trend and inscribed in their couture, which tells us in a
kind of reversed vivisectional manner what is inside the clothes,
and what is acceptable to be inside of them. Fashion as biotechnol-
ogy shapes recognizable bodies and thus recognized subjects. The
operational categories of fashion practices – race, gender, class, age
– are not necessarily accurate, but unavoidably real. In a material
culture theory reading as proposed in the introduction, fashion is
part of the matrix of subjectivation that encompasses both body
and subject as an entity.
Fashion practices (like insurance) constitute a map of the social
body, expressed by different styles. As argued earlier, styles became
markers of identity. At the same time they are signifying practices
(see Hebdige, 1979) that ultimately refer back to the subject. The
social space always already has a multitude of styles from which a
person could choose, but the choice of a style is translated in the
social imaginary as the expression of the interior self, and it becomes
the self. Marketing activities codify the multitude of styles, and the
appearance of rebel or contestatary styles is more and more rapidly
integrated in the “normality” of fashion, sometimes with a simple
word game: “shock is chic”. Initially, a counter-style contests the
existing identity-models by repositioning and recontextualizing the
commodities, and subverting their conventional uses. They claim
an identity position that is not (or not yet) normalized. But, in the
process of integration, the new models of rebellious subjects are ap-
propriated and objectified by the system of power. Hebdige treats
these ideas from the perspective of the 1970s punk movement in
England.
In the 1990s, this temporality is reversed (as in the risk in-
dustry), and the integration happens first. Contestation is already
anticipated and conceptualized in the strategy of marketing. In

Rolling Stone magazine, (No. 813, May 27, 1999), an article by
James Surowiecki presents the sources of inspiration in the creation
of styles for teenagers:
Teen marketing is predicated upon the idea that real success
depends upon capturing the hearts and minds of what Teenage
Research Unlimited president Peter Zollo calls “influencers”.
These are kids who are hip enough to be cool but mainstream
enough to not be scary. The scary kids are known as “edge” kids.
They start a trend, but it won’t be actually a trend until the in-
fluencers get hold of it. [...] The formula here is simple: pay at-
tention to the edge kids, get the influencer to follow (often with
a massive media campaign) and then watch the conformers and
the passives fall in line.
This account clarifies the idea of “always already mapped” ter-
ritory of style as “an activity of expertise [...] serves to label an indi-
vidual, to constitute for him or her a profile which will place him or
her on a career” (Castel ibid. 290). The individual subjects are con-
stituted by their own actions and choices in the field of multiple
styles, which already codifies and makes readable, if not imposes,
these actions. The body becomes the disembodied support of the
signifiers of social structure, the support upon which the marketing
strategies display the signs of consumption, and the display of these
signs constitutes the self. The subject is a function of the constant
flowing of commodities. If in the insurance case the monadic subject
explodes in a multitude of statistical factors of risk, in the fashion
system the individual is caught in the multitude of clothes, which
multiplies the subject. The body/subject is no longer defined by
a possessive relation, but is possessed by the marketing. The indi-
viduals are interchangeable “parts” of the fashion system, simple
bearers of commodities (as a Moschino fashion house advertising
Figure 2.2 Gap store in Saint Germaine, Paris. The window displays
“beheaded” subjects of fashion.
caption asks us: “Are you ready to donate your body to the fashion
system?”).
The narrative of self in network capitalism6 remains an open
question. The consumerist “self ” is not the same “self ” that had to
be educated by the ‘discipline’ of the body, any more than it is the
wretched soul of the tortured waiting for salvation in the after-life.
It is the creation of images in a preconceptualized and normalized
field of fashion and styles that informs the subject of governmen-
tality. Meanwhile, the rhetoric of self is imbued with the idea of
steady improvement -- made real by the constant flow of signifiers.
6 See Castells
The consumerist desire is in fact the desire for the actualization of

self:
[...] the only potentialities an individual can realize are those that
are tentatively sketched out in the surrounding world and that
an individual actualizes by the virtue of the fact that he or she is
interested in them. (Veyne 1997a:163).
The shape of the self is always already anticipated by the new mar-
ket strategies, in other words by new practises of governmentality.
The question of political communality appears forceful in this
context: when the sole possibility remaining to a person is to im-
prove him or herself, one says that that person is living the Greek
tragedy of Medea, who cried: «Everything has disappeared, but I
have one thing left: myself». (see Paul Veyne, ibid., p.231). Yet be-
fore this ‘self ’, market strategies, financial ‘opportunities’, risk con-
trol, unfold, as it were, as traces, parameters if you like, of futures the
self may inform itself within. What we have is no longer a society
shared among individuals or governed by laws, but an accumulation
of potential selves to chose from, just like the already integrated
contestatory fashion styles. In other words we are facing a form of
social organization based on “ready-to-wear” citizenship. The inter-
pretation of Medea’s words is that in the overbearing presence of the
self, (absent the thing we call ‘society’), the self itself is freed from
any constriction except the aesthetic. We live in an era in which the
tragedy of Medea is generalized, in which society is constituted by
prescribed modalities of actualization of the self, in which number-
less aesthetics are fabricated via marketing strategies, and in which
the path named choice is marked by readable «traces of future» -- be
they factors of risk or signs of a style. In it, the idea of communal-
ity, of Aristotelian politics, and of public space have no meaning,
not least because the world is governed by mathematical norms and
institutionalization of bodies, or better said, of traces of bodies.
Chapter 3
Oriental Flavors
Designing (for) the Middle East in Paris
On September 6th 2002, Lauren Bush, the fashion model and

George W. Bush’s niece, refused to walk for maison Toypes in
Barcelona’s fashion week. The reason for the refusal was that the
collection’s theme was of Arab world inspiration.
When she discovered the large trousers, the tunics, the turbans,
and the rugs that were supposed to cover the scene, and also the
Arab music for the background, she preferred to renounce her
presentation, pressured by her mother Sharon Bush. (Webdeluxe,
accessed 09.23.2002 “Mode : la nièce de Bush refuse de défiler
avec de la musique arabe”).
Dressed in a black sober-looking robe, she nevertheless accom-
panied the designer for Toypes at the final walk. The event took
place at “Pasarela Gaudi”. The proximity of the event to the anni-
versary of September 11th was the reason invoked for this refusal.
Now, at the time of my writing, this event is almost forgotten,
and it was barely commented on in 2002 either, since Barcelona is
not one of the premier fashion centers. Nonetheless, this account
enumerates elements that are part of the European aesthetic imagi-
nary of the Arab world; we are led to understand that forms of
garments and music suggest a geographic and ideological reference;
that the same reference can gain different meaning through actors’
actions. A complex of factors (historic events, personal affiliation
or nationality, social context) rendered an Orientalist fashion pre-
sentation unacceptable in the eyes of one model. Another example
82 3: ORIENTAL FLAVORS
may be illustrative for the importance of context in the aesthetic

creation of meaning.
On a sunny autumn afternoon two friends invited me to have
a tea at the Paris Mosque. Built in Paris after the First World War
in memory of Algerian Muslim combatants, the Grand Mosque of
Paris is not only a place for prayer, but a center that attracts visitors,
hammam (Turkish bath) aficionados, local intellectuals who find a
nice meeting place in the interior court, and so on. The Mosque
has a tearoom and a restaurant where one can taste North African
cuisine.
In the patio, in the shade of fig trees, we took a seat at one of
the tables and ordered our teas. While waiting, one of my friends
showed me a poster that announced a fashion show taking place
that very evening in the Mosque’s restaurant. The designer is Saliha
Achourane “creatrice de Paris”, and she is launching her perfume
“Sally”, a fig’s fragrance that “sends us towards Middle East” (“qui
nous renvoye au Moyen Orient”). The show is announced for
7:30 p.m.; the models will walk in the two halls of the restaurant.
Fortunately it is only 6 p.m., and I have the time to run to the
newspaper stand in the corner to buy a notebook for the event (I
was completely taken by surprise). It was Thursday, October 10th
2002, the middle of the year’s fall fashion week in Paris.
We find places inside the restaurant, and wait for the show, ob-
serving the public. I ask two photographers if it is possible to have
copies of the pictures they’ll take; they agree to send me electronic
copies (another instance of urban fieldwork inventiveness).
Two big halls in a U shape form the space of the restaurant. The
hall at the entrance is the tea and coffee space, while the second hall
is the restaurant. The far wall has open arches, so one can see from
one space to the other. I have seen the same separation of spaces in
traditional houses in Iran, each of the two spaces being reserved for
DESIGNING FOR THE MIDDLE EAST IN PARIS 83
men and women respectively. It is a characteristic of the architec-

ture that distinguishes between biruni and andaruni, space for men
and for women. Nevertheless, in Paris Mosque’s restaurant this dis-
tinction is not operational, as men and women mingle freely.
To the background hum of sound-beats that combine pop mu-
sic, oriental tonalities, and classical music, models enter the scene.
They walk through the coffee hall, walk the entire U shape, and
then return. The garments are not strikingly creative; they offer a
combination of light fabrics (muslin and silk) and vivid colors that
are supposed to send one to the imagination of a magic Orient, as
the designer herself told me. The show is in fact promotional for
the fragrance “Sally” that she wants to launch. The place and the
Figure 3.1 Fashion catwalk at Paris “Grand Mosque”.

presentation of the show contribute to the desired effect – oriental

and yet familiar.
It is very difficult to have this at the Mosque, first of all because
it is not usual, and also [...] there is the entire organization, the
team [...] and it is true that saying you are going to make a show
at the Mosque [...] after all a fashion show at the Mosque is [...]
really original [...] people do not envisage it easily [...] or envisage
it at all. (Sally)
The points of suspension in text mark hesitations from Sally’s
part. She is hesitant in explaining what exactly the juxtaposition of
a religious (Islamic) space and a modern manifestation, a fashion
show, means. The show took place in October 2002, when the
“veil affair” was not yet at its height, but talks of war in Iraq were
frequent. In France, as elsewhere, Islam is associated with fanatism
and tradition, and, more recently, with terrorism. The encounter
between fashion and an Islamic space should have produced a lot
of commercial buzz. For the preparation of the collection, Sally
did not hide the inspiration coming from Orientalist artists or
postcards:
It took me several months, I had to go to the library, to consult
history books [...] there are not many traces about berber cos-
tumes. So it is true that I had to inspire myself from Orientalist
paintings, from post cards also, old post cards.
Postcards are indeed a technique of creating popular knowledge
about the exotic other. A compelling analysis of French colonial
postcards, The Colonial Harem Alloula (1986) deals with the cen-
tral Orientalist fantasies as presented in post card photography. The
inaccessible space of the newly conquered territory (Algeria) finds
its synthesis in the assumed lasciviousness of the Harem – an inac-
cessible space as well, but rendered to the public gaze through the
artifice(iality) of the photographic studio.
Part and vehicle of modernity, the postcards propose a specific
mode of knowing based on identification and typification, just
like “an illustrated popular encyclopedia” (Alloula, ibid. 29). The
postcard frames an otherwise “vagrant and unfomed” reality in its
clearly defined terms, in which types are represented by individuals
who carry with them an identity (Alloula, ibid. 64) – both opera-
tional categories of the ‘modern project’. This procedure pacifies a
reality otherwise shaken at its foundation by the French presence,
and imposes at the same time a well-defined mode of thinking. In
fact, the purified gaze of the camera denies the actual presence of
the watcher, presenting to the spectator the ‘natural’ ambiance of
Algeria, and its inhabitants:
Beyond the ethnographic alibi (folklore), we have a vivisector’s
gaze training itself upon Algerian society. It is the very gaze of
colonization that defines, through the exclusion of the other (the
colonized), a naturalness (the native) that is first circumscribed by
the gaze. (Alloula, ibid. 92)
Sally’s fashion presentation was the expression of a postcolonial
nostalgia, rather than of a colonial technique. Nevertheless it was far
from being devoid of power relations. Sally is, maybe not coinciden-
tally, of Berber descent. Hers is a gaze of a late watcher, cut off from
the direct colonial experience, but heavy, I thought, with her own
nostalgia for a place to which she feels she has a symbolic link.
Sally herself may be considered a result of the colonial French
past. In fact, through her aesthetic enterprise Sally masters the nar-
rative of her origin, imposing in the aesthetic realm the image she
acquired of a space she knows only through incidental travel. (Her
first visit in Algeria took place two years before the show, and in-
spired the perfume). The way in which she formed and appropriat-
ed this image is common to the modes and mechanisms of current

stereotyping: Orientalist paintings, films maybe, and post cards.
Nevertheless, contact with the sources of stereotyping takes
place in an entirely different context than the colonial years Alloula
describes. She is not the French soldier playing out fantasies, but
the young fashion designer searching for inspiration where many
other designers do: the “Marché aux Puces”, a weekly flea market
in northern Paris, at Porte de Clignancourt:
It is true, there is a place in Paris, “The flea market of St Ouen”,
were I found many old postcards with old costumes, and it is true
that all the designers came at least once in their life at the flea
market of St Ouen in order to find old postcards.
For Sally, the fact of going to the St Ouen gives her legitima-
cy in her professional aspirations, rather than being a search for
some essential long forgotten and longed for identity or origins.
Frequenting the same space as “all the designers”, places her in the
“Pantheon” next to Gaultier or Galliano. The “searching of the
past” for inspiration is a recurrent theme among designers, and the
practice associated with it – browsing the flea markets – is indeed
common. Some aesthetic canons are produced in relation with the
past, and in Tehran I found a similar phenomenon with different
resorts commented in Chapter 6. It is important to remember that
Sally’s searching for images of a colonial past is yet another prac-
tice – implying uses of spaces and places – that forms part of her
professional trajectory, and to a lesser degree a personal revival of
her parents’ origins.
In fact, in her own account, her career as a fashion designer
started in the United States, when a theatre producer showed an
interest in her origins, and prompted her to create costumes for his
play. It was rather somebody else’s genealogical obsessions (maybe
not by chance an American’s) that suggested the idea of creating

dress of Orientalist inspiration to Sally.
Thus it is not personal nostalgia that triggered Sally’s propensity
for Berber or Oriental inspired dress, but the “imperial nostalgia”
found in France and elsewhere translated in aesthetic appreciation
of an exotic Middle East. A combination of the usual practices
of fashion creation, spaces of encounter or legitimation (St. Ouen
market), and symbolic capital through descent are the mechanisms
of Sally’s Orientalist fashion creation. I suspected her nostalgia was
in fact the socially constructed desire of exoticism, spiced up by
the French colonial nostalgia. Many designers in Paris, for different
reasons, have at some point or another in their career, given in to
the temptation of Orientalism.
At the same time, my own eyes were somehow skewed towards
seeing Orientalism everywhere. During one of my interviews with
Philippe, the then-director of the Yves Saint Laurent research cen-
ter, we were browsing the spring 2003 Lacroix collection when we
came across some models displayed trousers with laces at the ankle,
to which I pointed out an Ottoman inspiration. Philippe smiled
and replied:
I would like to underline that you may be tempted to see Orient
where it may not be the case. You may know that this style is
also the recuperation of a certain sport dressing in ready-to-wear
fashion. The Italian sportswear has this characteristic that may be
at the basis of Mr. Lacroix’s choice.
This is the expression of many instances in which I, as the eth-
nographer, gave in to the temptation of seeing something that may
not have been there, or rather of seeing what I would have liked
to see.
Fashion catwalks in the Parisian Mosque, or colorful garments
against a background of Arabic music are places of imaginary en-
counters, aestheticized moments, and stereotyped projections. In

France, whose parliament voted the “law of veil” in order to “re-
inforce secularism”, the image of the veiled woman, or veils used
in fashion presentations, are acceptable as long as they are signs of
exotic otherness. Once the encounter is taking place in a street,
school, or other public space, the situation becomes more delicate,
being resented as an affront to the French Republican principles
(Khosrokhavar 1995).
Reliable Clients
Paris haute couture survives on two factors: the sales of per-
fumes, and the Middle Eastern clients, who, along with US cli-
ents are the most important for the sale of haute couture dress.
Designers’ showrooms are privileged spaces of encounter between
clients and producers. The ready-to-wear industry also draws sig-
nificant profits from sales to Middle Eastern clients.
My first direct encounter with a boutique owner from Dubai
happened in the seasonal ready-to-wear salon in Paris in the Fall
2002. As every year, the salon takes place at Porte de Versailles, in
an exhibition park that attracts around 43 000 visitors and buyers
each season. In September 2002 the stands only occupied 25 000
square meters, a surface which expands every year.
A friend of mine, Christian, who runs a jewelry production
studio, arranged for me to be on his stand, to help with sales (since
my English is better than his). I was glad to start my first “partici-
pant observation” fieldwork experience in this manner. On the first
day of the exhibit I took the metro to the Porte de Versailles to
meet Christian who handed me a tag which read : “Alex Nicoleu,
exhibitor”. Of course, this is not my name, but Christian’s associate
made it up, merging the “u” from many Romanian ending words
with the name of ex-dictator Ceausescu Nicolae – another anec-
RELIABLE CLIENTS 89
dote illustrating the mechanisms of the geographical imaginary in

everyday life.
Theirs was a relatively small stand of about 8 square meters
among hundreds of other stands in the exhibition hall. The rent is
as high as 2 000 euros ($ 2 600) per square meter for the entire week
of the event. I had spent four days in a row at the stand, helping
English-speaking clients, and trying to observe the Middle Eastern
clients present at the fair. Veiled women coming mainly from Egypt,
Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates do not pass unnoticed – or is it
just me who watches carefully for these juxtapositions of fashion on
fashion? Very elegant, they move with easiness through the stands,
regarding the products offered with a critical eye. Voices say they are
some of the best clients, but this is not necessarily true.
One buyer from Dubai, who came with his mother and sister
(both unveiled) explained to me that marriage dress and accessories
are in very high demand in Dubai, because: “it is only once in a
lifetime, so people spend big money on it, big money”. Christian
confirms this, and extends its validity for any market in the world.
During their visit to the stand I had the occasion to observe
patterns of buying. The mother, Fatima1, presented her daughter to
me, Adana, as being a fashion designer and model. I guessed Adana
was about nineteen years old. Fatima chose products using Adana
as her model, and she tried the accessories on her daughter, throw-
ing glances of complicity to me in the appreciation of one product
or another. The particularity I observed at this first visit, confirmed
by Christian as a characteristic of Middle Eastern clients, was that
Fatima was ordering the complete series of one product. This dif-
fers markedly from European clients, who are more measured in
their spending, working with smaller budgets.
1 Fatima and Adana are pseudonyms I use in this case
Pointing to a quite sexy dress with resin applications she said:

“this product is not very appreciated, because the silky chador wom-
en wear catches in the accessories and destroys itself.” Fatima’s remark
points to two important characteristics: the clients of her boutiques,
those who buy Parisian-made dress, are of a privileged class if one
considers the silky chadors. Second, the chador imposes certain limits
in dressing, even if it secures the complete invisibility of the dressed
body underneath. In fact, this play of inside/outside, of interior/ex-
terior, public and private for Middle Eastern clients of the fashion
industry proved to be a capital factor for fashion production.
Figure 3.2 Blaise adjusting a dress on a model at the ready-to-wear

Parisian fare in September 2002. In the center right of the image, a
client from Dubai.
ORIENTALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS 91
Orientalism and its discontents

While looking at the products, Fatima observed one little tag
bearing the mark “France” falling on the floor. She carefully picked
it up and said to Christian: “Do not forget this.” I asked her if it
is important, and she answered: “of course, very important”. The
tag is the mark of the authentication of the merchandise (Warnier
1996). It is the proof that the commodity comes from elsewhere
– not from anywhere, but from France – and the material link
with the space of inception. It certifies the voyage that the com-
modity undertook, and it creates the reference to a space of fashion
excellence.
Some fashion designers confirmed indeed Middle Eastern
clients’ propensity for branded products, for well known brand-
name tags that figure greatly in the buying patterns, but most of
all in the creation of a popular image about these clients. Middle
Eastern women are supposedly “brand crazy”, looking for conse-
crated names like Dior or Chanel. Of course, the persons in con-
stant contact with those clients know that this is not entirely true.
The manager of Paul Smith’s showroom in Paris (Alain), during
an interview, identified two types of Middle Eastern clients as, in
his words, “two schools”. “Clients with a certain fashion culture,
who are aware of the trends and understand taste” are part of the
first current. Alain identifies the others as being “fashion victims,
usually nouveau-riche types, who are following the trend, Prada /
Gucci style.” He operates a distinction that is valid for all fashion
clients regardless of their geographic location, and that juxtaposes a
class distinction based on taste. The “followers”, although socio-
economically equal to “tasteful clients”, do not have the aesthetic
ability to understand and eventually anticipate the fashion trend.
As their name describes, they follow, or “lag behind”, and this is as
much a temporal as it is a spatial reference. Both fashion designers
and sales persons are aware of the general stereotype that makes out
of the Middle Eastern clients brand hunters.
At this point the theoretical conversation on Orientalism and
representations must be introduced. The purpose is to raise the
question on how fashion practices reproduce stereotypes, what kind
of stereotypes they reproduce, and most important, how studies
of fashion practices would allow us to push forward the reflection
based on simple dichotomies such as those opposing the modern
West to the modernizing non-West.
After World War II, or more precisely accompanying the weak-
ening of colonial powers, the discipline of Orientalism slipped un-
der the lens of critical thinkers. It was (and continues to be) a period
of reconsideration for many other scholarly disciplines, from phi-
losophy and anthropology to history, scrutinized both in methods
and in final scope. The colonial advent has been employed, if not as
explanatory device, at least, and rightfully so, as historical context
that offered the background for certain theoretical developments in
these disciplines: historicism and the idea of progress, or race and
racism, to name the most important in their consequences.
In 1963, Abdel-Malek (2000) pointed out the crisis in the
discipline of Orientalism in an article that methodically analyses
three constitutive dimensions of the research in the domain: (1)
the general conception of orientalism, (2) the methods of study
and research, and (3) the instruments of study and research. The
essentialist assumption of Orientalist studies constitutes their main
fault and the generative source of the creation of the figure of “the
oriental other.” Abdel-Malek distinguishes scholarly knowledge of
“traditional orientalism” from the more popular orientalist pro-
duction insured by “an amalgam of university dons, businessmen,
military men, colonial officials, missionaries, publicists and adven-
turers, whose only objective was to gather intelligence information
ORIENTALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS 93
in the area to be occupied, to penetrate the consciousness of the

people in order to better assure its enslavement to the European
powers.” (Abdel-Malek, ibid. 49). In spite of this separation, the
author argues, their scientific conception and methods are similar,
and result in the creation of an inferior image of “the Orient” from
both historical and socio-economical point of view. At the same
time, the constant ignoring of contemporary local scholarship and
the gathering of empirical material proved to be harmful in the
long run. Important quantities of scholar material belonging to the
colonized world have been removed and brought to the colonial
centers, out of reach of the local scholars.
Only ten years later, at the twenty ninth International Congress
of Orientalists which took place in 1973 in Paris, the term “ori-
entalism” applied to the academic discipline have been officially
abandoned (Lewis 2000). Edward Said’s well known critique in
Orientalism (1978) came thus not as a novelty but more as an ac-
cessible synthesis of previous conversations, attempting a problem-
atic methodological marriage to which I will later return. From the
start, Said gives a triple definition of orientalism, encompassing:
the corpus of academic knowledge produced in Europe or United
States about the geographical area known as Middle East; the intel-
lectual production based on a “style of thought” that ontologically
distinguishes between the Orient and the rest; the colonial attitude
and mode of domination of the Orient.
A synthesis of these definitions (and of Said’s book) would lead
us to understand orientalism as a set of specific social practices lo-
cated in the West, oriented towards the production of knowledge
about, and the circumscription of a geographical space, which re-
flected a hegemonic discourse of domination of Western space over
the East.
“Orientalism” had far reaching consequences from both disci-

plinary and methodological points of view. Maybe the importance
of Said’s book lies more in the conversations and critiques that it
generated, than in the material analyzed in it. In fact, in one of
the most acerbic critiques of Said’s book, Bernard Lewis constantly
points out “ Mr. Said’s transmutation of events to fit his thesis”
(Lewis, 2000: 259). Although this may be the case, Lewis’ critique
does not invalidate the questions that Said raises, nor does it justify
the dismissal of the entire thesis that the author of “Orientalism”
advances.
Orientalism, in Said’s term, is an all-encompassing term that
refers to any activities of knowledge production about the East.
The author does not – at least not in this work – consider that, in
this enterprise, there is a possibility of pursuing the ‘real’, anymore
than in any other discursive domain. On the contrary, Orientalism
is a mode of domination, and its ‘economy of truth’ enables the en-
durance of certain socio-economic and political institutions, along
with the strength and durability of the discourse itself (Said 1978:
133).
In spite of the accent put on the idea of diffuse discursive pro-
duction, Said insists in the role of agency, and argues from the
standpoint of the primacy of political interest. For him, Orientalism
is the direct outcome of a political agenda of domination, and in
parallel “a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic,
scholarly, economic, sociological, historical and philological texts”
(Said, ibid, 138). In other words there is a textual hegemonic rela-
tion (and by text I understand a wide range of knowledge produc-
tion techniques), in which the primacy of Western knowledge (and
language) insures its dominance.
This theoretical position may be genealogically traced from the
‘Nietzschean’ primacy of language (and text) in power relations,
APOLITICAL REPRESENTATIONS 95
or what I would call the ‘real’ of language. The (re)organization

of the world into language, grammar, and representation is an ac-
tivity of truth production, in Nietzsche’s sense, that is “truths are
illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are”.
(Nietzsche in Said, ibid., 142). Naturally, Foucault’s method of dis-
cursive analysis comes in handy in Said text, but the author does
not succeed in reconciling the profound anti-humanist and critical
optimism of Foucault to his own existentialist position of Sartrian
influences.
(A)political representations
This is in fact the major flow that James Clifford (1988) identi-
fies in Said’s methodology, and at the same time the point of rupture
from which certain postmodern disembodied thinking emerges.
Aijaz Ahmad (2000), further explores the incongruities in
Said’s methodology and in his attempt to present orientalism both
in a post-modern paradigm, and as a result of agency. Thus the
Orient is only a representation, and every representation is a text
that refers only to previous texts, but simultaneously this repre-
sentation is the result of agency: it is a misrepresentation wilfully
produced by the European colonial powers in order to control spe-
cific territories. In order to insure a methodological coherence, the
question of misrepresentation is thus wrongly brought forward by
Said. As Aijaz explains, one cannot talk of misrepresentation with a
reference to a pre-existent truth in an analysis following the above-
mentioned Foucauldian approach, because one can talk only about
the effects of truth of a discursive field, and not about the “real”
referent. However, despite his own theoretical and methodological
position, Said identifies a real Orient, knowable through unmedi-

ated genuine experience2.
Many analyses of colonialism attempted to describe the history
of colonial hegemony in terms of disembodied textual domination,
and Said’s attempt does not avoid this pitfall in spite of his con-
cern with “the prevalence of hegemonic exploitative relations in the
world” (Dallmayr 1996: xvii). On the contrary he seems to be one
of the main sources of inspiration for them. Aijaz rightly observes
that this approach leads to the peculiar a-political position of some
postmodernist writers. Other authors expressed similar concerns
about the political disengagement of Orientalism using gender as
starting point. In her introduction to Gendering the Middle East,
Kandiyoti (1996) emphasizes that privileging textual representa-
tion may divert the attention towards the Western space, and, at
the same time, it may jeopardize the analysis of the mechanisms of
generating gender inequalities in Middle East. Many authors share
this perspective and worked effectively in showing the mechanisms
of inequality (Keddie 2000, Moors 1995, Abu-Lughod 2001a,
Moghadam 2001)
The issue of political engagement with Orientalism and the
Middle East may be addressed through the lenses of fashion as so-
cial practice. Fashion is a mechanism of subjectivation generative of
social categories like gender, class, and modern. Approaching rep-
resentation as pure text disables commentary on the social practices
2 Other authors (e.g. Porter 1994) take issue in the same major methodological
flow. Starting from Said’s choice of combining Gramsci’s idea of hegemony
with Foucault’s approach on the question of knowledge production and
power. A first contradiction that Porter identifies in Said’s position is the
non-concordance of the place that Said accords to truth and the ‘real’.
While he states the coincidence of knowledge with political – that is there is
no truth outside ideology – Said implies the existence of a truth “out there”
in the ‘raw reality’.
APOLITICAL REPRESENTATIONS 97
of representation, which involves much more than the image itself.

Fashion practices are at the core of mechanisms of representation.
Nonetheless, it becomes important to point out that the post-
modern textual analyses are much more complex in their theoreti-
cal approach, and it may be that their perceived a-political nature
is a by-product of the disciplinary constraints of the field. Most of
the textual analyses come from the literary criticism, and, as argued
before, the object of their focus influences what is being said about
the theme. The sometimes poignant critiques of these tendencies
come from anthropologists, who, through the specificity of their
approach, are more sensitive to the social fabric, and thus meth-
odologically attracted by propositions of linking the discourse and
the practice, or better said, more prone to understand discourse or
text as effective practice.
The critique that Thomas makes to Homi Bhabha’s theory of
representation and, through it, to the school of Subaltern Studies
has to be understood in this context. The reproach “that the allow-
ance made for subversion on the part of the colonized is distinctly
gestural, and that this style of theorizing reifies a general structure
of colonial dominance” (Thomas, 1994: 40) may be justified, but it
may also point out to the author’s own quest for a real outside the
discourse, as an ultimate referent. It may be that Thomas fails to see
the real consequences of the gesture of mimicry, and thus its dis-
cursive quality in a Foucauldian sense. Again in this case, fashion
may be illuminating. In “Clothing Matters”, Emma Tarlo (1996)
extensively explores the political effects of the dispute on the adop-
tion of English and European style dressing in the colonized India
had. In nineteenth century, Tarlo argues, the anxiety among the
English created by the adoption among Indian middle and up-
per classes of European dress was expressed in the journals of the
time. The gesture, ridiculed as mimicry, had a long-term impact on
the colonial relations. The British defined an aesthetic racism, and

switched the construction of difference from the form of cloth-
ing to the color of the skin. The Indian élite resented the need for
search of an “authentic” dress, able to express the Indian national
identity about to form. The politics of clothing became even more
accentuated with the emergence of Gandhi in the public sphere,
and with him the sartorial definition of Indian nationalism.
Dress: Practice and Representations

Following Ann Stoler’s (1989) remark “that the attention be-
stowed by ethnographers upon cultural complexity among the
colonized has never been matched by interest or sensitivity to ten-
sions among colonizers” (Thomas, 1994: 13) Thomas proposes an
analysis of this heterogeneity, suggesting that the period of colo-
nialism cannot be considered a well-delimited historical period, as
the social fabric operates in a cultural complex that preceded and
succeeds the period of colonial rule. A way to study cultural con-
tinuities is to look at the perpetuation of social practices or at the
institutions, in large sense, that do not disappear with the end of
colonialism.
Various anthropologists have analyzed colonial period in this
manner. I would mention the work of Mitchell (1991), Comaroff
(1997), or Cohn (1996). Each of them, in different contexts, has
shown the importance of the forms of discourses and discourses
of form in creating the new colonized world, and in changing the
social reality of the place. All of them have carefully approached
clothing in their analysis. But maybe the clearest work that links
text and social reality is Brinkley Messick’s analysis of British tex-
tual dominance in Yemen (Messick 1996). The author recounts
the changing character of institutional settings in colonial Yemen
DRESS: PRACTICE AND REPRESENTATIONS 99
brought about by, and supported with, the shift in official writing
from spiraling calligraphy and page arrangement to the linear left
to right authoritative European page format. All these authors are
relevant for their method of approaching discourses as social prac-
tices, with material consequences.
In the case of representations, the choice of the subject of in-
quiry has a decisive imprint on the way in which one conceptu-
alizes the phenomenon in itself. Thus, fashion practices may be
telling in the attempt of going after Orientalism. As shown before,
when dealing with representations, most of the authors, if not all,
approach either “the culture of representation” or “culture as rep-
resentation”, tendencies that may overlook the dynamic character
of culture. Instead, one may look at culture as practice of repre-
sentation, rewarding ‘culture’ with the mobility that escapes the
exercises of “writing culture”. Or, why not, culture as mechanisms
of differentiation displayed through style (Ferguson 1999).
In this way, the two impasses regarding Orientalism that have
been raised may be pushed forward: First, the essentialized images of
cultures, found eventually in a clash moment (Huntington 1996),
can be shown as what they are: images produced in processes that
have an actual history of making. “East is East, and West is West”
only after one does away with these processes, through a kind of
selective amnesia that also eliminates the “threatening intimacies”
(Paul Gilroy, UCI conference, May 2002) and the “messiness” one
encounters in the crucible of everyday life. Second, representations
do not have a pure textual form, and systems of domination are
based on real practices that create those forms, but they are not
reduced exclusively these practices. Using fashion practices I push
this analysis further in order to denaturalize the border between in-
teriority and exteriority, self and the other, identity and difference.
Brand Orientalism
Fashion is one of those institutions that traverses colonial and
post-colonial periods, and implies a whole set of knowledge pro-
duction and imaginary of the other. Fashion both produces ste-
reotypes about its clients, and dismantles them through everyday
practices.
The new Orientalist fantasy is less concerned with bodies of
the other, and more concerned with brands. When speaking with
a wide variety of persons, from fashion designers to artists to fel-
low students, one reaction emerged over and over again. This may
be summarized as follows: “But is it true that underneath the veil
(chador, or what have you) women in Middle East wear designer
clothes?” Delacroix’s erotic oriental bodies are readily replaced in
the Oriental imaginary with signs of luxurious dress; the erotic of
brand or signature replaces the erotic of skin, in the mechanism of
identification of the exotic body. This imagery both approaches the
Oriental body to the Western one, but at the same time signifies it
differently.
Because, as in the colonial Orientalist stereotyping, the chador
covers the signs replacing the body, and it incites at the same time
as it stops the gaze for reaching the sign. Although one may argue
that in this identification of Middle Eastern women as fashionable
persons there is a tendency of universalism, as in “they are just like
us,” in fact a second glance would reveal something that characterizes
these representations: excess. Historically in Orientalist paintings one
may find an excess of skin (flesh or forms), whereas in most of the
new Orientalist views one finds an excess of brand names. One must
notice the link between “sign replacing body” phenomenon, and the
use of patterns of consumption in order to create distinction.
Further inquiry among fashion designers revealed that, while
brand consciousness may be elevated among Middle Eastern cli-
BRAND ORIENTALISM 101
ents, it is not much more elevated than that of the young consum-
ers in the new trend emerging in England: the Chavs. Originating
from the Medway town of Chatham in Kent, this trend is formed
by young urbanites who express a preference for brand names such
as Burberry, and created a specific dress style that combines de-
signer dress with flashy accessories. In some circles they are pejo-
ratively called “Britain’s bourgeoning peasant underclass that are
taking over our towns and cities” (www.chavscum.co.uk accessed
13.03.2004). This brief description concentrates the conflictual so-
cial representation created by the established bourgeoisie, entitled
to occupy the “towns and cities” that feel threatened by the Chavs,
or in extenso by the rapid social mobility displayed through con-
sumption of fashion articles. Nevertheless, this type of consump-
tion is described as bad taste, ostentatious, and excessive. It does
not correspond to the bourgeois values of restraint, used as argu-
ments and as a mode of distinction by the Chavs’ critics.
At the section dedicated to Chavs celebrities on the same site,
one description of Daniella Westbrook is telling:
Give a Chavster a whole bunch of cash and they’ll piss it up the
wall! Danniella was once a staple on Eastenders during the 90’s
and was a chavster earning a huge wedge of cash. So what did
she do? Buy a house? Invest? Nope, she put a quarter of a million
quids worth of coke up her nostrils. [...]she has decided to get a
surgeon to implant a couple of cantaloupe halves in her chest!
Nice!! (www.chavscum.co.uk, ibid.)
Beyond the violence of the language one may deconstruct the
logic of the argument. The bourgeois accepted values of domesticity
(buying a house) or enterprise (investing) are presumably neglected
by Chavs. They prefer conducts judged as immoral (cocaine sniff-
ing) or aesthetically unpleasing (breast implants). The underlying
argument is that of moral distinction, and the reactions to Chavs
Figure 3.3 A “chav” at a Parisian fashion show. Note the Burberry shoes.
that can be followed on internet chatrooms are responses to what

is perceived as a moral threat. Buying a house or paying for breast
implants are both actions of subjectivation, practices that consti-
tute the subject (be it bourgeois or chav). The transparent conflict
is between two different subjectivation practices, both underlined
by proper moral codes.
The imagined excess of brand-consumerism in Middle East is
mentally associated with a different, if not dubious, and at the same
time fascinating, behavior. Incredible parties, opulence, and private
displays of luxury is the way in which many of my interviewees
talked about the women fashion consumers from Middle East.
These are as many practices that hint to different modes of subjec-
tivation, and the moral and aesthetic codes that underlie them.
Nevertheless, this is not always the case. Many times the con-
stant contact with clients contributes to generating a different im-
age. During an interview, Mark expressed his contentment in see-
ing the Middle Eastern clients liking and buying the same kind of
dress that many of his Western clients buy. Two of his oldest clients
are from Lebanon, and run a chain of boutiques, IF, with retail
spaces both in New York and in Beirut. Clients from Saudi Arabia
or the Emirates also visit IF in Beirut.
It is amazing that their choice is... in fact they buy for Beirut the
same things they buy for New York. This means that they sell in
Beirut the same clothes they sell in New York.
The similarity of orders indicates a similarity in taste or in aes-
thetic choices, which raises questions that challenges the field of
usual assumptions regarding Middle Eastern clients. This is pre-
cisely the “amazing factor” for Mark. Between radical difference
and plain similarity, what could be a balanced view towards the
other? Mark continues:
It is surprising, because it is not at all in conformity with the im-

age: I think here we have a really deformed image about Middle
Eastern clients. We immediately imagine Chanel, Dior, evening
dress, things very colored and heavily embroidered. In fact, no!
They buy the same things, black and white... They could have
asked for more colorful things for Lebanon, but in fact no.
In this fragment the “image” of the Middle Eastern clients is
clear: excess of brand and colors. The surprise comes from the fact
that this imagined “excessive other” is not as different from us as we
may have thought. But this observation may have more profound
implications. The excess is also a mark of immorality, as it is color.
The predominance of black and white in Western urban style is
direct issue of a certain moral code prevalent in public spaces. The
image of the “more colorful” dress for Middle Eastern women, the
flashy style is also a mark of over-erotic stereotyping, which adds to
the (imagined or real) brand excess. Mark’s surprise is in a way due
to the revelation that similar aesthetic (and maybe moral) codes
apply both in New York and in Beirut.
Undoubtedly, and as I will show, for women in Tehran for ex-
ample, the brand is an imaginary link to cosmopolitan fashion lo-
cations, like Paris or Milan. The engine of brand consciousness is
different, due to different configurations of the signifying space of
fashion. The “nouveau-riche” effect is one of the factors to which I
have previously referred. Desire, and power relations between the
Western “civilized” world and the Middle East may be another.
Dorinne Kondo (1997) points to the power laden domain of fash-
ion which imposes universal aesthetics conceived in relation with
particular bodies (European) on other bodies (Japanese). In this
case, desire is the trigger of one’s own submission or subjectiva-
tion to aesthetic rules that claim universality. But in the adoption
of brand names for the Middle Eastern clients, prestige combines

with desire, in a different spatial configuration.
As one of the designers working closely with Middle Eastern
clients told me:
It is very important to be faithful to those clients, because they
are fair, everything is going fine with them, and I love the idea
that Arab women wear my creations. [...] I love the idea that
women who we think are rather submissive in a certain way, wear
sophisticated kind of dress I am making, and things that are so
new. I find this interestingly funny to imagine.
It would be naive to think that fashion designers necessarily
avoid stereotypes. However the enduring contact they have with
their clients allows them to construct a more complex image than
those provoked by reductive stereotypes. In this fragment one may
clearly understand the designer’s implication that consumerism
Western sophistication, and taste lead to liberation. Fashion aesthet-
ic appears as a mark of freedom from “submission”, and adopting
Western dress comes hand-in-hand with the adoption of Western
values. However, the complexity of factors in this adoption may be
more intricate than this formulation suggests. It is also transparent
in my account that the “moral/ immoral” distinction linked to uses
of fashion and practices of subjectivation emerges from the con-
cern of a bourgeois ideal-type of subjectivation, and it indiscrimi-
nately applies to “chavs” and Middle Eastern Clients among others.
While in the first case the concern is “them taking over our towns
and cities”, the attitude towards Middle Eastern Clients’ inscribes
in the longterm post-colonial power dynamic. Both of these at-
titudes express concern and desire of appropriating spaces that are
always already gendered (Abu-Lughod 1986; Mernissi 1991; Gole
1996). Bourgeois morality historically defined and constructed the
public space as a masculine space (Habermas 1989), the private
sphere is assimilated with femininity, and the conquest of Orient

is always a sexual fantasy (Mutman 1992). The distinction secu-
lar modern versus religious non-modern follows similar fantasy
contours (Asad 1986). This ethnographic approach on fashion as
practice of subjectivation attempts to deconstruct those binaries in
problematizing the public/private dichotomy. The following sec-
tions propose a vision of “Middle Eastern spatial configuration” as
some Parisian designers perceive it, together with an introduction
to the problematic of feminist critiques of Orientalism.
Inside Out Dress

Astrolabe (www.astrolabe.com, accessed March 2nd 2004), a
website/store from United States, offers “Muslim commodities”, in-
cluding a variety of Barbie dolls, called Razanne. Razanne is a doll
outfitted following Islamic rules, and the signification of her name is
“Islamic beauty and modesty”. One type of Razanne is featured under
the name “Inside & Outside with two outfits”. Razanne is properly
covered for the outside outfit, while the inside dress is a more reveal-
ing robe, and of course the headscarf appears as optional. This doll
is, as any other toy, Islamic or not, an idealized expression of social
modes of organization. Razanne has two outfits for two spaces, one
outside, a space ideally pervaded by moral rules of conduct and the
principle of hijab or modesty. In exterior spaces, following Islamic
morality, both the male and female body has to be covered, and for
women the headscarf is required, in order to avoid “sexual disorder”.
The interior (domestic space) is, ideally, free of moral determinants
other than those decided upon by the family, or its patriarchal au-
thoritative figure (usually the eldest man).
A complex of factors influences the relations between Middle
Eastern clients and haute couture houses in Paris. The person inter-
viewed at Le Sage house briefly explained:
INSIDE OUT DRESS 107
After the [first] Gulf War the number of clients decreased from
3 000 to 300, so there is not much sustainability for haute cou-
ture houses. Ready-to-wear brands like Gucci and Prada are more
convenient for clients without big financial resources.
Global politics indeed greatly influence the fashion industry. The
Gulf War (1991) marked the decrease of trust among clients from
the Middle East buying in Paris. But the major recent event is the
September 11 2001 attacks, which took place in the middle of the
fashion week in Paris. After the event, many clients both from the
U.S. and Middle East cancelled their orders, interrupted their buy-
ing week, and returned home. The web-published report on ready-
to-wear Parisian salon does not give any numbers for the sales of that
season, and the next season is generically called “Rebirth” . Mark
observes another consequence of the September 11th 2001 events,
maybe more to the advantage of Paris’ industry. He points out that
clients prefer to travel to Paris or other European locations than to
go to New York. Also, new local boutiques like IF in Beirut or Villa
Moda in Kuwait offer location alternatives for retail clients.
War does mean fluctuation in industry, and even rearrangements
in the movement of clients and commodities, but it is not the only
reason for the reconfiguration of selling patterns. As the organizer of a
showroom dedicated to Middle Eastern clients (Mozaique) observes,
“with or without September 11th, clients come and buy clothing”.
In the previous fragment on “Le Sage”, one understands that
economic status contributes to preference for high-end ready-to-
wear. One can also infer that Prada and Gucci are preference of
European clients, since the decrease in Middle Eastern clients meant
a decrease in sales for haute couture. While financial power is one
of the determinant factors in haute couture sales, there is something
more that makes European clients buy high-end ready-to-wear, thus
distinguishing them from the haute couture preferences of Middle

Easterners.
Darja is one of the designers selected by the Mozaique showroom
dedicated to Middle Eastern clients. These clients are extremely im-
portant for her business. The clothes she sells can be easily considered
avant-garde, and are strongly appreciated by boutique owners and
women from Dubai, Qatar, Kuweit, and Saudi Arabia. While talking
with Michelle, the organizer of Mozaique, she agreed on something
that may sound surprising:
You need to know that the Middle Eastern clients are really in
the avant-garde relative to the Europeans. This means that they
do not hesitate in choosing strong collections (très fortes), very
original, while the Europeans are more classic, more conservative
in their choices.
The avant-garde taste applies not only to dress articles but also
to perfumes. Michelle continues her examples with the story of a
friend of hers, a cosmetics promoter:
He told me that once he would have a new perfume, he would
launch it in Dubai. Because the people there are really avantgard-
ist, they would always need something new; he told me that there
he would see what works and what does not. And only after he
would come here.
The conservative attitude is the easiest mode to explain the differ-
ences between clients from Europe and the Middle East. However,
this may be explained in many different ways. One important factor
may be the patterns of sociality in the Middle East. As one Lebanese
vendor from D&G explains, “in the Middle East we go out more”. I
think in Europe “we go out a lot” also, but there is a particular con-
figuration of space that makes wearing avant-garde possible, and that
was not revealed to me until my visit to Tehran.
One image that circulates among vendors for Middle Eastern cli-
ents is that women from the Middle East wear their dress only once. It
is a hard to verify statement. Nevertheless, at first glance their sociality
seems to take place in spaces less anonymous than that of a regular
European client. In the case of Middle Eastern clients, known people
populate the places and spaces of displaying one’s haute couture ac-
quisitions (private parties rather than anonymous clubs) so one may
assume that showing oneself with the same dress would not be taken
very well. At this one may add the type of sociality proper to upper
classes that would buy haute couture avant-garde, that is a small circle
of known and similar people. Nevertheless, this does not explain why
the classic, some would say conservative formulas (Gucci or Prada)
are less taken up by these clients. Or rather, why Europeans prefer
standardized ready-to-wear formulas, and are more conservative in
style?
They (the Middle Eastern clients, Darja says) all say “we can’t, we
can’t, it’s too much, it’s too much” but afterwards they buy even
things completely transparent. So it is weird.
The clients’ statement “we can’t, it’s too much” have to be under-
stood as a public declaration. It is something said in the presence of
foreign persons, and it is a mode of declaring one’s morality. The act
of buying is the expression of a personal desire, and of daily behavior:
it goes without saying that Darja’s avant-garde creations will not be
worn in the streets of Ryadh, but in private enclosures. They are not
worn in the streets of Paris, either, but it also appears that they are
much less worn in the private spaces in Paris.
But I think I understand the system. I know that I need to be at-
tentive to big low-necks, for the jewelry display. For some I need
to cover the arms, for others the body. For some I need to double
the entire piece, even the sleeves. For all of them [the dress] is
long, except Lebanon.
“The system” Darja describes is a composite of rules and regu-
lations of body exposure that vary in different contexts. Without
entering into the details of the covering of the body, for fear of fall-
ing into stereotyping (in Lebanon, as opposed to Riyadh, etc.), it is
important to remark that body covering is an important prescrip-
tion; nevertheless, the form of dress, its colors and daring motives
are not in the range of concerns of these clients. On the contrary,
for Europeans, the choice of dress is centered on the image of sobri-
ety that the clothes would project. The practices of subjectivation
that are transparent in the buying habits of European consumers
follow a certain morality expressed through aesthetic choices (as
in the conflict about the chavs). Same observation is valid for the
clients from the Middle East, but the important difference lies in
the pervasiveness of those rules in different spaces of life.
Just like Razanne with her inside/outside dress, Middle Eastern
clients, through their buying habits, send a message about the so-
cial organization of space that is marked on dress. It is generally
known that the principle of hijab or modesty is a requirement in
Islamic morality, and it pertains to the covering of the body both
for men and women, in public and/or in the presence of non-kin
persons. Nevertheless, as I will show in the next chapter, the degree
of covering varies greatly with the space and persons present, and
with personal aesthetic (read moral) choice.
In his article on the possibility of an anthropology of Islam,
Talal Asad (1986) emphasizes that Islamic societies are generally
depicted as totalitarian systems that impose shari’a law upon their
subjects. The author shows how this position is in fact the outcome
of a secularist intellectual position that does not take into account
the historicity of secularism, or the role of religion in the formation
of the secular. Asad argues that Shari‘a is a legal form that is able to
regulate only some aspects of social life. He contrasts this with the
secular state’s mechanisms of power that are pervasive in all aspects
of life, be they public or private.
For my purpose it is useful to reflect on the “highly regulated
character of social life in modern states” (Asad, 1986:13); “the reach
of institutional powers” in a modern secular state is in direct relation
with the mode of subject formation in these states, and highly de-
pendent on the spatial organization. I will argue that, with the very
conceptualization of a public (political) and a private (religious)
sphere, the spatial separation of public and private disappeared;
more precisely, the private interiorized, became a mental concep-
tion, while the domestic space (traditionally private) became public.
It is only in this configuration that “the privatization of public and
the publicization of private” is possible. The “institutional powers
that constitute, divide up, and govern large stretches of life accord-
ing to systemic rules” (idem) are effective in this particular mode of
spatial organization. To these institutional powers, I would add and
emphasize the role of the particular modes of subjectivation and
governmentality by means of aesthetics (discussed in the previous
chapter). Practices of subjectivation based on aesthetic sensibilities
and desire are telling of the spatial pervasiveness of different forms
of power, and revealing of the mode of organization of this power.
The following section will emphasize architecture and spatial orga-
nization as material expressions of modern scopic regimes of pow-
er. This mode of power contrasts with the shari’a requirements and
shari’a ruled states’ modes of subjectivation. Fashion consumption
renders visible this contrast.
Visible Subjectivation
Many have treated not only the spatial organization of mo-
dernity, but argued for the conceptualization of the modern as a
spatial condition. Many authors directly relate space to capitalist
socio-economic relations (Harvey 1985; Clark 1984; Elias 1994),
showing how transformations in relations of production were par-
alleled by the structural transformation of space. Others have re-
lated space structuring to the configuration of political categories
such as citizenship, human rights, etc. (Caldeira 2000; Holston
and Caldeira 1998; Vidler 1978, 1995; Ross 1988; Young 1990).
Furthermore, those who study both the imperial center and the
colonial enterprise have explored the manner in which ideas about
modernity are intimately linked with space formation, and with
design procedures (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997); Wright 1991;
Mitchell 1991). The emphasis falls on the political potential of de-
sign, and in the implications of the social practice of design at the
level of individual human self-conception.
Vidler (1978) argued that the Renaissance architectural projects
for building streets originate in representations of ideal or utopian
spaces, particularly theater scenes. Sebastiano Serlio’s projects from
the 16th century were re-worked and used for the project of the
streets in the later centuries. The invention of perspective implied
major changes in the design of streets:
“For the laws of perspective were not only those of illusion, of
depicting three dimensions in two, but fundamentally the con-
structive laws of space itself. Thus the street, subject to perspec-
tive representation in the ideal theater, was transformed by this
technique and shaped by it.” (Vidler 1978: 30).
In order to understand this transformation one has to do away
with the Kantian idea of space as a priori. Lived space is a direct
VISIBLE SUBJECTIVATION 113
result of architectural design, and our spatial perceptions are influ-

enced by the rules of this design.
The operations of design and the construction of streets follow-
ing the rules of perspective created the possibility of a vista point,
and moreover, it made any point along the street a vista point. The
rule of perspective centralized the role of visual perception, and
at the same time de-centered the place of the perceiver in the case
of transposition of a two-dimensional plan in three-dimensional
construction. For instance, while for the representation of a street
on paper the vista point is the place of the designer or of the plan
viewer, once on a street built on such a plan, every place offers
the same overarching perspective, combining the quality of the
panoramic observer with the position of equal participation in the
landscape-spectacle of the street.
“The tragic street was thus the instrument of urban control
and regulation, inserted at the will of the planner into a hith-
erto private realm. The streets of Fontana and the boulevards of
Haussmann two and a half centuries later shared this common
rule.” (Vidler, idem).
But, before the streets were projected and construed in this
manner, architecture, following the advice of philosophers, came
to regulate particular aspects or moments of life (e.g. industrial
production, or sickness).
Vidler follows the political transformation of space in France,
starting with the philosophical ideas of the mid 18th Century and
ending with the late nineteenth century (in the aftermath of the
Paris Commune). A preoccupation with the geometry of space and
spatial organization characterized the philosophy of Enlightenment.
Diderot showed concern about the adequacy of the form of space to
its function, a principle to be applied in the construction of factories.
This mode of thinking about space came out of the Encyclopedists’
concern with rationality and the rationalization of production. It is

interesting to remark that in order to explain their concepts about
the spatial organization of production, the Encyclopedists gave up
the written word and used the rhetoric of images. This procedure of
creating and using images that speak through themselves is twofold,
once pertinent in order to better illustrate the theory of the space,
and second because this new space is based on the idea of com-
plete visibility, required in order to secure a harmonious surveillance
of production. It is worth mentioning that the colonial encounter
largely impacted the Encyclopedists’ project, orienting it towards
the cataloguing of the other.
Architecture gave a symbolic code to industrial enterprise, ori-
ented both in the directions of surveillance and of communitarian
life. The harmony of a society constituted of citizen/workers was
produced in Ledoux’s plans for factories. The salt exploitation at
Arc et Salins is maybe the most famous of his industrial projects
that came to life. Hospitals and prisons (“therapeutic architecture”)
were two other types of edifices to take advantage of the newly set-
forth precepts of space3.
In a famous analysis of social order that has as its departure
point the architecture of Bentham, Foucault (1979) seizes on the
relation between one common occurrence and one powerful state
institution: plague and the juridical apparatus. This relation is one
mediated by and constructive of power. The dream of a disciplined
society, in which prisons would be ultimately rendered useless, is
based on the image of the plagued city, “traversed throughout with
3 Socialist and utopian thinkers of France (Fourier and his Phallanstery,
Morelly and the “Code of Nature”) were all interested in the relation
between the inhabited space and the habitus developed by people, in their
attempt to find the formula for a perfectly organized society. Le Corbousier
entirely embraced this idea in his modernist architectural projects.
hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized

by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinctive
way over all individual bodies – this is the utopia of a perfectly gov-
erned city.” (Foucault 1979: 198). On a small scale this principle is
applied in the construction of the panoptical prison. Nevertheless,
there are major differences between the plagued-town and the
Panopticon. While the first is an exceptional case, the second is the
disembodied, timeless principle of the functioning of power. It is
a particular model of power that constituted the ulterior model of
state organization, with the arrangements of the subjects in a vis-
ible constellation, a model that has as its ideal the eradication of
dark or invisible spaces. The Panopticon’s functioning “abstracted
from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as
pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political
technology that may and must be detached from any specific use.”
(Foucault ibid. 205, emphasis mine).
In his writings, Foucault always emphasized the relation be-
tween the mechanisms of power and the forging of the subject
able to feel and resent the action of this specific form of power.
Numerous critiques of modernity4 approach the subject of visibil-
ity, in both senses, that is the visibility as subject of analysis and the
subject emerging from the social organization around optical ideas.
This subject is endowed with certain qualities, and has a specific
relation with power, that is, it establishes a reciprocity that places
it in both a position of power and in the realm of powerless sub-
jectivation. Ledoux’s salt exploitation, an industrial Panopticon,
transforms the industrial space into a theater scene, and establishes
4 I have already mentioned most of the authors relevant to my study. I would
like to add John Jervis’ name for his exploration of the modern (1999),
in which he places the theatrical principle of spectatorship at the core of
modernity.
a relation between workers and the director that reminds Vidler

(1995) of Rousseau’s relation of reciprocity in the social contract,
expressed in the mechanism of elections. If in the Panoptical prison
the relation is unilateral, in Rousseau’s ideal case the sovereign is
under continuous scrutiny5 of his/her electors.
Vidler traces the genealogy of the optical power and its corol-
lary subject to the project of the Enlightenment, analyzing Locke’s
theory of environmental influences on human behavior; Condillac’s
and Helvetius’s conversion of this theory into principles of psychol-
ogy; and Burke’s idea of “the sublime effect”; the author concludes
that:
The Enlightenment as a whole had placed the onus on the sci-
ence and art of observation to reveal and instruct, to mediate be-
tween object and subject; the instrument of observation was the
eye and its commanding quality – the faculty of vision (Vidler
1995: 54).
Since the visibility would secure the knowledge, and knowledge
is at the basis of rational organization of communitarian life, the
eradication of invisible spaces would ensure the construction of a
harmonious society. Logically, this principle extended in architec-
ture beyond the construction of special institutions to the refor-
mation of spaces in the city and its transformation into a public
realm, a movement that both invested it with political qualities,
and disabled its capacities of political action by making it more ac-
cessible to forces of power (Vidler 1987, Ross 1988, Elias 1994) at
the same time that it throws the subjects into the apathy of self and
reciprocal contemplation (Sennett 1994).
5 It is not far from the truth to claim that the media created a situation closer
to this ideal (Debray 1993).
The mode of subjectivation of the Enlightenment is based on

natural laws that apply both in exterior and in the domestic space.
Total visibility is the higher principle that ideally governs the spatial
organization of the modern institution. As Pamela Karimi (2003)
observes:
Since the development of new institutions in the late Enlighten-
ment, the private/public spatial dichotomy in the West has bro-
ken down; as a result, public and private spaces in Western and
Westernized cities have acquired similar spatial characteristics
and have even become enmeshed. The prevalent dialectic of private
and public allows people to define themselves simultaneously
as individuals and as public citizens. In contrast, in some con-
temporary Muslim societies the division of public/private space
is still arguably one of the most important features of spatiality
and often centered on female body (Karimi, 2003: 14, emphasis
mine)
The “enmeshing” of these spaces is both a condition and a re-
sult of the natural (institutional) laws that construct and partially
govern the formation of the modern subject. I say partially because
the subject formation takes place in a matrix of subjectivation in
which the relation (sensorial, affective, cognitive (Warnier 1999))
with objects is its central characteristic. The efforts to create new
citizen subjects were directed towards the organization of space and
objects conceived to induce rational laws of governing bodies (read
subjects).
Desire has a central place in consumer culture and in the case
of fashion practices in particular. Desire mediates subject construc-
tion and relations of governmentality. The 1960s (culminating with
’68 moment) meant the beginning of the emancipation from the
“natural” laws – the bourgeois foundation of morality – that gave
way to the laws of personal desire. Today’s forms of political orga-
nization (many secular nation-states and the transnational politico-

economic conglomerates) operate with a form of governmentality
that combines the “natural” laws (of the market), their subject (the
“citizen”) and the laws of desire along with their subject (“the good
consumer” or “branded subject”). A complete secular citizen is
one who has both of those characteristics “enmeshed”, just like the
public and private spaces. As in Karimi’s example of space practic-
es, political subjectivation is pervasive and includes (private) desire
that has to be morally (publicly) controlled.
Fashion practices (body/subject practices) reflect in great mea-
sure the spatial and political (in the larger sense) constitution of
the social. Buying patterns are relevant for this constitution of so-
cial space. While European space is evenly regulated by (political)
morality in public and private, in Middle East the separation in-
side/outside marked on dress (on body) allows the wearing of dar-
ing attire, and the survival (and revival) of avant-garde fashion in
Europe.
Latent Orientalism and Feminist Critiques:

Inside the Modern Middle East
Many have argued (Bourdieu 1977; Sennett 1994; 1990; Ross
1988; Rosaldo, Bamberger, and Lamphere 1974) for the comple-
mentarity of public and private, and this dichotomy lies at the
core of different understandings of the veil (Abu-Lughod 1986, El
Guindi 1999). Scholars of colonialism have critically explored the
political significance of this dichotomy, as well as its Eurocentric
character (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997; Hirsch and Lazarus-
Black 1994; Stoler 1995).
The scopic regime of power and its action on the reorganization
of social and physical space is at the core of the feminist critiques
LATENT ORIENTALISM AND FEMINIST CRITIQUES 119
of Orientalism. The game of interior/exterior, of public and pri-

vate, of political and civil, plays at the border that separates the
two, where their significances are negotiated in terms of visibil-
ity. Anthropologists explored the implication of the new political
categories that emerged along with the Enlightenment ideologies
of separate spheres and their complicated intertwining (Rosaldo
1980; McClintock 1995; Fitzpatrick 1992). The negotiation of the
borders between public and private is a social practice that itself in-
forms the structure of this dichotomy. It implies uses of spaces and
objects that gradually become socially perceived as borders. One of
the best examples of these objects is the women’s veil. Although the
veil is not central to my project, it is central to many feminist cri-
tiques of Orientalism because of its relation to the scopic regime of
power described above. Thus, colonialism and the dichotomies cre-
ated through a representation of the East are not only political, but
also gendered and sexual. Yegenoglu (1998) is one of the voices that
points to Said’s absence of engagement with “latent Orientalism”.
Described but not analyzed in Said’s book, “latent Orientalism”
refers not only to the gendered differences in the Orient and the
sexual fantasies revolving around Oriental women, but also to the
way in which the difference West/ Orient is represented in gen-
dered terms. Thus in Western colonial narratives, the veiled woman
stands for the non-western spaces that should open up to the gaze
of the colonizer, and the difference West versus indigenous is imag-
ined and concentrated on the woman’s body and/or its absence
(covered by the veil). In this (colonial and post-colonial) discursive
configuration, the presence of the veil is equated with the absence
of women from public (political) sphere, because women’s bodies
were not visible participants in the scopic regime of power. In other
words, the veil meant a non-modern social space (Gole 1996), and
indicated an otherness against which the Western self is constructed
(Veer 1999; Mutman 1992; Al-Ali 2000). Up to this point, I have

shown how this narrative is both present in, and questioned by,
fashion practices in Paris and the Middle Eastern clients of fashion
designers. Brand Orientalism is a general mechanism that distin-
guishes the bourgeois type of moral subjectivation from its others,
be they from Middle East or from suburban England. Buying pat-
terns indicate to some designers a similar mode of subjectivation
among Middle Eastern and various other clients. Moving towards
Tehran, the text will call into question this very type of separation
between the modern West and its others.
In past two decades, feminist studies of the Middle East have
addressed and deconstructed this type of narrative that separates a
modern West and a non-modern (Muslim) Middle East. There are
two main approaches to this narrative: first, the historical study of
“modernizing the region” from women’s perspective. During the
colonial period, non-western locations addressed and shaped the
modern project, even if they were not directly part of the colonies.
Some scholars of the Middle East addressed the way in which new
political configurations and new forms of citizenship emerged dur-
ing the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how women were
part of this modernizing project (Tekeli 1995; Gole 1996; Keddie
1999; Mitchell 1991).
A second way of addressing and blurring the dichotomy be-
tween a modern West and a non-Modern other is through study-
ing the recent women’s movement and mobilization in the Middle
Eastern region. These movements may take secular or Islamic un-
dertones, but they are all crystallized around the idea of women’s
liberation and participation in the public sphere. (Moghadam
2003; Al-Ali 2000; Paidar 1996; Abu-Lughod 2001b; Joseph
2000). Thus, women movements in the Middle East directly re-
late to the modern construction of citizenship and participation,

regardless of their (non)religious orientation.
Both of these approaches show how developments in women’s
political participation engage modern modes of subjectivation in
a specific context and configuration of power relations, defined by
patriarchy, religious domination, or secular projects. All these au-
thors underline the importance of physical presence of women in
different spaces of debate, be they public and literary, political, and
scientific. Bodily mobility accompanies and (in)forms this pres-
ence. As Najmabadi (1993) underlines, the Iranian modernizing
project at the beginning of the twentieth century was accompa-
nied by the physical education curriculum in girls’ schools. The
training of the body was a defining part of subject formation. All
these critiques help us understand how modernity forms a reper-
toire of modes of subjectivation, rather than a unique model that
is adopted or rejected in “non-western” locations. The intersection
of this repertoire with local specificities configures in various “re-
gimes of modernity”6 that emerge rather as rhizomatic occurrences
(Deleuze and Guattari 1988) than as genealogic branches from a
central modern root situated in the West.
While presenting “snapshots of Islamic Modernity” Gole (2000)
is aware of the danger of understanding modernity in non-western
locations as “simply rejected or readopted”, and insists on an analy-
sis of the critical adaptation of modern discursive and social prac-
tices in these contexts. Elsewhere Gole (1997) makes a fine argu-
ment concerning the kind of morality that an Islamic public space
proposes, and how this may oppose modern ideals. Gole calls this
morality a “communitarian morality”, that is, “a trait of societies
in which modern individualism, individual conscience, confession,
6 With thanks to Teresa Caldeira for the suggestion
and public exposure of the self have not dominated the structuring
of the individual and social relations.” (p.72). She also observes
how the new Islamic movements are not constrained by this very
type of morality and combine in their practices and in their public
manifestations the modern tools of self expression and individual
conscience, which take modern aesthetic forms of manifestation
(in her case through the autobiographical novel).
Instead of juxtaposing snapshots, I will construct a narrative
of social practices of fashion (a modern practice, an aesthetic form
of self expression) in Tehran, from producers to consumers. This
will highlight particularities of subject formation through fashion
practices into a system organized by specific class, cultural, and
religious practices. All these categories are arranged into a pecific
constellation of power relation from which fashion is a constitu-
tive part. Women movement and participation into the social life
will become selfexpressed through the ethnography of fashion and
body motions.
The following chapter is an introduction to the atmosphere of
Tehran’s fashion practices. It constitutes an analytic cartography
of Tehran urban spaces and bodies that populate it through the
lenses of fashion. It furthermore problematizes the distinction pri-
vate/public in Tehran’s spaces, through taking in consideration a
series of factors such as access to clothing, access to spaces, aesthetic
choices, and fashion canons. All of these have a significant role in
the configuration of urban spaces in Tehran.
Similar approaches have shown various aspects of women’s mo-
bility and power configuration in Islamic public spaces (Afsaruddin
1999). In her study on women wearing headscarves in Istanbul,
Anna Secor (2002) emphasizes the role of spatial configuration of
power in influencing the choice of veil wearing among specific so-
cially positioned women. She introduces the concept of “regimes of
veiling” which designates different modes of power configurations

that contributes to the way in which women wear their veil.
[W]e can best understand the socio-spatial experience of veiling
and not-veiling if we consider the city to be comprised of differ-
ent regimes of veiling, that is, different, spatially realized sets of
hegemonic rules and norms regarding women’s veiling, which are
themselves produced by different constellations of power. (Secor,
2002: 8)
While engaging Secor’s suggestion, in my ethnographic ap-
proach I discuss regimes of dress, rather than focusing solely on veil.
I also consider that different social positions of women greatly in-
fluence the configuration of different “regimes of dress”, in Tehran
and elsewhere. Thus, I would like to complicate the idea of choice,
and to emphasize the dyamic character of subjectivation. That is,
subjectivity emerges during the process of bodily engagement with
these spaces, a process that transforms the regimes of dress, and the
body/subject itself, through questioning and transforming the spa-
tial hegemonic rules. All regimes of dress are part of the same ma-
trix of subjectivation in urban Tehran. In the long run, I emphasize
the mode in which fashion practices create the modern subject in
Tehran. The meaning of modernity is differently used in processes
of class distinction, and in discourses mirroring the post-colonial
domination of Western representations of the other that I will call
“self-othering”. Self-othering is the discourse employed to distin-
guish “Western other” from “non-Western us,”in which modernity
is used as a divide line. I prefer this term to that of othering of the
West, because the primary reference in the process is the West,
against which a self that “lacks (modernity)” is constructed.
Chapter 4
Fashion and Aesthetic Authority
in the Urban Spaces of Tehran
Fashion is a nomadic phenomenon; clothing and designs cir-
culate from place to place following internal rules of aesthetic and
economic consideration that vary with the location. This field con-
stitutes the intersection of a designated urban space with a general
urban phenomenon (Simmel 1971), once again pointing to the
tension between geographic and anthropological locations (Gupta
1997).
As Laya, a Tehran designer, explains, fashion is del haste, that
is “desire”; everything else is just clothing. Desire has many faces,
and many of the modern industries are geared towards it. Fashion
industry is linked to capitalist forms of production, and entails a
series of social practices that organize body, time, space, and desire.
Fashion is historically linked to modernity, and sartorial changes
modernizing processes (both voluntary and unintended). In an
attempt to read the social spaces of Tehran through the lens of
fashion, I will describe the spatial configuration of modernity in
Iran.
This chapter focuses on the practices linked to clothing and
fashion consumption, and the emergence of a particular concep-
tion of, and mode of relation with clothing and dress. While cloth-
ing is an eternal matter, fashion is a differently charged concept.
Fashion and the modern individual are linked through a symbiotic
relationship. The social practices of fashion constitute a source of
authority in Tehran’s various social contexts, an aesthetic authority
that organizes bodies, movements, time, and spaces.
126 4: FASHION AND AESTHETIC AUTHORITY
Fashion consumption has two major aspects constituted

through social practices: first, the actual buying of the articles of
dress, that is the procuring of the desired clothes; second, the stor-
ing and wearing of those. Economic regulations intervene in the
process of dress importation, with direct implications in the social
practices of buying (or obtaining) the sought-for commodity.
At the level of wearing, fashion consumption in Tehran comes
up against specific Islamic religious regulations of behavior and
body exposure. Many rules of conduct in the public space of Tehran
draw from Muslim principles of modesty, or hidjab, and they refer
also to the separation of sexes and the restriction of body exposure.
In Iran those rules are reinforced by the moral police – “pasdarha”
– and by a form of pervasive social control analyzed in this chapter.
Thus, the fashioning of oneself in public as well as in private work
to combine different sources of aesthetic inspiration and authority
in different ways, resulting in a specific set of body practices.
Modern Dressing in Iran

“Dress matters”, as Tarlo (1996) has shown in detail, and dur-
ing the period of colonialism it became the instrument of modern-
ization policies, as well as a form of anti-colonial struggle and the
affirmation of national identity. Iran, although not directly colo-
nized, was no exception. It is difficult to write about Iran with-
out waking up the ghosts of a variety of “isms”, from Orientalism
to Modernism, passing through and obsessively lingering on in
Islamism. The popular perspective on Iran is that after its period
of modernization under the Reza dynasty, the Islamic Revolution
gave way to a regime that attempted to crush its previous social
“achievements.” This new regime marked the coming to power of
yet another sumptuary law derived from shari’a, which specially
targeted women: the imposition of headscarf - and/or chador -
MODERN DRESSING IN IRAN 127
wearing in public spaces. For many Western eyes this meant the
blocking of their own vision, blinding them to the social dynam-
ics and transformations taking place beyond this visible obstacle
(Adelkhah 1991).
Iran, like any other place, has a long term dynamic that needs
to be assessed to provide a background for contextualizing later
developments. Dress regulations have been a central part of that
dynamic. In the nineteenth century Qajar period, men’s headwear,
believed to express allegiance to the Khalifat, was an object of dis-
pute between the shi’a ulama and the dynasty in power (Baker
1997). The Khalifat was the religious/administrative authority
based in Istanbul that represented the interest of the sunni Muslims.
Iranian Shi’a clergy thought of the Qajar dynasty as subservient to
the Khalif ’s interest, as the Qajar family was of Turkish origin.
The twentieth century was one of a sustained polity of modern-
ization understood as Westernization, and the Reza dynasty was its
exponent. The Constitutional Revolution in 1904-1906 and the
formation of the first Iranian parliament were the signs of the new
era to come for Iran. The commercial classes from the bazaar and
the shi’a clergy were the main actors in this movement that forced
the Qajar shah to ratify the first Constitution of Iran in 1906. The
adoption of the Constitution created a new political landscape. The
political class’s desires to construct a modern society brought about
a series of reforms designed to give a modern aspect to Iranian
society: a key to this aim was sumptuary laws that targeted men’s
attire.
From the beginning of the early 1920s to the mid 1930s, Iran
was swept up by a series of cabinet degrees, or parliamentary laws
meant to regulate men’s dress. I will present these new regulations
and their effect on the population and will continue discussing the
effect on clothing of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, in order to in-
troduce the ethnographic account of the emerging fashion industry

in the early part of the the twenty-first century.
Clothing Reforms in Iran between 1920 and 1940

29 Bahman 1301 S./ 18 February 1923, the Iranian Parliament
ratified a bill calling for “all civil servants, cabinet members, and
parliamentary deputies” to wear Persian-made clothing during busi-
ness hours. Seven month later, on 1 Mizan 1302 S./23 September
1923 the Minister of War (later to become Reza Shah) extended
this reform to military personnel as well. Urbanites favoring mod-
ernization started wearing Western style clothes. The reforms in
dress intensified after the coming to power of Reza Shah, in 1926.
He promulgated a series of dress reforms that accompanied his
policy of modernization, which created increased discontent in the
population at large for various reasons (Yarshater 1992).
On 4 Mehr 1307 S./ 26 September 1928 a cabinet bill stipu-
lated that Persian men should wear Western style clothes. This law
was part of the project of Iranian national identity construction.
The uniform dress, in the Shah’s opinion, should have forged a feel-
ing of national unity beyond the regional and tribal divide (Baker
1997; Chehabi 1993).
A very important part of this law stipulated the replacement of
the headdress with a uniform cylindric hat with a bill for govern-
ment workers and schoolboys. Clergymen and leaders of other offi-
cially recognized religions were exempted. This new hat came to be
known as Pahlavi’s hat, or kulah-e Pahlavi. The British ambassador
of the period gave an expressive description of this hat:
The Pahlavi cap is not prepossessing. It is nothing more than
the round ‘Kola’ [kulah: a brimless cap] with the addition of a
straight peak and, worn with a short coat, it makes the wearer
look like a railway porter (Baker 1997).
CLOTHING REFORMS IN IRAN 129
The law became effective in towns on 1 Farvardin 1308 S. /21

March 1929 (the first day of the Persian year.) One year later it
became effective in villages.
This reform met opposition from various social strata, not
only from the religious authorities. Each group viewed the issue
from a different perspective. The traditionalists, the clergy, and the
tribesmen identified the Pahlavi’s hat as a source of discord; for the
traditionalists, the turban was a sign of distinction. Moreover, the
clergymen argued that the peak of the hat impeded the normal
course of the prayer (Baker, ibid.). This is an important point, since
it touches directly on the idea of body conduits: the Islamic prayer
requires the believer to bow a series of times bringing the forehead
in contact with the ground. While a turban is perfectly adapted to
this procedure, a peaked-hat would interfere, unless one turns the
bill backward. Praying five times a day is part of what constitutes
being a Muslim, and in Iran prayers are often performed publicly
(breaks in working day are reserved for prayer times). One could
say that the kulah-e Pahlavi, unintentionnally turning the prayer
ritual into an act of ridicule, could contribute to the creation of a
different kind of (religious) subject, or even to the abandonment of
prayer altogether. Clergymen expressed this specific worry.
Nor did tribesmen welcome the new reform. The head-dress
played, and still plays, an important role in the differentiation of a
number of tribes and population groups in Iran1. Another serious
complaint against the 1929 law came from the textile producers,
who saw their trade threatened. The importation of ready-made
clothing or the use of foreign materials had disastrous effects on
the local producers.
1 In the Kurdish region of Iran I visited, in the town of Ourumieh, I was refused
service in the Bazaar because I was wearing a headgear that identified me as a
Kurd from Iraq. I was also stopped by the police on the same grounds.
Some intellectuals and educated people rallied against these

measures. On political grounds, they saw in these laws a new
mode of limiting individual rights newly acquired through the
Constitutional Revolution, and its modernization drive. They were
against the system of fines and imprisonment that they thought of
as unconstitutional, thus opposing a constitutional model of mod-
ernization to an autocratic pedagogical one. In spite of concerted
opposition, on 6 Day 1307 S./ 27 December 1928, the Parliament
ratified the law and made “the clothing regulations both legal and
compulsory” (Yarshater, ibid. 809).
Around the same period, Reza Shah felt his power sufficiently
consolidated, and began limiting the autonomy to the religious au-
thorities in an attempt to enforce his own cabinet’s power over the
legislative apparatus. This tendency was displayed publicly through
actions of the royal family meant to show how little control clergy
had over the public space. In 1928, during a visit to the religious
shrines in Qom, Reza’s wife appeared unveiled.
One Ayatollah Bafqi, present at the Shrine, sent a message to
the Queen: ‘If you are not Muslim why did you come to the
shrine? If you are then why are you not veiled?’ When his mes-
sage was ignored, Bafqi delivered a sermon denouncing the shah
and inciting the crowd. In response, Reza Shah personally went
to Qom, entered the shrine in his boots, horsewhipped Bafqi and
had him arrested. (Zubaida 2003: 187, my italics)
One sees in this passage how the overt confrontation between
the clergy and the new power was publicly displayed through dress
and bodily attitudes. Not only had the Queen appeared unveiled,
but the Shah horsewhipped the ayatollah and disregarded the reli-
gious codes by himself entering the shrine wearing boots.
Despite increased public discontent Reza Shah continued his
policies. After he visited Turkey in 1934, and met Kemal Ataturk,
CLOTHING REFORMS IN IRAN 131
he became determined to accelerate his reforms towards modern-

ization, and to generalize the Western-attire. On 16 Tir 1334 S./8
July 1935 a cabinet decree replaced the kulah-e Pahlavi with the
full brim hat for all Persian workers. This caused new and seri-
ous upheavals in the population. In the same month, a resistance
movement lead by Shaik Taqi Bohlul found refuge in Gowharsad
Mosque in Mashhad. The authorities responded with arms, and
between four and five hundred people were killed (Baker, 1997:
193).
Although brimmed hats continued to be worn until the last years
of Reza Shah’s reign, Persian men gradually gave up wearing
headgear altogether, despite the traditional Persian view that it is
unseemly to appear in public uncovered. (Yarshater, ibid. 809)
Up to that moment and despite the fashions that came from
Europe, women were not the focus of Reza’s policies. Women in high
classes or at the court were already wearing European hats and were
participating in public gatherings. On 17 Day 1314 S./ 8 January
1936 at the graduation ceremony at the Normal Governmental
School, Reza came with his wife and daughters unveiled and gave a
speech about the necessity of women being unveiled. This gesture
was preceded by a decree (1935) that forbade the veil in schools for
both students and educators. Also in “summer 1935 women wish-
ing to renew their identity documents had to report unveiled to the
police” (Baker, ibid. 185)
After the speech at the graduation ceremony, Reza promulgated
a law forbidding veil-wearing in public spaces, with disastrous ef-
fects for a large part of the population. For many women, this law
meant confinement to their homes for the rest of their lives. The law
was followed by sustained repression:
The great majority of Persian women had been brought up to con-

sider the veil indispensable and to believe that exposing the head
and neck was a sin. Furthermore, Persian men considered aban-
donment of the veil outright evidence of unchastity. [...] Women
were beaten [by the police], their chadors and head scarves torn
off, and even their homes forcibly searched. (Yarshater ibid. 809)
After the forced abdication of Reza Shah, in Shahrivar 1320 S./
September 1941, many women resumed veiling. Under the pres-
sure of ulama that partially regained influence, Muhammad Reza,
the new Shah, abrogated the law concerning the veil. Nevertheless,
the years of forced unveiling left a deep mark in the society: veiling
habits became not only indicators of education and class difference,
but modalities of construction of those differences, through the mo-
tion conduits they imposed. For the entire period, access to educa-
tion was practically impossible for women coming from traditional
social environments. The veil as object, or better said, its imposed
absence, greatly contributed to the perpetuation of illiteracy among
lower-class women. It also created a divide between Westernized
high classes and the rest of the population.
Moral Dress and the Islamic Revolution

It has been argued that practices of modernization put in place
since the Westernizing economic and cultural reforms of Reza Shah
in the 1920s created persisting binaries at the level of the social
dynamic, opposing the reformist liberal Westernized class to the
conservative traditionalist classes.
Modernization creates not only a dual economy but also a dual
society, in which the wealthier Westernized classes speak a differ-
ent language from the traditional or popular classes and have a
very different lifestyle and cultural values (Keddie 1981:16).
MORAL DRESS AND THE ISLAMIC REVOLUTION 133
Developing this observation I will argue that there is a con-

tinous dynamic in terms of class distinction along the aesthetic
definition of Western style. The Islamic Revolution introduced
new forms of social mobility, creating access to superior education
and jobs for women from traditionalist classes. That is, although
a divide based on lifestyle and cultural values exists in Iran today
(especially in the urban settings), Western style is appropriated and
reworked by people in different class position, with different po-
litical orientation. This divide is the expression of different modes
of engagement with the modern repertoire in Iran, rather than a
reflection of a society constituted out of modern and non-modern
polarized populations.
However, media and journalistic political discourses picked up
this dual image that presents the Iranian society in this manner,
rather than accounting for the complex social reality within the
country. After the Islamic Revolution political commentaries and
new documentaries (e.g. Georges Thiery “Under the veil”) have
the tendency to equate Iranian disenfranchised classes with exces-
sive Islamic religiosity, while they present an allegedly secular (in
Western terms) Westernized and reformist young student popula-
tion. However, it is important to emphasize that even during the
wave of modernization at the beginning of the twentieth century,
the opposition to the forced modernization displayed on the body
came from a variety of different social actors, including pro-mod-
ernization intellectuals.
The Islamic Revolution emerged from a long term dynamic
that reunited a variety of social classes in the struggle against the
Shah’s despotic regime. The emerging educated classes, leftist intel-
lectuals among them, linked their interests with the commercial
class of the Bazaar (bazaari) who acted under the leadership of the
religious authorities. The ulama were unhappy with the form of
monarchic government with modern tones, and one of the main

sources of conflict concerned the regulation of property. While
shari’a required non-intervention of the state in land, property and
contractual clauses, the Shah’s government introduced an agrarian
land reform and also regulated the urban property in the 1960s.
Also, contracts were regulated by public policies, which were not in
agreement with the shari’a (or with the private interests of the well-
to-do clergymen and bazaari) (Zubaida 2003). Leftist ideas were
also disseminated to newly educated persons, in a context in which
Muhammad Reza Shah was encouraging industrial modernization
with the help of foreign specialists. The employment of foreign
experts meant that the local universities, while offering higher edu-
cation and training, could not ensure jobs to new alumni. (Digard,
Hourcade, and Richard 1996).
In this context, the Islamic Revolution erupted in the late 1970s
as civil unrest; the Shah’s policies were associated with westerniza-
tion, including dress regulations. After the first violent repression
of the regime’s opponents on 8 September 1978, wearing non-
western style clothing meant resistance to the Shah.
For over a year the word kravati (tie-wearer) had come to be
the fashionable term for disparagement for any intellectual and
smart, clean clothing was seen as estekbar (ostentation) and thus
unfitting to devout Muslim men, in revolutionary circles.
The chador was rapidly becoming and acknowledgement symbol

of rebellion against the established political order, although it did
not necessarily imply support for the establisment of an Islamic state.
Thus, after veiled women had been refused entry into university
in 1977, it was symbolically donned as a sign of protest (against
Pahlavi regime) by most female demonstrators in the following
year. (Baker, ibid. my italics)
MORAL DRESS AND THE ISLAMIC REVOLUTION 135
With the installation of the new government led by Ayatollah

Khomeini, women working in governmental positions were re-
quired to wear a form of dress cover. In the spring of 1980 big dem-
onstrations against head coverings swept Tehran. A period of unrest
followed. On March 13 1980 the Ayatollah announced publicly
that women should consider it a moral duty to wear chador, and on
the 5th of July all women in public and governmental employment
were required to wear the headscarf.
[T]he legal reform programme of 30 May 1981 (restoring Shari’a
law), the wearing of hijab [...] was declared compulsory for all
women over the age of 12, whether Muslim or not, non-compli-
ance being punishable by one year’s imprisonment. (Baker, ibid.
188)
For the period that follows, studies about women’s dress in Iran
are scarce; the subject itself is a delicate one. There are few serious
studies on the subject in this period. Notable is Fariba Adelkhah
book, Revolution Under the Veil (Adelkhah 1991) that shows how
the veiling policy was a mode of empowering a large number of
women, who were able to attend schools and became educated
without the pressure of the family regarding their mobility out-
side home. This increased the social mobility among lower class-
es, and helped the formation of a new middle class, attuned to
Islamic sensibilities. This is the period of the “normalization” of the
Islamic Revolution, characterized by the professionalization of the
Revolutionary class.
The establishment of shari’a in Iran meant also the regulation
of conduct in public spaces, a fact to which I will constantly return
in the text. Among these regulations, here called Islamic, those that
refer to bodily attitudes and to photographic representations are
most important for our purposes Besides the dress code for wom-
en, the representation of an uncovered woman’s body in public is
formally forbidden. A man’s body also needs to be covered, short

pants being considered inappropriate.
After the election of President Khatami in 1998, with wide-
spread support from the young generation, the imposition of the
dress code became more relaxed. Western media took up this subject
and presented it as a sign of liberalization of Iranian society, more
clearly its secularisation. Documentary films show the divide be-
tween the Westernized class and all others, and the recurrent theme
is the attitude towards dress, veiling, and ultimately consumption
that would indicate the divorce of an upper middle Iranian class
from the Islamic “traditional” values. In the overwhelming majori-
ty of journalistic accounts, this divide (westernized/traditional) has
the spatial expression of public/private space, where in private peo-
ple (women of the upper classes) behave “freely” (read non-Islamic)
while in public they would fall under oppressive traditionalism.
The following account strives to undo this binary while ap-
proaching fashion practices in terms of their relation with bodies,
spaces, places, and times of fashion in Tehran. While there is a
clear difference between the Westernized population and the tradi-
tional one, their relationship can perhaps best be understood as a
common continuum, with the difference most related to access to
fashion objects and aesthetic choices, and economic discrepancies.
It is therefore less related to “different cultural values” than to dif-
ferent practices that shape distinct subjectivities in the same over-
arching Islamic context. Beyond these aesthetic choices, issues of
male dominance, sexuality, segregation of gender in exterior spaces
may remain common concerns among a greater part of the popula-
tion and cut across Westernised/ traditionalist separated categories.
In my interviewees’ accounts, the term modernity appears both
linked to clothing and to behavior. The two are not always coin-
cident, that is, wearing modern clothes does not necessarily make
URBAN SPACES IN TEHRAN 137
you “modern”, and “being modern in Iran” (Adelkhah 1999) may

have a completely different meaning than modernity in the West.
Fashion practices are intertwined with other subjectivation prac-
tices in the complex social field of Tehran.
Before proceeding it is necessary to mention that all of my in-
terviewees were part of the upper middle classes and high classes of
Tehran, which puts them in the “Westernized” pole of the contin-
uum. Nevertheless, my fieldwork took me to a variety of Tehran’s
districts, which will also appear described in the text.
Urban Spaces in Tehran

Tehran is a metropolis of about 8 million intramural inhabit-
ants, with greater Tehran accounting for as many as 12 million
people. With no building older than one hundred and fifty years
old, this city has a modern infrastructure of freeways, and its ur-
ban planning has been often characterized as chaotic. The mod-
ernization of the city accelerated after the oil boom in the 1970s,
and many of the modern constructions have been accomplished in
the last ten years, constituting the pride of the Islamic Republic.
Spread on a great surface, Tehran offers a discontinuous space for
the visitor. That is, not unlike Los Angeles or other city built pri-
marily for car-users, Tehran has numerous locations for pedestri-
ans (e.g. parks, shopping galleries, boulevards, plazas) separated by
residential areas, and accessible only by car, due to the considerable
distance between them, and to the particular construction style –
often there are no sidewalks at all. This particularity turns out to be
essential in the observations on fashion practices.
Not being completely comfortable with the distinction of
public/private (see Chapter 3), I will describe the variety of urban
spaces in Tehran through dress practices, and only afterwards will
I categorize these spaces. For the time being I will use the term
“exterior spaces” will be used for all spaces outside private homes.
It is broadly assumed that public and private spaces in Iran are
two clearly separate spaces, demarcated by religious considerations:
while in public the Islamic rules apply, in private we meet a dif-
ferent world – of the genre “Under the Chador, Chanel” (Sciolino
2000). Leaving aside the fact that the separation public/private is
itself a problematic one, both of these spaces are pervaded by prac-
tices resulting from the combination of aesthetic, economic, and
religious considerations, many times not separated from one an-
other, thus rendering the border itself questionable.
The public sphere (in the common acceptation of the term)
of the Islamic Republic of Iran is a moral space. This space is not
tolerant to manifestations of affection between a man and a wom-
an (although it is common to see men holding hands together).
(In an odd manner this reminded me of the little tolerance my
Californian students have for what they call PDA -- Public Display
of Affection). A strict regulation concerning exposure of body in
photography for publicity requires that female bodies should not
be displayed uncovered, and the headscarf must be worn.
This type of morality is not reserved to exterior spaces, but also
pervades private spheres. Its presence is directly dependent on the
religious convictions of the persons implied, and their class po-
sition. For example, many times I have noticed women keeping
their headscarf on in the interior of their own house, or even while
sleeping. Thus, the border public/private in Iran may not be as eas-
ily traced (as some would have it) by simply asserting that public
is dominated by religious impositions, while a sort of laic behavior
characterizes the private realm. On the contrary, a morality that
pervades both public and private is disputed, contested and rear-
ranged in different context of class belonging, religious affiliation,
or aesthetic convictions.
URBAN SPACES IN TEHRAN 139
It is important to contrast, if only briefly, practices of the Islamic

Republic public space with other public spaces. For example, the
“veil dispute” in France reveals the organizing principles of the
Republican public sphere. The French principle of laicity requires
the separation of politics and religion, and constructs public sphere
as a religiously neutral space. Laicism manifests visibly in the public
sphere, through the interdiction of religious symbols worn on the
body. While most of the exterior spaces in France do not enforce
the removal of the headscarf, the spaces-emblem for the Republic
(schools, or the ID photos) requires that no religious symbols be
displayed on the body, as a mark of individual neutrality in edu-
cational or political realms. At the same time, body exposure in
itself is not as restricted as in the Islamic Republican space, which
follows the principle of hidjab or modesty.
Other Western spaces, that claim the principle of multicultural-
ism, as in England or the United States, are less restrictive concern-
ing the wearing of the Islamic headscarf in public spaces such as
schools. Other moral principles are more strongly enforced through
a diversity of forms of social or police control. The non-smoking
requirement in certain public spaces in California may be an ex-
ample along these lines. A recent legal proposition in Louisiana
seeks to forbid low-slung jean because, it has been argued, they
expose adolescent’s underwear. The initiator of this bill, a Louisiana
Republican Senator, seeks legal grounds in the law concerning the
interdiction of public obscenity2 (www.bharattextile.com, accessed
05.01.2004).
Following the explicit model of French Republican space, in the
1920s Turkey had undertaken reforms meant to secularize the pub-
lic sphere in the effort to modernize the country. While the secular-
2 With thanks to Maurizio for pointing this out to me.
ization of politics has not been completely successful, the Turkish

authorities imposed a secular form of the public sphere through
banishing the religious symbols displayed on the body. The Islamic
political movements in Turkey that started in the 1980s are reshap-
ing the definition of the public sphere, introducing new forms of
expression, and revendications of religious identities (Gole 1997).
Dressing the Muslim Women’s bodies

Dress is one of the strong markers of the Islamic morality. As
a general rule, both male and female bodies are required to be in-
tegrally covered, but even though many men do wear long sleeves
during hot summer days, the rule is most uniformly and strongly
enforced for women3. Thus, there are some specific dress articles
that one can find in any woman’s wardrobe in Tehran:
1. the chador – big piece of fabric that covers the head and falls
around the body all the way to the ankles. Cut in a specific way, it
is held in place around the body with the left hand, underarm, or
even (though less commonly) in one’s mouth. Because of its need
to be held in place by its wearer, the chador is highly restrictive to
body movements. One imaginative and highly prolific fashion de-
signer created a “chador – evening dress” to lessen this restriction:
Look, look, just now! When my children came in (the students4),
I see again the chador. Immediately I told them “ I have to make
a chador for you not to put it here, not to do it like this (gestures
of keeping the chador in place underneath the arm)”. I designed
3 For a detailed discussion on human body, movements, and dress rules in Iran,
see Shahshahani’s article “Body as a means of non-verbal communication in
Iran” (in press).
4 During the visit at her home, two of her women students were present
looking at the new dress models. Although in interior, they were wearing
chadors, with beautiful floral designs.
DRESSING THE MUSLIM WOMEN’S BODIES 141
a chador... for example in Iran women have to wrap, they have

to cover, when they are together with men and women [sic!]. I
designed a chador, when you are together it is properly wrapped.
But when you are going with the ladies and you can take it
off, when you open it, it becomes a naked dress, evening dress.
(laughs) ... (Mahla)
The secret of this model is simple. Instead of one piece of fabric,
the “evening chador” has sleeves. This makes it a lot easier to keep
it in place, to have one’s body movements less restricted, and to let
it fall down on one’s back, in order to reveal the shoulders and the
evening dress.
The urban Tehran chador is black, but it should be noted that
throughout Iran there is a variety of colors and patterns for this
clothing item. Thus one can find beautiful flowery chadors as one
descends from Tehran towards the South of Iran, in Esfahan or
Shiraz. The black color is in fact the outcome of dress uniformiza-
tion characteristic of urban conglomerations. While the chador is
omni-present in South Tehran, populated by lower classes, it is
seldom visible once one goes up towards the heights of Northern
Tehran.
2. the maqnae – piece of fabric , usually black, brown or dark
blue, sewn underneath the chin, and covering the head and the
shoulders. It is the mandatory headdress for women working in
the governmental or public institutions (e.g. bureaucrats, educa-
tion personnel, professors, clerks). It is also mandatory for the TV
speakers, as well as in the photograph on women’s identity pieces,
including the passport. Schoolgirls and students also have to wear
it during course hours, and on the campus.
3. the russari – is the equivalent of the foulard, the headscarf
worn by many Muslim women, and which became the specific
marker of Islamic women. Worn to cover the head, it is manda-
tory in the absence of the maqnae. Fabric and colors vary. There
are very different ways of wearing the russari. With or without
knot, wrapped round the neck or loosely hanging on the sides of it,
tightly closed around the head, covering the hair, or pushed back
hanging only on the pony-tail, it is the minimum requirement for
women’s head dress.
Scarf ? now they wear it tied around the neck like this, from col-
ored cotton... I think that with the scarves, as with the manteaux,
when fashion comes in, and it is like a fashion to them, you see
ALL the girls the same. (Neda, 28 years old, film scenograph)
Two days before my second visit to Tehran, on 17 June 2003,
there had been a women’s march against wearing the headscarf.
For two hours the participants did not wear their russari. It was a
manifestation among others in the same period, which could be
characterized as exercises of democratic forms of public expression
of discontent. Although of no great consequence in the short term,
these manifestations are elements of the local form of modernity, as
it has been described by Fariba Adelkhah (1999)
4. the roopoosh or manto – compulsory in all exterior spaces
in the absence of the chador, it varies substantially in color, form,
or fabric quality. The mantoha (for plural) are a substitute of the
chador, initially meant to hide the form of the body, just as the
chador does. The most usual mantoha are black, brown or beige.
Nevertheless, colors greatly vary, and they constitute distinctive
markers of style.
The extensive classification of mantoha shows their great variety,
and their importance in the aesthetic organization of clothing. The
mantoha are first classified by the cut of their collar (iaqhe). I could
register six types of iaqhe, corresponding to six different forms:
a) Iaqhe inglisi – “English style collar”, that is double collar.
b) iaghe akhundi – “akhund style collar”, that is no collar.

Akhund is the religious authority, also known as mullah. They wear
the abba, a large over-cloth with no collar. The manto’s name is a
direct reference to the abba.
c) iaghe pirhani – “shirt style collar” , as the name tells us, it is
the manto with small collar cut straight.
d) iaghe shekari – “hunter style collar”, it looks like the shirt
style collar, only it is bigger. The name is a direct reference to Safari
style clothing.
e) iaghe istade – “standing up collar”, is a straight collar that
reaches all the way under the chin, like a turtle-neck collar of
sweaters.
f ) iaghe khargushi – “bunny style collar”, is a past fashion of
manto, with long collars fallen on the chest.
A second classification, in three categories, is made by the spe-
cific cut:
a) tank (straight and tight), it follows the line of the body, and
it is in fashion at the time of writing;
b) kammar corseti that is tight waist, corset style, the name says
it all ;
c) goshad or the large mantos, which hide the body allure.
Other important details follow as principles of classification,
such as the place where the leg cut is made (chak): chake posht (cut
on the back) or chake baqal (cut on the sides); the length: bolan
(long) or cutak (short); or the belt (kammar): kammar dar (with
belt) or bikammar (without belt).
The above features may be freely combined, for example one
may search for manto corseti, iaghe inglisi, bolan, bikammar.
A special way of classification defines three types of manto by
one word:
a) Khofashi (bat style) made of a big piece of fabric, with no

sleeves, but covering the hands, no collar. In fashion twelve years
ago, it being then forbidden to wear anything but large mantos, it
gives the wearer the allure of a bat.
b) googooshi – manto kammar corseti, long or short, with the
sleeves cut towards the wrist and attached with one butterfly knot.
It borrowed the name of a famous Iranian singer of the 1970s,
Googoosh, now living in Los Angeles.
c) chini – meaning Chinese style, cut straight, collar mullah
style, of an average length.
In this extended classification one may find a variety of diverse
references, ranging from geographic areas to famous entertainers.
An interesting case is the iaqhe inglisi. Although the manto is a post-
revolution acquirement, the English style collar is a form familiar
to Iranian urban fashion, applied to the winter-coats, for example.
Its familiarity is explained by the significant British presence in
Iran before the Islamic Revolution. A certain aesthetic is attached
to a particular geographic provenance, same as in the case of chini
manto. The way in which the familiarity with the remote space is
created differs from case to case. While the British had a physical
presence in Iran, carrying on their bodies the particular aesthetic,
the Chinese aesthetic is known mainly through movies or through
commodities of this provenance.
Immediately after the Islamic Revolution, the chador became
a compulsory dress element. Gradually the manto appeared as an
accepted alternative to the chador. In the first years of its social life,
the manto was large and somewhat formless. In the following inter-
view excerpt, Azadeh, a fashion designer from Tehran, remembers
the gradual transformation of the chador to manto.
The first years after the revolution it was almost the same [as
before]. In parallel with the changing to Islamic political domi-
nation, they launched the chador for women. Who? The new re-
gime. But not all the women agreed with the chador. Some of
them created a sort of chador with sleeves. It was really funny, it
looked like a penguin... It was not practical, nor nice. After this I
do not know, I was in prison for two years.
Azadeh continues her story and explains her surprise at the new
aesthetic forms that entered the Iranian public space after the first
years of the Islamic Revolution. At its appearance, the manto was a
rather odd piece of dress, proposing a new aesthetic that combines
the requirements of Islamic covering of the body with the modern
urban life style; the mobility of the body for working women is a
‘must’ not attainable with the chador. Nevertheless, for Azadeh the
new form of the clothes seemed rather odd, but the manto has been
quickly adopted because of its practical character.
When I entered in prison, I was wearing a normal dress for cold
weather. In prison I was compelled to wear chador. When I came
out, I saw that women were wearing a sort of manteau, black,
long to the ankles, with a black russari. I was more used with
the chador, because my mother always wore one, even before the
Revolution. I was used to look at the women on the streets wear-
ing chador, but not with manto. I did not know what it was.
Something new for me. (Azadeh)
Although the large manto has been a requirement from the mo-
ment it replaced the chador, in the last three or four years shorter
mantoha, tight, are becoming more popular among the young
people:
It is easier to wear tighter mantos nowadays. Before, we used to
wear long and very large, but now you can see, outside in the
streets girls wearing short mantos and very tight. (Neda)
Thus, today one finds in exterior spaces of Tehran a ‘cohabi-

tation’ of different mantos, and a large variety of dress manners,
ranging from the black chador to the tight manto wore with brand
name headscarves.
Although the russari is, in European eyes, the significant ele-
ment of dress in an Islamic context, in Tehran the manto is a more
important site of political revendications. For the simple fact that
the manto is a big piece of dress, it allows more variation in terms of
cut, color, and fabric. Each of these modifications contributed to,
and marked changes in the political landscape in Iran. The short,
tight mantoha are simultaneous with the period of “liberalization”
of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, coincident with the presidency
of Mr. Khatami. Although the headscarf has a stronger meaning
Figure 4.1 Everyday scene in Qaem passage, one of the popular commercial
centers in Tehran.
in the European imaginary of Islam, the manto is equally, if not

more, restrictive dress item. It is notable that during the above-
mentioned demonstrations of women against the wearing of the
headscarves, women did not set aside the manto, in spite of the
unbearable heat.
The rusari is one of the elements that attract one’s attention,
but may divert from other, more restrictive dress pieces like the
manto or the chador.
Either the very tight mantos, either the pataf trousers5, I think
that is significant that we have learned how to live with all the
existent imposition. I don’t know concerning the headscarf, but I
think we are so used to it that we forget it. (Saba, Iranian student
in Paris.)
Each of the small details counts enormously for the people who
wear manto, and for those around. Nevertheless, some may ques-
tion, as one of the interviewees, the limited possibilities offered by
the dress code in Tehran. Saba continues her explanations:
The stores became more intelligent, maybe because there is more
attention to the way of dressing; they are waiting a little to see
what is the tendency in fashion, and than hop! They make all the
same things. I am really looking forward to seeing what will they
invent next year. How can you manage with only two pieces, the
manto and the foulard? We have had the fashion of very large
manto, than the short and tight ones, what more can one do?
5 Fashionable trousers with a generous cut at the lower part of the leg, hence
the name “patte d’elephant” or “pataf ”, meaning elephant foot.
Spaces, Dress, Places

In Iran, as in other parts of the world6, sartorial changes are
political markers, and since the beginning of the Reza Shah mod-
ernization, each change in regime has been marked by changes in
dress requirements. While before the active modernizing policy the
infusion western clothing in Iran happened by way of traveling,
and was sanctioned on religious grounds, after coming to power
Reza Shah imposed a strict dress code for men and women alike,
which included forced unveiling for women, and wearing of west-
ern suits and hats for men.Chehabi (1993) identifies this process
with modern nation building in Iran.
After 1981, the victory of the Islamic Revolution has been
quickly marked by the imposition of the Islamic dress code in exte-
rior spaces, the veil becoming compulsory for women. The people
in Tehran do not equally invest in these spaces, and women’s dress
is a sensitive marker of the different use of spaces. In fact, generally
speaking, clothes are the physical bound between the body and the
social space; they are a prime mediator of human relations; they
construct a link between architectural context and the bodies that
populate it. The feeling that one is “out of place” is mainly born
out of the anxieties provoked by dress and style that is, by self-fash-
ioning. Thus, “place” is a network of relations7 rather than a simple
space and dress is one main element in the formation of a place.
6 Turkey’s politics of voluntary modernization in the XXth Century was
marked by strict impositions of western dress codes. A century before,
Europe marked the passage to the burgeois discipline of work with men’s
three pieces suit.
7 Mbembe defines a similar concept of place drawing from Michel de Certeau :
“In fact, a place is the order according to which elements are distributed in
relationships of coexistence. A place, as Michel de Certeau points out, is an
instantaneous configuration of positions.” (Mbembe 2002: 260).
Figure 4.2 Tehran young chic, Spring 2003
In the multitude of exterior spaces of Tehran, the wearing of

headscarf and manto is compulsory, but there is a continuous ne-
gotiation concerning the “permissiveness” of dressing, negotiation
that is definitory of a place. There is a relation between the space
(home, the street, a commercial gallery, a coffee shop, or an art
gallery), the dress, the company in which one may find herself, the
moment of the day, and the bodily postures. This assemblage forms
different regimes of dress.
The street is the place most exposed to the gaze of others, and
to undesired control. It is interesting to note that, while usually one
thinks about the sidewalk of a big city as a space where one’s pres-
ence passes unacknowledged, in Tehran it is not the case. While
walking in the city, one is surprised, if not disturbed, by the insis-
tence of the gaze in others’ eyes. Both some of my Iranian women
interviewees, and my French women colleagues talked about the
unpleasant pressure they feel on the street, even if they are dressed
completely in conformity with the rules. The multitude of glancing
eyes on the sidewalk transforms it in a diffusely controlled space.
I wondered many times about the emphasis on the expression
of others’ eyes, and I have to recognize how I, on more than one
occasion, found myself bothered by the insistent looks on others
faces, in spite of my efforts to ignore them. In her book on Beauty
Salons, Ossman (2002) observes how reciprocal control through
gaze functions as an organizing principle of the public spaces she
studied. The look on others’ faces is a source of constant control of
one’s own appearance and actions. According to Shahshahani (in
press), concern about others’ judgments is an emotion that explains
social behavior in Iran, and it constitutes a strong control mecha-
nism with political consequences. Hamid Naficy argues along the
same lines, stating that in Iran and other non-Western locations
the construction of self is “not fully individuated or unified as it
SPACES, DRESS, PLACES 151
is purported to be in the West, but is thought to be familial and

communal” (Naficy 2003: 139) (See also Chapter 5). He pushes
forward the analysis, concentrating on the grammar of looks. The
author argues that, in Iran, a particular mode of self-constitution,
which revolves around the question of modesty as social practice,
accounts for a dynamic of averted looks in gender interactions.
Due to the sexual tension present in any gendered interaction, di-
rect gazes are avoided, securing thus gender segregation even in
un-segregated spaces. It also constitutes a system of reciprocal sur-
veillance based on “controlling the look and being controlled by
the look”(Naficy ibid. 140). The author argues that the specific dif-
ference of this type of control from that imagined by Bentham and
explained by Foucault is the reciprocity implied in the exchange of
glances. While Naficy basis his analysis on gender dynamic in film
representations, the exterior space of the street in Tehran engages
a similar dynamic, with an emphasis on surveillance and control
of women’s bodies. This emphasis, I will argue, is the result of new
forms of political subjectivation in the Islamic Republic.
This point is exemplified with a series of ethnographic observa-
tions. A woman in her late twenties (Mahtab) explained to me the
way in which the dress code was imposed in exterior spaces imme-
diately after the Islamic Revolution.
Because during the first years of the revolution, people my age,
or maybe older, would come out on the street and surveyed other
people, really strong. If you would have little hair out of your ru-
sari, or red painted nails, they would arrest you. If we are think-
ing now, we do not know how we could live this way. We forgot.
And there was a very strong propaganda: anybody could impose
the Islamic code on the street. “Do good deeds, and stop the
evil”, or “Commit the right and Forbid the Wrong”.
In this passage one can see the strictness of the code; each sign
of feminine aesthetic (painted nails, hair) was considered an offense
to the new established order and its good morals. The repressive
apparatus just in place would appeal to the new sense of citizenship
in order to enforce and maintain the order. The appeal addressed
to all citizens “Do good deeds and stop the evil” is a subtle mode of
empowering the people through their participation in the control
apparatus. In this manner power is diffused into the social body, a
power that, at the same time as it represses certain habits, produces
its very subjects: new types of citizens. Further on, Mahtab talks
about the new apparatus in place, the official patrols that survey
public spaces:
There were night patrols of the committee, with cars painted
around in green. Or [there were] three women with chador, ar-
resting women, or men to arrest men. We all lived through this,
and the propaganda really entered in the head of the people, that
today we do not know where this is coming from, but it really
entered in the morality of people that now are used to judge oth-
ers. We became accustomed to judge others all the time. There
has been only five years since this has stopped .
There are some interesting elements showing the complexity
of the ways in which the new order was established: the cars with
green insignia, signs with direct reference to Islam, green being the
color that signifies goodness and life8; the segregation of sexes dur-
ing the process of surveying and arresting, a proof of the generaliza-
tion of this segregation in all sectors of life. The modern panopti-
cal mode of surveillance, impersonal and embodied by the new
moral police systematically actualized and integrated modesty and
reciprocal surveillance into its own body. The new morals and the
8 See below for a discussion on the color significations.
“habit of judging others” appeared in the population, and diffused

through daily practices, thus giving birth to a new type of control,
legitimated through the modern form of participant citizenship.
While this may be more satisfactory than a only culturalist ex-
planation which would emphasize solely the tradition of modesty
in Muslim contexts, it should be understood as an element within
a larger context. As many studies point out the question of gender
and citizenship in the Middle East is traversed by the overarch-
ing patriarchal hegemony (Joseph 2000). The Islamic Revolution
in Iran gives the patriarchal domination in Iran the modern form
of citizenship. Through the family code, Hoodfar (2000) argues,
women are relegated the place of second class citizens, impeding
thus their empowerment by means of other achievements (i.e. edu-
cation and social mobility). However, through its very modernity,
the Islamic regime in Iran gives women an array of forms of contes-
tation of the hegemonical patriarchy (Paidar 1996).
The different dress regimes in Tehran are partially expressions
of the patriarchal power dynamic with regard to women’s empow-
erement. The intensity of this control varies in different regions of
the city. For example, in the streets of Northern Tehran, or around
the commercial galleries frequented by middle and upper classes,
one may expect that the pressure of another’s gaze be less intense or
differently charged. People may look at each other to “check out”
the new fashionable styles, not to mention the search for a suit-
able partner. Once one moves towards the South, in the residential
areas of lower classes, chador-wearing is rather the norm, and the
gaze is heavy and insistent. Incidentally, in the South the religious
observance is more frequent. The imposed segregation between
women and men may also contribute to the persistent insistence of
looking. And it is notable that in the north this segregation is less
enforced, one may find more spaces to mingle, such as shopping

galleries and cafés.
On my first visit to Shah Abdel Azim (a famous neighborhood in
the South), a friend residing in Northern Tehran accompanied me.
We were supposed to meet up with her sister (Sybil) and some of
her colleagues. My friend was wearing a light-colored though large,
manto, and sandals. At the moment we descended from the taxi the
deprecatory gaze of men and women alike struck me. Although I
somehow expected this, her sister’s reaction at the moment we met
took me by complete by surprise. After she glared in awe for three
seconds, Sybil started admonishing her sister at length for her man-
ner of dressing: “how can you come like this in Shah Abdel Azim?!
Are you out of your mind?!” Sybil acted in concordance with the
specificity of the space. Had we been anywhere in the North of the
City, she would have rather admired the clothes of her sister. Sybil
and her friends were themselves dressed in rather large and colorless
mantos, brown cotton pants, and sport shoes. The most scandalous
fact about my friend’s dress was the naked feet, and the visible paint-
ed toenails. Feet are one of the single visible parts of the body once
one wears a chador, hence they are invested with erotic signification.
One may note the similarity with the Romantic period in Europe,
when thin ankles were symbols of beauty and eroticism, while long
elaborate dress covered the rest of the body.
The degree of body-covering varies with location but also with
the company present. Each time I have met one of my future inter-
viewees, mainly in cafés, she was making a gesture of rearranging
the russari, taking it off for a second or two, time enough for me
to admire her hairstyle. The gesture was repeated along the con-
versation. I have observed the same manner among other women
sitting in coffee shops, and restaurants. An episode that took me by
surprise occurred during an outing with several friends in Tehran,
Radis a young man, and Irandokht a young woman. Radis was

driving, and we listened to his choice of music: Iron Maiden; while
on the freeway, Irandokht let her rusari fall on her shoulders; Radis
discreetly but firmly asked her to put the headscarf back on. At first
blush I wondered if there were more than a friendship relation be-
tween them, but found out that there was not. On later occasions, I
have again seen Irandokht uncovering her hair in taxis but in these
instances the driver did not react in the same way as Radis.
One may give many interpretations to Radis’s gesture. The most
obvious being that he was afraid of, or rather that he was trying to
protect his friend from, a possibly unpleasant encounter with pas-
darha. I later came to understand that that was not the whole story.
It is interesting to think about Irandokht’s gesture in terms of the
particular contexts in which it had been repeated. One is Radis’s
car, a private bubble moving on a public freeway. The second is a
taxi, a “place” that offers the same privacy as a private owned car,
but with the added anonymity of relations within. Radis acted as
a source of male authority in a familiar place, while the diffuse
authority in the exterior spaces of Tehran was less present in the
relative isolation of a taxi moving 70 km per hour. Although the
taxi driver may have glanced with reproach in the rear-view mirror,
once or twice, his gaze does not have the same weight as that of the
hundreds of eyes one confronts on the street. It must be noted that
Radis has no objection to Irandokht’s unveiling in private homes.
But I have also noted that in similar situations, familiar men alert
their women friends or relatives in the event that the veil fall off9.
At the same time, I have met individuals who, in my presence,
9 In a study on veiling of Tuareg men, (Murphy 1994) observes how in
situations of relative anonymity the veil is worn very loosely, while it is
strictly enforced among the in-groups. As in the case exposed here, the in-
group authority is easier to exercise.
would keep on their rusari, regardless of whether the space was ex-
terior or interior (e.g. homes). One notable case is a student I have
seen on successive occasions. After we had seen each other three
or four times in different contexts, she stopped wearing her rusari
when with me, but kept her manto on. She later confessed that she
does not consider her body beautiful enough to be shown.
Space and company are thus important elements in the way
women dress, and, differently from men, the control of their bod-
ies through dress is stricter. As Neda said, attention to others is
what defines one’s mode of behavior and dress. While talking
about dressing, as she explained to me regretfully, she was unable
to wear all she wants at all time. My tentative question was tellingly
interrupted:
A : Are there any places in which you can...
Neda : Be free ? I suppose you can in your own community. I
mean I have some good friends, and they have been abroad, and
they have similar thinking, I mean ... We meet at our places, we
have gatherings, not parties, I am not one of those partying all
time, we just like to seat around, and talk, yeah... good people.
Dressing and freedom are many times associated in discourse,
but not in the simplistic formulation that “fashionable Western
dress equals freedom”. Instead, for example, freedom of movement
for women in exterior spaces may mean dressing for invisibility,
as Adelkhah (1991) shows in her exploration of veiling practices
after the Islamic Revolution: veiling offers women the possibility to
move rather freely in the exterior spaces. It thus gave a lot of them
the possibility to take up jobs outside their homes, since the male
authority figure of the family could not object anymore to their
leaving the house. The issue of being invisible as a means to be free
in exterior places came out repeatedly in connection with clothes
throughout my conversations. “Dressing down”, in faded colors, or
in conformity with the Islamic moral rules, grants women the lib-
erty of passing through places without being noticed, receiving im-
polite comments from passers-by, or the risk of being stopped and
questioned by the pasdarha. Thus, invisibility gives a general feeling
of security, necessary to the freedom of movement for women in
different regimes of dress in Tehran.
It is important to observe that police checks for dress-code en-
forcement have decreased compared to the years immediately after
the Islamic Revolution. The structure of different dress regimes is
characterized by a diffuse set of norms of proper dressing emerging
from the practices of each place in the city, unique to the particular
people occupying that space, their class position, moral concerns,
and aesthetic convictions. In fact each place has its own (moral)
Figure 4.3 Women on the street in Northern Tehran.

definition of what is appropriate, and “freedom” is constructed in

direct relation with this definition. Even more so than the moral
police, the daily practices engrained in every place constitute a tool
for surveilling women’s dressing habits, which is cast as the ulti-
mate expression of the place’s morality. Desires for the freedom to
move about freely and to wear what one desires often come into
direct conflict in a context where the freedom to move is bound up
with the necessity of dressing against one’s desire.
Dress, morality, and space are thus intertwined in the definition
of a place. Due to the diffuse control of exterior spaces, and to the
desire for mobility that is achieved through invisibility, women’s
dress colors are reduced in their specter.
Saba: Here we prefer faded colors, because there are many re-
strictions, and we are wearing a lot of black because it is less in
the gaze of others, it is less visible. Anyway, in the last years this
changed.
A : Yes, I have seen colored things.
Saba : Not really colored, but rather brown, beige, crème, green-
gray... you do not really see colors.
While my first sojourn in Tehran began at the end of the winter,
my second one started in full summer. In spite of this I have been
surprised by the limited, if any, variation in the colors of women’s
dress on the street, from season to season. However, oher regimes
of dress permitted seasonal changes marked on dress’s color.
In Tehran trendy boutiques, commercial spaces, restaurants and
coffee shops are closed spaces, mall-like constructions called pasaj
(from the French term). These are exterior spaces with a specific
dress regime. While on the busy streets of Tehran it is less common
to see broad color variation in women’s dress, such variety is often
encountered in the pasajha. The moral police rarely enters these
spaces. Some commercial galleries developed their own system of

surveillance/protection. Women (and seldom men) employees of
the gallery, dressed “in civvies”, may approach other women who
may be too “daring” in exposing their hair or legs. Without the
threat of arrestat, they recommend a rearrangement of the garment
and a lowering of voices, if this is the case. This “light” form of
surveillance protects the space for undesirable moral police con-
trols that may end up in closing off of the commercial space. The
pattern of clothing and dress’s colors can be understood in light of
urbanization in Tehran. Most people who tend to frequent these
spaces are part of the middle or upper classes of Tehran, and gen-
erally own a car, or can easily afford a private taxi. The ability to
move from, and through private enclosures (apartment, car) to the
desired destination, allows one to avoid more restrictive regimes of
dress, and thus to experiment more freely with ones clothing. Like
the Parisian arcades project that created spaces for the projection
of the bourgeois fantasy, and for the subjectivation of the emerg-
ing bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century (Benjamin et. al, 1994;
Buck-Moors, 1991), the commercial galleries in Tehran are spaces
of subjectivation for middle and upper classes through the exercise
of consumption and attitudes associated with Western style. They
are also spaces for exploration of the margins of the overarching
patriarchal state project, within the same modern project of the
Islamic Republic.
Mitra, a young woman in her late twenties, complained about
the impossibility of wearing her nice blue manto while going alone
through Azadi Square, because there are many “workers” (amalleh).
I asked her what does she meant by “workers”, and she answered:
“you know, somebody can be a doctor, but still be an amalleh in his
mind”, thus implying the degree to which class is seen as engrained
and consequently, the necessary correspondence of social attitude
Figure 4.4 Everyday scene in Golestan passage. Note the replacing of head-
scarves with hats, and that of the roopoosh with a poncho.
to social class. Class, taste, and tolerance to women’s clothing style

are intermingled. In the summer of 2003, the fashionable color for
manto was beige, while next summer white and light blue mantoha
were popular.
To this point the intertwining of human relations, space, and
class in the construction of a place marked by women’s dressing
comes into view. Based on an acknowledgement of this dynamic,
a classification of spaces is possible. Four exterior regimes of dress
define four categories of exterior spaces: the exterior spaces of ef-
fective surveillance, in which most of the women prefer to dress
for invisibility (i.e. streets, shared taxis, public transportation, and
parks). Secondly, and somewhat in opposition to these, are the
Figure 4.5 Choosing the fashionable headscarf. Note the contrast between
different colors and style of the roopoosh
spaces of relative decreased surveillance such as private taxis, cof-

fee shops, commercial galleries, or cinemas. Circulation through
these enclosures partially protects one both from the pasdarha sur-
veillance and from the diffused social control. Third, institutional
environments (school campuses, banks, tribunal, television, etc.)
which usually have a special dress requirement, as previously dis-
cussed. The fourth type of exterior space is a special category of seg-
regated space, or venues reserved exclusively for women: women’s
gym halls, swimming pools, etc.
In addition to these, I have identified three types of interior
dress regimes definitory of interior spaces, such as private fashion
Figure 4.6 Shopping scene; note different headscarf positions of the women
in the picture.
showrooms, private parties or reunions, and the everyday inside

life.
The categorization of spaces chosen reveals the different levels
of tolerance towards women’s dress, and the multiplicity of fac-
tors informing women’s choices regarding their dress. The degree
of familiarity with others sharing a space often shapes the women’s
revealing or covering of the body. Familiarity does not however
always function in a straightforward way, but rather depends on
the context within which it exists. For example while in an interior
space familiarity may contribute to taking off the rusari and man-
toha, in exterior spaces a familiar male authority may impose the
“correct” dress. Obversely, the presence of unfamiliar figures in pri-
vate spaces may oblige covering, while at the same time the absence
of familiar persons in an exterior space may allow more freedom of
movement (e.g. less imposed restriction).
It is also notable that exterior spaces of relatively decreased sur-
veillance are also generally spaces of consumption. Urban culture,
as it was first defined and described by Simmel (1971) is character-
ized by annonymity and consumption. Consumption in Tehran car-
ries the message of modernity, and dress is the material link with a
cosmopolitan imaginary. All spaces of decreased surveillance are not
however necessarily also spaces of consumption, and reversely, not
all spaces of consumption are spaces of relatively decreased surveil-
lance or anonimity. On the Tehran’s North-South axis, the intensity
of diffuse patriarchal social control varies. In the South of Tehran,
the diffuse surveillance and patriarchal social control increases greatly
(i.e. the Bazaar, albeit a commercial space towards the South, has a
regime of dress similar to the busy streets rather than to shopping
galleries of the North).
Class, religious attitude, taste, location, company are some of the
many elements that re-organize space, thus challenging any attempt
to clearly demarcate and contrast exterior spaces as “controlled” and

the interior as “free”. That is because the rules against which this
“freedom” defines itself discursively do not exclusively apply to ex-
terior spaces nor are they inapplicable to interior spaces. Rather, the
notion of “freedom” cuts transversally through these spaces; because
the modalities of surveillance and control within the spaces vary; and
persons incessantly traverse these spaces, cutting across the imagi-
nary and material borders, carrying on their bodies both the expres-
sion and the subversion of the patriarchal domination that claim
legitimacy from Islamic Republican citizenship. While driving with
a woman friend for the first time, she showed me the backseat of
her car. I saw three different headcovers, a maqnae, a dark headscarf,
and a light one. She explained to me that in the same day she has
to be in different places and she prefers to be prepared for each of
them. These dynamic regimes of dress described above, definitory
of Tehran’s urban spaces that combine different types of surveillance
and control, are all expression of the intersection between a repertoire
of modernity (fashion practices as aesthetic forms of self-expression)
and a specific configuration of power that combines patriarchy and
state control. This can be conceptualized as the matrix of subjectiva-
tion in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Fashion, Time, Consumption

While still in Paris, my friends and colleagues were almost
always surprised hearing about myresearch subject: “fashion in
Tehran!? Is there such a thing?” Once I arrived in Tehran, some
of my interviewees had similar reactions. A young designer (Said)
told me he is working in a domain that does not exist. Said insisted
that, because of the restrictions in place, one may not talk about
“real” fashion here. And what is fashion after all? In the words of
my interviewees, fashion is often equated with modernity:
FASHION, TIME, CONSUMPTION 165
Fashion! Means fresh, means new! Something different from

the past. Means modern. Many different meanings. (Mahla,
designer), or in a more pragmatic definition : Fashion ? Great !
(laughs) Love it ! You know, Johnny Galliano, I like his style... Or
Vivienne Westwood, I like her and her work. Some other ones,
I cannot just think now. Victoria Secrets (laughs). Underwear, I
just love underwear... (Neda, scenograph).
In this excerpt there is a sum of characteristics that link fashion
and modernity. First, there is the temporal quality of fashion, as
expressed above: “something different from the past”. Mahla op-
poses the modern present and its ever-refreshing fashion to the
“traditional” past. Another characteristic of fashion implied is a di-
versification of styles. In this formulation, fashion requires a variety
of forms of expression, all catalogued and labeled in a system of
categories, not unlike the modern modes of scientific classification.
It is very likely that the seeming monotony in exterior dress (e.g.
the seeming uniform aspect of the mantoha, and the uniformity in
colors imposed mainly by the urban culture in Tehran) contributed
to my interviewees doubts about the existence of “fashion” in their
city. This doubt can however also be considered in the light of the
equation of fashion with modernity (both in theory and in every-
day discourse), and the confinement of “modernity” to Western
spaces. This is the type of discourse that falls in the category of
“self-othering”.
A widespread argument in fashion theory links the creation of
the modern individual with the emergence of a new social phenom-
enon that later became known as fashion. The historical process of
modernization, as exposed by Elias (1994), and the creation of the
public space as a scene (Jervis 1999), brought about a new form
of the individual, characterized by, among other things, the use of
fashion as an expression of individuality (Sennett 1994; Simmel
1971). The switch from dress to fashion is both simultaneous and

intimately linked with new ideas about the modern individual. The
modern individual being a person able to participate in public life,
frees her/himself from the constrictions of traditions, and live in the
present, oriented toward the ‘progressive’ future. This particular re-
lation with time, anticipatory that is, is present both in the process-
es of creation and consumption. Creation anticipates desire, while
consumption searches to anticipate creation; generally speaking,
the fashion-oriented individual is aware about what will be a new
trend, and through consumption s/he expresses this anticipation.
For the argument here, it is important to emphasize two aspects of
fashion: its historical and discursive link with modernity, and its
capacity (and necessity) to introduce a specific practical calendar,
which expresses an anticipatory relation with time and desire.
In Tehran the obligation of observance of hijab, or modesty,
is constantly reminded in exterior spaces, with banners, stickers,
bearing inscriptions reading “hidjab is dignity”. One of the most
poetic of these inscriptions hangs on the wall of a chic coffee shop
near the Vanak commercial center: “the veil on a woman’s face is
like the drops of water on a rose”. However, Tehran is a cosmo-
politan, interconnected city, part of the global scircuit of images ad
commodities. Satellite TV broadcasts, the internet, travel abroad,
and the seasonal visits back and forth to relatives from the Iranian
Diaspora make up some of the innumerable sources of desirable
images of dress, fashion, and body aesthetics. The clothing market
in Tehran both creates and adapts to the desire of its consumers.
For ready-to-wear clothes there are about twelve chic shopping gal-
leries (pasajha) in Tehran, each with a variety of boutiques carrying
a range of brand names, from: Esprit, Mango, Zara, and Levi’s, to
Armani, Yves Saint Laurent, and Pierre Cardin (!). Local brands
are in less demand by women shoppers. There are five main local
brand names for women’s ready-to-wear, listed in order of their

quality (as conceived by the owner of an Esprit boutique): Yakend,
Golchineh, Aryan Jeans, Iran cotton, Iran tafteh. Besides fashion-
ably cut mantoha, these brands also offer various clothing articles,
from trousers to tops and jackets. For men, the two famous local
brands are e-cut and Hakoupian.
Foreign brand name boutiques have a special status among
shoppers. Untill March 2002, Iranian economic laws, conceived
for the protection of internal producers, forbid the importation of
any finished clothing product for commercial purposes. The quasi-
totality of ready-to-wear bearing foreign names (mostly produced
in Turkey), are introduced on the internal market in a clandestine
way. The two main ports-sources of foreign clothing are Istanbul
and Dubai.
While window-shopping in the Tajrish passage, I entered a
store that had on display, besides the usual roopoosh and jeans,
some turkeman fabrics and a handmade bag similar to those I have
seen in the Joomeh Bazaar (the Friday Flee Market). The boutique
owner recognized me. I was surprised, because I did not remember
our meeting. Even more surprising was that, as he explained “we
were in the same airplane coming from Istanbul”, a trip which took
place six months prior to this meeting. The recognition prompted
our conversation about my project, his business (which he was ea-
ger to discuss), and a pair of trousers I was interested in buying. He
(Reza) was wearing a white t-shirt, jeans, two hip rings on his fin-
gers, and remains the only person I have seen in Tehran to have his
eyebrow pierced. Since Reza opened his business six years ago, he
has gone to Istanbul on a regular base, every three to four months,
in order to choose the clothing he wants for his boutique. Besides
the usual jeans, t-shirts and tops, he buys a number of mantoha.
Reza (and the other vendors) have to give special orders for the
mantoha, so to fit Iranian standards. “The Turkish mantoha have

shorter sleeves, and we cannot sell them here. So we order special
for Iran, with long sleeves.” It is interesting to remark the similarity
with the policy of Parisian designers, who have to adapt their cre-
ations to fit the standards of their Middle Eastern clients, with re-
gards to the degree of body covering. All the roopoosh Reza sells are
made in Turkey, including the ones that display the brands Mango
and Zara. But, as he further explains “the Zara Mango mantoha are
kare batchahaye irani” that is “Iranian kid’s work”. He means that
the models are ordered by and for Iranians to the Mango and Zara
workshops. For this reason, the prices are quite high, comparable
to Western prices, and they cannot therefore afford to order too
many. While the Turkish brands offer discounts for buying large
quantities, the two Western brands do not offer wholesale pricing.
The time period between purchasing the clothing to their ar-
rival in Tehran is approximately three weeks. Having been given
the restrictions on clothing importation, there are two methods
used to purchase and import clothing. The first is to personally
buy the clothes, and give the packages to persons in transportation
networks in Istanbul. From there, the clothes are loaded into buses
or trucks, and brought to the Iranian border. Caravans of donkeys
transport them across the porous border (through the mountains)
where they are received by the Iranian counterparts, and brought
into Tehran. The price of this transportation makes up 35 % of
the value of the clothing at the time of purchasing. This modality
is risky, and not Reza’s preference. The risk of having the clothes
seized by the border authorities is quite high, and, although Reza
was “very lucky” up to now, a neighboring store had their transport
seized four times in the last two years. A way to reduce this risk is
to rely on the transportation network for the actual buying of the
clothes. Although this increases the costs of the order, it does not
endanger the buyer’s capital in the case of transport seizing. For

this alternative method, Reza goes to Istanbul, chooses the clothing
he wants to bring, and gives the order to one of the persons in the
transportation network. They buy the clothes at their own expense,
and bring them to Tehran. At the moment of the arrival, Reza pays
the value of the order, plus 45-50 % of this value. In this way, Reza,
and other boutique owners, manage the risk by adding 10-15% to
the cost of their order.
A young man is bringing us hot water in plastic disposable
glasses and two tea bags with some pieces of hard sugar in a plastic
bag. We sip the tea, and watch the clients entering the store. The
times I passed in different boutiques revealed a common shopping
pattern among women clients. Women come in groups of two or
three, sometimes larger; mother-daughter couples are very com-
mon, and in these instances, it is usually the daughter who chooses
the clothes. The client-vendor interaction seems to be quite stan-
dard: the woman asks for a model; the vendor shows her a variety
of models, and if she chooses one, she asks for the price. After she
has tried on the clothing (and if she is interested in purchasing)
she again asks for the price, thus entering in the informal price
negotiation. The vendor asks another vendor or the buyer herself
“chi goftam?” He recalls the initial price, and then offers a reduced
new price.
I tried on the trousers I had asked for, and asked their price.
Reza said “1 200”, the equivalent of $ 15 (it was the sales period).
I said I would buy them, even though they were a little too long.
His helper immediately rolled the pants on the right size and took
them away. Every commercial gallery has some spaces, usually hid-
den from the public circuits, where two or three workshops make
the necessary modification to the ready-to-wear clothing, shorten-
ing sleeves or trousers; all this work is included in the selling price.
While the trousers were being altered, we continued our conversa-

tion. Reza told me about the rules that are in place for opening a
boutique. One of them is to not display an English name (that is
a name written with Latin alphabet10). “Here in this passage, they
closed three stores because of their name.” Police presence is usual,
and the agents check for the complying of the dress to the existing
codes (which are mostly contextual and arbitrary). Thus, Reza ex-
plains, in the beginning of the summer (when students commemo-
rated the 1999 riots in Tehran through street manifestations) police
came and said that white mantoha are forbidden. The vendors were
required to remove the white mantoha displayed from their stores
or risk having their boutique closed. Later in the summer, the po-
litical tension decreased, as did the rules, and the white mantoha
reappeared in boutiques and on the street.
We finished our tea by the time the trousers were completed.
I put them on to find that they fit perfectly. I asked again for the
price. Reza asked his partner “chi goftam?” and turned to me and
said, “for you 10 000” (about $ 12). I payed, we exchange phone
numbers, and arrange for a trip in the Turkmen region in order to
buy traditional textiles. He likes them a lot, and they sell well in
Tehran. Reza says that he is somewhat bored by the saturation of
the market with Turkish ready-to-wear. He considers changing his
focus towards Thailand, to import clothes from there. They are less
expensive, and the offer a different, more exotic style. This would
be an interesting development to follow, since it would some-
how mirror the diffusion of taste from high classes preferences for
10 One remarkable thing, among others, is that the Latin alphabet is called
English; in the popular imaginary, English language is the standard of any
foreign country, and I was asked not only once if in Romania (my country
of origin) the official language is English. Many times this question refered
to the alphabet we used, the Latin alphabet in fact.
Indian styles, to the middle classes, ready-to-wear European-style-

via-Turkey taste (see Chapter 6).
While one imports the Turkish made ready-to-wear from Istanbul,
European products are imported from Dubai. As another boutique
owner confirmed, from Turkey the borders are crossed by land. The
bags carrying the desired clothing I have seen can each accommodate
around fifty kilograms (about 100 pounds) of clothing, and they are
made of yellow plastic fabric. Turkey is the most important source of
women’s clothing, especially because they produce brand-name man-
to, e.g. Esprit, Zara, etc. Women are therefore able to aquire clothes
with both fashionable cut and prestigious brand names while main-
taining their conformity with the Tehran regimes of dresses. Turkish
made Zara mantoha on the Tehran clothing market are a perfect ex-
ample of prestige and fashionability added to Islamic dress.
Figure 4.7 Boutique displaying together the two marks of prestige in Tehran
From Dubai, dress travels by sea, in containers carrying other

commodities as well. The two important ready-to-wear European
clothing lines in Tehran are transported in this way. Mango and
Zara, Spanish brands that conquered the European market with
their relative accessibility and their policy of following closely the
fashion proposed by prestigious designers, became luxury products
in Tehran. Two factors contribute to their status: the dust of the
road and the salt of the Persian Gulf ’s waters leave their imprints
on the price tags; the route Paris/Dubai/Tehran adds some sixty to
eighty percent to their initial price. The clothing articles are less
accessible, and thus more prestigious. Second, and probably most
importantly, this dress comes from Europe, that is, the geographic
space in which fashion originates. For many of the people I have
talked to, Europe is the place of reference for everything “mod-
Figure 4.8 Boutiques during sales period, February-March 2003

ern”, from clothing style to models of behavior. The term kharegie,

meaning foreign or foreigner, is usually employed to designate the
European provenance of a product. It is also sometimes ironically
used to point to persons or behaviors adopting an Occidental style
perceived as overt ostentation, hilarious, or inappropriate (e.g. in-
sisting in eating with a fork and knife, while usually one uses a fork
and spoon).
The “fashion following” process induces everyday practices that
follow a specific calendar. Thus, for fashion, the year is divided into
two collections for the four seasons: spring/summer and fall/winter
collections. These moments are alternated by the periods of sales,
in Europe taking place in summer (July) and in winter (January).
In Tehran, the same seasonal calendar is followed by the ready-to-
wear boutiques, with one and a half month difference: summer
sales start in mid September and winter sales in mid February.
The fashion calendar in Tehran intersects with the lunar calen-
dar that establishes the religious events, influencing the practices of
fashion. For example, during the week of ashoora (the mourning
for Imam Hossein), wearing red on the street is completely forbid-
den. Colors are invested with strong meanings in the shi’a imagi-
nary. Due to the principle of modesty or hidjab, full bodied or
bright colors are not recommended for clothes. Faded colors, and
black are most common, and considered in conformity with the
above mentioned principle. Green is also a “good” color, signifying
life. Generally speaking, red is not a good color to wear, because it
stands opposed to what is good in shi’a imaginary. It mostly signi-
fies the blood of the martyrs, and during the ashoora it is readily
associated with Imam Hossein’s blood. More so, the murderer of
Hossein is always dressed in red, while Hossein in green. So red
magically disappears from clothing on the streets during that peri-
od. Also, any other expression of joy, like celebrations or parties, is
postponed during the week of ashoora. People avoid buying clothes

during this period.
Shopping galleries and boutiques in Tehran offer a relative syn-
chronization of styles with the world fashion, perceived both by my
interviewees and by myself. While still in Paris, Isabelle (a photog-
rapher who often travels to Tehran) told me about her amazement
when she saw the exact model of her coat which she bought in Paris
for her travel on the streets of Tehran.
Outside... If you go to Paris with trousers, a manto and a head-
scarf the effect is... You know, if you are wearing large coats in
Paris, we do it also here... I don’t know, there is a moment we
wore mid-length trousers in Paris, and at the same time we had
them here... First in the parties, and than on the street... (Saba)
The synchronization of ready-to-wear styles is made possible by
the commodity circuit explained above, doubled by the images of
body aesthetics traveling through media channels, and on the bod-
ies of those who move between Tehran and other locations. For the
consumers of fashion, in Tehran or anywhere else, timely acquisi-
tion of dress and style means tuning to the rhythm of modern life.
Fashion is the temporal indicator of “modernity”, of being “up to
date”. In Tehran, modernity has a variety of meanings, expressed
in daily practices, and the temporal synchronization with Europe
for those who follow fashion is highly important. One is modern if
one displays the lifestyle of a modern person, that is, a certain type
of clothing, car, places of frequentation, subjects of conversation,
mode of relating with others, etc. It is interesting to observe that
this type of modernity, defined by daily practices, does not neces-
sarily have a local reference, but rather evokes an imaginary cosmo-
politan space, in spite of the cosmopolitan aspect of Tehran itself.
The association of modernity and clothing is strong in Tehran, dis-
playing one’s fashionability is equated with one’s modern way of
thinking, or with his/her connection with cosmopolitan locations.

Modernity has its material expression in fashionable clothing, and
time is at the core of class distinction displayed through clothing,
the source of a feeling of being “in” or “out”.
In relation to commodities and fashioning oneself, there is a
pervasive feeling of inferiority with regards to Europe:
I think to follow fashion here is very very difficult, I mean to buy
stuff in Iran is very difficult, because there aren’t many shops and
fashion design. There is only one Mango, do you know MNG
Mango and Diesel11? But I do not buy anything from here. Every
time I go traveling, I just buy stuff. It is very very hard to buy,
but my opinion is because we do not see a lot of good stuff here,
we see on MTV or Fashion TV, and we do not have fashion
designers, all the girls and boys I think they copy. They copy too
much. They have to [buy] they do not have a choice. It is very
sad, actually. (Neda)
Nevertheless, this feeling is counterbalanced, among those who
lived in Europe for sometime, by a consciousness of increased care
for style and appearance of women in Iran. Many of my intervie-
wees told me about the way in which their clothing habits change
when they visit Tehran. Nafiseh, a clothing designer who lived in
Paris and came back confessed an increased care for clothing since
she has been back. Roxanne, a divorced woman of 40, who runs an
of interior design business, lived in Bruxelles before she came back
to Tehran eight years ago, explains:
I did not have a big wardrobe there. Since I am here, I feminize
more. The feminine parts of myself come out, and here we party
more, we go out more.
In direct reference to fashion, Saba said:
11 Mango and Diesel – European ready-to-wear brands.
Sometimes when I am in Paris I do not understand what fashion

is. When I come back to Tehran, I go to the showrooms, and I
understand what fashion is. In Paris it depends on the status of
the family, not everybody lives with Dior. But here if you have
a middle level, you know the people, you go to showrooms and
you understand that the girls know very well what fashion is.
One can understand in this fragment the relative shift of class
position that Saba experiences in accordance to her movement
from Paris to Tehran. The question of accessibility comes into play,
and the perception of “what counts as fashion” is directly linked with
her shifting status. While glamorous Paris is closed for an Iranian
student, Tehran offers her a wider accessibility to dress, to chic re-
unions and spaces, or to the designers of clothing themselves.
The particularity of Tehran urban spaces engender a series of
adaptation of dress practices, among which the most telling one is
the consumption of manto with brand names, and the continuous
changing in style, form, and colors of this piece of clothing. Urban
Tehran undeniably developed a proper clothing style, a fashion that
combines Islamic moral requirements with consideration linked
with a modern lifestyle – in the sense that is given by the inhabit-
ants of this city. Thus, wearing a manto and russari may not be op-
posed in a meaningful way to being fashionable, just as following
Islamic moral precepts may not be opposed to being modern. The
meaning of “modern” needs a deeper exploration, and the mode
in which it constructs itself as an exclusive category in relation to
Islam is a question that requires further analysis.
As suggested earlier in Chapter 3, all public spaces, regardless of
geographical location, are pervaded by tacit or explicit moral concerns;
however, if they are located in “the West” the morality is obscured by
the discourse on freedom and modernity. Simply, it seems that the
geographic location function as a decisive criteria in establishing the
degree of modernity of a place within the social imaginary. Less con-

cern is given to social practices, such as fashion, that may be indicators
of modern forms of social organization and self-expression. The con-
cept “repertoire of modernity” designates social organizations on mod-
ern basis outside Western hemisphere. While modernity is historically
linked with European development in the last two to three hundred
years, its social practices are generalized. Modernity is a rhyzomatic
occurence, people engaging with it in different degrees and creating
various “regimes of modernity” in different areas of the world.
In Tehran, both fashion designers and the ready-to-wear boutiques
introduce a sense of seasonal time marked by changes in the form and
colors of clothing. The private fashion presentations offer the occasion
to meet, see, and discuss the latest modes of fashioning ones body.
Shopping for clothing also serves as an important passtime for Iranian
women of all classes. Periodic shopping trips to renew ones wardrobe
is a must. Traditionally in Iran this happened once a year, around no-
rouz, the spring celebration of the New Year; a time for rejuvenation.
Through the seasonal collection and periodical sales, fashion multi-
plies the times of renewal, setting a canon of understanding oneself
differently in relation to time. The accelerated renovation of the self
through dress necessarily entails a particular conception of the self, al-
ways changing and yet the same.
Forms and colors of dress are synchronized with the canons of
Western fashion that arrive through various channels of communica-
tion: media, fashion journals, or directly carried on the bodies of the
Iranians residing outside the country. These constitute the many sourc-
es of aesthetic authority that contribute to giving the desired shape to
the bodies in Tehran social spaces. As fashion’s time intersects the reli-
gious calendar, aesthetic canons meet and intertwine with other sourc-
es for body and clothing discipline in Tehran. At their intersection we
may observe the redefinition of various spaces in new terms. Thus,
exterior spaces of consumption (pasaj) are more permissive to aesthetic

extravaganzas than other exterior spaces. In Tehran the degrees of state
surveilling and difuse social control are related to consumption spaces
and patterns. Streets and parks are spaces of total visibility, more prone
to diffuse surveillance and social control that decrease the feeling of
anonymity. The presence or absence of familiar figures may change the
shape of space and regulations of dress, especially for women. While al-
ways a valid separation, the categories of “inside” and “outside” do not
necessarily define spaces of liberty in dress for women. Other factors,
such as social position, spatial structure, and the presence of certain
persons can contribute to the shaping of the regimes of dress.
The borders between “in” and “out” are porous, and people em-
body the messages of an aesthetic modernity, with deep echoes in the
reorganization of daily life. The aesthetic cartography of the world
and its imaginary separation along the lines of modern/non-modern
(Balasescu 2003) are profoundly questioned by the social practice of
fashion in the non-western world. Next chapter constitutes an analysis
of gendering of spaces in one specific fashion practice: fashion shows.
Starting from the ethnographic description of two fashion events in
Tehran and respectively in Paris, it will explore the similarities and the
differences between the two approaches on gender segregation. The
following comparative description constitutes an illustration of the po-
rous borders between modern and non-modern as revealed by the spa-
tial structuration in the two cases. The chapter is also an introduction
to the world of fashion design in Tehran.
Chapter 5
Gendered Space and Fashion Catwalks:
Paris and Tehran
Fashion shows and showrooms are specific moments that brief-
ly invest time and space with the characteristics of fashion. Fashion
is usually associated with femininity, as are the spaces (and persons)
that revolve around fashion activities. Yet, in Paris and in Tehran
both fashion and femininity encounter two different modes of re-
lating to gender.
Gender segregation is a general requirement of Muslim moral-
ity. The headscarf is also an expression of this segregation, many
times a mode of introducing a private area around one’s body, as
Karimi (2003) has observed. In Tehran, locally organized fashion
showrooms both enforce and transgress this requirement. On the
other hand, in Paris, some fashion houses and retailers who acquire
Middle Eastern shoppers create a gender-segregated space in order
to accommodate their perception of their clients’ sensibilities.
Every fashion season Paris is the host of a showroom specially
organized for Middle Eastern clients – Mozaique. Every fashion
season, private fashion presentations take place in Tehran, in the
designers’ own quarters (see Chapter 6). The second public fashion
show in post-revolutionary Iran took place on October 1-3, 2003
and was organized by Mahla, a Tehran fashion designer. Mahla also
initiated and organized the first public show in January 2001. This
time, in 2003, the three daily shows spread over three days sold out
their total capacity of 18 000 seats. This chapter will explore the
similarities and the differences between the two approaches on gen-
der segregation and questions the imagined separation of modern
and non-modern along the lines of gender segregation practises.
180 5: GENDERED SPACE AND FASHION CATWALKS
Lotous Fashion Show

I closely followed the preparations of the 2003 Lotous fashion
show in Tehran, up to the day of the event. I was not however al-
lowed to attend any of the shows, as they were exclusively reserved
to women.
With the occasion of the show, various urban spaces of Tehran
have been differently invested through advertising. The event venue
was “Hijab Basketball Hall”, a women’s sport center located near
Hotel Laleh. Samsung was the main sponsor of the event, followed
by Parsol (an eyewear brand) and Guerlain. Lotous House adver-
tised the show through newspapers advertisements, posters around
the city, and in the ticket vending points.
Figure 5.1 Advertising banner for Lotous Fashion Show, Tehran, September
2003
LOTOUS FASHION SHOW 181
On the streets of Tehran there

were two big banners, both on
Vali Asr boulevard, one not far
from Tajrish square in the North
of Tehran, the other one placed
near the Jaam e Jam food court,
where I spent many hours of ob-
servation. The posters at various
ticket vending points were of stan-
dard A3 size, displaying a model
in Lotous designed dress, with her
head covered by a turban, along-
side the necessary information for
the show. The tickets cost 50 000 Figure 5.2 Advertising banners for
rials (about $ 7, a relatively ex- Samsung at the Hijab Basketball
pensive price for a middle income Hall. September 2003
person whose monthly income is
averaged around $ 100).
The relative flexibility of fashion time in Tehran was also ex-
pressed in the scheduling of this event. Lotous fashion show had
been originally scheduled for August 18th-20th, but was postponed
due to the death of Mahla’s father. A month before the show Mahla
was practically unreachable. She was preoccupied with securing nec-
essary approvals for the show, the site, and the banners to advertise
for the event. The advertising banner was taken from the cover of
Lotous magazine no.1, with text to describe the event, time, venue,
and cost. The graphic presentation required the approval of the cen-
sorship commission for cultural events. Although the banners were
already posted in two exterior locations in Tehran, Mahla only ob-
tained the final signatures necessary at the eve of the show itself.
The interior venue was pre-

pared accordingly. For the show,
the local Samsung advertising
team prepared a series of special
banners and designed the catwalk.
Photos for the banners had been
taken at Mahla’s place two eve-
nings before the show. The pho-
tographic session lasted about two
hours. At ten in the morning of
the first show, the venue was in
full preparation for the event. Six
enormous banners with Samsung
telephones photographed against a
Figure 5.3 Lotous catwalk ready
background of textile and jewelry
for use. Tehran September 2003
covered the basket hoops, three on
each side of the court. The ban-
ners also happened to covers the framed photographs of the two
leaders of the revolution, the Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei.
A twenty-five meter long catwalk was installed in the middle
of the court. At my arrival, the stage was covered with old kilims
(Iranian traditional carpets); two men came and rolled on a big car-
pet, and I wondered if this will be the final design for the catwalk.
The whole setting was finally covered by a white plastic surface, on
which the Samsung staff stuck two Samsung logos, one on each
side of the catwalk. The kilims underneath secured a smooth sur-
face for the models to walk on, while the white Samsung branded
surface gave the stage a modern allure.
The hard surface of Parisian catwalks evokes an image of purity
in which the model is completely separated and autonomous from
the environment, the representation of the monadic individual,
walking on a stage that is completely separate from its own body.

Walking on a white surface doubled by a carpet obscures the con-
toured the border between the feet (or the shoes) and the stage. The
contours of the model are blurred (the various layers of dress adds
to this impression), and the steps are amortized by the smoothness
of the kilims underneath.
A model walking on a hard surface needs to be light, to give
the impression of legerity and separation from the stage. The past
is absent, the individual is distinct from it, the contact between its
feet and the catwalk marks this separation. The model is the ideal
representation of a “[…wo]man touched by Enlightenment and
European civilization, [a wo]man who has ‘cut himself [herself ]
off from the soil and the roots among his [her] people’ as they say
nowadays.” (Dostoyevsky, 1982)
The soft surface of the Samsung branded catwalk contains both
the signs of a desired modernity (branded by Samsung), and the
underlying tradition represented by the invisible kilims. The sepa-
ration from the “traditional past” is not complete (but where is it
ever complete?), but it is rendered invisible.
When I asked an Iranian friend if she thought that Tehran is
modern, she answered me with a firm “no”, explaining that people
live in constant awareness of the judgments of others – an awareness
which shapes actions, and social interactions. The prioritizing of
social pressure over one’s own will is at the core of her formulation;
as she put it, Tehran’s un-modernity expressed through peoples’ fol-
lowing others’ will rather than their own. In her description, the
“un-separated selves” render modernity impossible. Individuals are
not separated from one another, nor are they separated from the
past, which contrasts the logic of modern perpetual recreation that
supposes a break with the past. On the catwalk, models’ bodies are
not separated from the catwalk’s surface, but are rather accommo-
dated by the carpet underneath.
The basketball hall was gradually transformed into a space adapt-
ed to the fashion show presentation: the exits for models have been
ornamented with big heavy kilims, the catwalk was in place, the
lights checked, and the advertising banners displayed. Particularly
interesting in the setup were the Parsol banners of models (head-
shot only) without headscarves – an image which is forbidden for
advertising in Iran’s public spaces (see the following discussion on
photography). Although a special commission is charged with sur-
veying and approving the banners on public display, the space of
Hejab Basketball Hall as an exclusive feminine space (for the show)
is able to bypass the effects of this surveillance.
During the preparations I asked a male photographer if he
would be allowed to attend the show. He regretfully said “No, it
is only for women. Jomhouri Eslami... (Islamic Republic)”. The
‘public’ of this space is exclusively feminine; the hall thus became a
segregated space, allowing the display of unveiled women models.
Lighting is another resource used for separating spaces. As in
most public events the public is in the shadow of the light that
illuminates the event actors (in our case models). For the Lotous
fashion show, the lights also accomplished another important task.
Since the event takes place into a relatively small basketball hall, the
public seats are not separated in sections, and do not therefore offer
the intimacy of, for example, a VIP lounge. Nevertheless, as Mahla
told me, important persons (i.e. persons from the political echelon
or who are linked through kinship relations with important cler-
ics, and who constitute a part of Lotous House’s clientele) have a
special seating area with feeble lighting. This secures their desire of
invisibility among the public.
Spatial segregation was also in operation before the show. A

special moment constituted the arrival of the models, about four
hours before the first défilé was scheduled. Among them, Mahla’s
daughter arrived, carrying a plastic bag with the make-up kit. After
being introduced to the president of Gas Jeans, an Italian brand,
who was present for some fifteen minutes in the hall, the models
went directly behind the kilim curtains, in the changing room. The
space was prepared accordingly. There was one hall that had a large
room on the left hand side, with a closed door, in which the entire
collection of dress has been already arranged on hangers. On the
other side of the hall there is the restroom. A staircase just in front,
stuck to the windowed wall. A bench was setup near the staircase,
and two big mirrors were set against the hall’s wall near the exit on
the “arena”. On one of the mirrors read (written with lipstick, in
English): “Smiling is the second best thing you can do with your
lips”. A young man and I accompanied the models to the space
behind the curtain. I did not enter the room with the collection,
since it was reserved as the models’ changing room. The young man
seated in the hall talked to one of the young women who was not
participating in the show because her nose was bandaged – sign of
a recent surgical aesthetic intervention, fashionable among young
Tehranians.
Although the first show was not scheduled until 4pm, the
make-up operation started by 1pm. There were no professional
make-up artists, and the cosmetics used belonged to the models.
Female friends of the models, with sporadic interventions of the
models, who offered their own suggestions and active modifica-
tions, did make-up application.
With permission, I began photographing the models in the
“make-up hall”. One young woman who was part of the organiz-
ing team told me not to take pictures. When I explained to her that
Mahla had given me permission to do so, she left, and returned

quickly, telling me that Mahla asked that I refrain from photo-
graphing in that area, since it was a space reserved for the models.
I stopped, though not without regret. Although the space was not
entirely forbidden to men at that point in the day, images of it were
not supposed to circulate publicly. I encountered a similar type of
gendered space segregation, and an even stricter policy regarding
photography, in a Paris showroom specially conceived for Middle
Eastern clients.
Mozaique reflections, 14.10.2003

My last day of fieldwork in Paris culminated in an unhappy
incident, largely due to my naive, and almost careless approach
to a field situation. During Fashion week in Paris (Oct 7-15), I
planned to attend the Mozaique showroom reserved to Middle
Eastern clients (see Chapter 3). Mozaique was located on the fifth
(last) floor of an opulent building on avenue Montagne, not far
from the Christian Dior boutique; the entry had a simple paper
notice announcing Mozaique Showroom. Michele, the organizer,
does not advertise the event too broadly, as she is sufficiently well
known among her potential clients. The door gave into a little en-
trée simply ornamented with a black evening dress, creation of one
of the present designers. The large salon in which Michelle greeted
me is bare save for the table placed in its centre. I was invited to
look around the showroom but not to take pictures.
The apartment had five little rooms (approx. 2.5 m by 4 m)
each of which accommodated the collections of one to two design-
ers. The clothes hang on both sides of the rooms, separated by a
table with four to five chairs placed in the middle of each room.
Among the names of the designers (some rooms were still empty at
the time of my visit), besides Darja Richter, there were Francesca
MOZAIQUE REFLECTIONS, 14.10.2003 187
Miranda, Rosemary Jennings, Araba Morelli, Amarilis, and Rita

Lagune. I met Rita Lagune in her showroom, and she invited me
to seat. A woman dressed in a black skirt and green sweater served
us coffee. As we drank coffee I began to explain the nature of my
work, the same woman who brought us coffee (Mozaique assis-
tant) announced the first client of the day – a boutique owner from
Kuwait. A woman in her late forties, dressed in black and wearing a
Moschino headscarf, entered, followed by a tall man with gray hair
carrying a laptop that he immediately installed on the table. I asked
Rita if I should go, and she said no.
The woman instantly distinguished the old collection from the
new pieces, and asked to begin by viewing the older clothes. The
Mozaique assistant who served coffee to the clients, acted also as
a translator and inter-mediator between the clients and the stylist.
Once the client selected a piece, she would remove it from the rack
and take it away. A moment later, a model would enter the room
dressed in the chosen piece. I retreated to the farthest corner of the
room, near the window, to observe the scene. To allow the clients
to order pieces for purchase, the model held a yellow “post it” with
numbers written on it.
At some point, Rita asked the man if he liked the clothing on
one of the models. He deferred to his female companion: “Don’t
ask me, she is the boss, I am only organizing.” The dynamic of the
showroom, both in terms of exchanges between persons and the
ordering process, created a completely different atmosphere to that
of big ready-to-wear sales salons (see Chapter 3). The atmosphere
is relaxed and the clients are treated on an individual basis. At one
point in Rita’s showroom, the man begins taking pictures of the
models with a digital camera. Encouraged, I do the same, but after
some shots, Michele passed by to see how the sale is going, and she
became suddenly distressed because of my camera. She explained
that she did not want me to take pictures – that only clients were
permitted to do so. I quickly apologized, and reassured her that
the photos will not be published. Nonetheless, Michele asked me
to leave. On the way out, she justified her reaction by explaining:
“You have to understand that this is a question of mentality. You
are a man, and your presence disturbs my clients; they do not feel
comfortable while you are here.” It was only at this point that I
realized that all the showroom personnel were women. The only
men present, from what I understood from previous conversations
and my observations at the ready-to-wear salon, were those linked
to the buyers through kinship relations.
This “ethnographic moment” is highly significant because it re-
vealed a series of different themes I encountered in my research.
The transformation of a space into an exclusively feminine do-
main is a practice I have also encountered in the organization of
showrooms in Tehran, culminating with Lotous’ public show (see
Chapter 7). My own gender did not allow me full access to those
spaces. Photography is a disruption of this segregation, because it
carries with it the possibility of transporting the gender-segregated
space (or its two-dimensional representation) into a non-segregated
context.
Nevertheless, upon further reflection, the incident brought
home to me the issue of copyright, which stamps the fashion mi-
lieu in Paris and elsewhere and remains a prominent concern for
designers. As Michele and I did not have the time to build a trust-
ing ethnographic relationship, she could have easily suspected me
of working for a company that practices copying on small or an
industrial scale. Today, copying is facilitated by electronic technol-
ogy; a photographer can easily take pictures in one city and almost
instantly send the photos through email to a fashion house on the
other side of the world where it could be copied. The secrecy sur-
MOZAIQUE REFLECTIONS, 14.10.2003 189
rounding fashion industry renders exterior presences almost un-

desirable. The difficulties I faced throughout my fieldwork period
can be understood within this discursive logic of the protection
of the author and the products. In fact, photography was always
a delicate issue during my fieldwork experience. Public visibility,
and the circulation of images (not intended to be public) through
non-controlled independent channels has consistently been a point
of contention as my experience at the Mozaique showroom in Paris
put in sharp focus.
Showroom spaces have a specific regime of dress, in the sense
explained in Chapter 3. Gender segregation is a shaping force in
fashion design. The following chapter explores the characteristics
of fashion design in Tehran as they emerged from my ethnography.
The categories “modern” and “traditional” are again at the center of
the analysis, as they are expressed through aesthetics and practices
of design. It will become obvious how time, class and body mobi-
lity intertwine in their relation to these categories.
Chapter 
Traditionally Modern:
the Haute Couture in Tehran
This chapter describes the practice of fashion creation in Tehran,

the local haute couture as observed during my ethnographic inquiry.
The access to designers’ workshops was easier than in Paris, since
the elegant Paris, the Golden Triangle, is almost closed to the eth-
nographic eye, hidden behind the practice of secrecy.
In Tehran I was fortunate enough to meet many of the most
famous local designers. Chance played a major role in my meetings
with them. In total, I interviewed seven designers and I built signif-
icant ethnographic relations with five. I spent an extended amount
of time in two workshops, those of Mahla and Shadi. A Parisian
photographer gave me Mahla’s phone number in Tehran, and I met
Shadi through the contacts I made at the French Embassy in Tehran,
on the occasion of France’s National Holiday (14th July). All the
designers I interviewed in Tehran can be considered part of a cos-
mopolitan network, with links in capital cities of the world, such as
Paris and London. They are part of the “Westernized Iranian class”
(Keddie 1981). According to the designers’ own accounts, and to
opinions of some of their clients, there are no more than ten to
twelve well known designers in Tehran. Following a brief overview
of the industry, outlining the main characteristics of haute couture
in Tehran, the chapter describes the designer’s workshops, and the
production strategies in ethnographic detail.
References to the categories “tradition” and “modern” will ap-
pear throughout this chapter, as the interviewees used them. The
text will point out how these categories refer to a specific aesthetic
192 6: TRADITIONALLY MODERN
and mode of clothing use, a use significant in the system of class dis-
tinction in the urban environment of Tehran. Modern also signifies
a specific mode of subjectivation, of body mobility. The aesthetics
of the modern body is that of mobility, but it does not necessarily
embrace “Western style” clothing, for various reasons that will be
further discussed. As the argument will show, there are “modern”
ways of looking at tradition, such as modern uses of “traditional
clothes”; simultaneously, there are “not so modern” ways of using
modern clothes (read Western aesthetics), or “modern things” that
become “traditional”. As will become evident, being modern means
being attuned to a certain sensibility and the aesthetic preferences
of the upper classes.
Time for Fashion in Tehran

In Tehran, one may easily find tailors ready to cut clothes to
measure. Enghelab street between its intersection with Vali Asr and
the Ferdousi Square displays a long series of tailor shops for men.
Zaratousht Street, West of Vali Asr is the well known textile quarter,
and there are also tailors for both men and women in this neigh-
borhood. These shops usually offer their clients suits and dresses,
cut to measure, copied directly from Western fashion magazines.
They are open to the public all year around and are not considered
to be cut-off of the realm of fashion design by the general public.
There is a special category of fashion designers, who can be
considered, along with the ready-to-wear boutiques, as the genera-
tors of aesthetic canons in Tehran’s urban style. It is hard to speak
of a well-established fashion industry in Tehran, although there are
constitutive elements that form its basis, such as production in the
workshops belonging to local designers, and the brand names of
local designers. An incipient fashion advertising, and – implicitly –
TIME FOR FASHION IN TEHRAN 193
fashion photography (see Chapter 8) may also be considered part

of the emerging fashion industry of Tehran.
I first met a local fashion designer in my first week in Tehran,
on the occasion of her private collection show. It was early March,
just before norouz (the Iranian New Year); This is the time when all
of the designers in Tehran present their spring/summer collection,
because it is traditionally the period in which people buy clothes
and renew their wardrobes. I called Azadeh (the designer) to con-
firm my attendance and was told not to arrive earlier than eight –
as the first part of the presentation (starting at 3 pm) was reserved
exclusively for women. Azadeh imposed a sort of temporal segrega-
tion of men and women, in order to offer the needed comfort to
her female clients. For them, I would have been a doubly uncom-
fortable presence, both as man, and as foreigner. In spite of the fact
that the apartment is not very spacious, the temporal gender segre-
gation makes that the clients are able to try the dresses on, without
too much formality. The bulk of her clients were supposed to come
between 3 and 8 in the evening. Not all of the clients are intimate
with Azadeh, and many come without knowing the designer at all,
even though the sale takes place at her house.
Situated in a block of flats with architecture specific to the
1970s, Azadeh’s apartment was transformed for the occasion. The
living room was emptied of excess furniture (e.g. a big table and
some armchairs, which I had the occasion to see back in place on
a second visit), thus offering a space of about 25 square meters.
One corner of the room was occupied by a couch upon which a
white panel was installed. On it, a series of jewelry items (necklace,
bracelets), and accessories (e.g. handmade bags) were displayed
with price tags attached. They belonged to a friend of Azadeh, who
was invited to display her work on this occasion.
In Azadeh’s living room there were five women sitting on

chairs, elegantly dressed. They were drinking tea and talking to
each other. They all looked at us with overt curiosity. On both
sides of the room, two rows of hangers presented the dresses. Two
wooden mannequins completed the display. In the right side of the
room, a TV attuned on Fashion TV was discreetly broadcasting the
Moscow fashion week.
On these occasions, the house of the designer becomes an ad-
hoc showroom offering an informal atmosphere for clients. With
Fashion TV on, one can virtually browse the cosmopolitan places
of fashion (Moscow entered the circuit not long ago), while at the
same time feeling the touch of local fabrics, lines of design, and
clothing proportions. Different aesthetic proposals mix in the space
of the same room and create an odd feeling of body dislocation, of
Figure 6.1Private showroom in Tehran, March 2003. Fashion TV is

tuned on.
TIME FOR FASHION IN TEHRAN 195
the relocation of desire, from the screen to the clothes, and back.
The two localities (Moscow and Tehran) are linked in the imagi-
nary, the two aesthetics (the actual and the virtual) are brought
together by the clients’ gestures, their eyes moving from the TV
screen to the clothes on the hangers.
We start browsing the pieces on the hangers. They are mainly
mantoha, constructed as a mix of modern and traditional (these are
her own terms, but one can also see the fabrics with modern touch,
and the old type imprints or laces, introduced smartly into the gar-
ments). It is clearly a style, her own.
This type of seasonal presentation of collections is an element
specific to the fashion industry in Tehran, where each designer
organizes between two and four collection shows each year. One
particularity of the seasonal presentation is that the catwalks are
privately organized. The presentations take place in the more or less
spacious houses belonging to the designers, and publicity is mainly
through “word-of-mouth”. The single exception among Tehran’s
designer is Mahla, who organized a public fashion show in January
2001, and who was working for a second one, scheduled for 18-
22 August 2003; a death in her family two weeks before the show
caused her to postpone the event to 30 September (see Chapter 5).
This detail suggests (and was also confirmed in conversations with
other designers) that the fashion calendar is not strictly followed.
Most of the designers try to offer collections every season, but
this is never guaranteed. Different reasons, often personal, may
prevent a designer from presenting a collection. The shows usually
start in the early afternoon and last late into the night. As a general
rule, the first part of the presentation is reserved to women, and
only later are men invited as guests. Sometimes live models may
present the dress; usually chosen from among the friends or rela-
tives of the designer.
Mahla, because of the particularity of her enterprise, has a per-

manent strategy of model recruitment. She recruits her models by
herself, among her daughters’ friends, and on the street. If she sees
somebody she likes, she introduces herself and her work, and in-
vites the potential model to come by her workshop with a guard-
ian, usually the mother. Over a cup of tea in her workshop, Mahla
explains the nature of the employment, presents her journal, and
asks if the girl would be available for modeling.
Every designer I talked to told me that they did not have a fixed
date for their presentations. The answers were rather along the lines
with Parissa’s approach; when asked about the schedule of her pre-
sentations, she answered:
No, no... whenever I am ready... sometimes with lucky num-
bers... One month difference, sometime. Last year I thought I
would not have any show anymore. I just work in the house,
people come and go, Sundays I am always open...
Time, the spice and the regulator of fashion, has a different
dimension in Tehran’s landscape. Less constrained by competition,
by the capitalist acceleration of production, by the fever of the
“newest, hottest, hippest” look, the designers organize their cre-
ations and their sales in a less rigid time framework. Family events
or religious celebrations play a major role in scheduling the event.
All of the designers I spoke to offered two to three collections a
year. Working in this flexible timeframe, the designers of Tehran
construct each individualistic approaches to an emerging industry
MAHLA, OR FASHION AS BUSINESS 197
Mahla, or Fashion as Business

I visited Mahla for first time at her place, in the north of Tehran,
not far from Tajrish Square. I arrived around eight o’clock in the
evening along with a young woman photographer (informal visits
in Tehran are always around this time, people having dinner very
late, usually around or after ten). I entered through a big garden,
covered with patches of snow, somehow desolate (it was raining
heavily). Her apartment occupies the first floor of a three storey
building. I was invited to the living room, a vast space of some
seventy square meters, decorated in baroque style, juxtaposing faux
Louis XVI furniture, wonderful miniatures, and paintings dating
from the Qajar period. There was also a display of thirteen dressed
dolls (museum pieces) from the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury, presenting the specific costumes of different regions of Iran.
They are arranged on a window case, in which one can see textiles
and fabrics from the same Qajar period. On the big dining table
there were flowers, and a number of evening dresses. Two young
women, covered with flowery chadors were looking at the dresses.
They were sisters, students of Mahla, who came from Kerman (a
city about 1 000 km South-East of Tehran) for a short visit accom-
panied by their mother.
Two small events during my visit are worth mentioning, in the
effort to understand the complicated question of veiling. While the
three visitors were covered with chadors, Mahla and the photogra-
pher who accompanied me did not wear any head cover. Upon ob-
taining permission to do so, I began photographing the scene. At
one point, I took a photograph of Mahla and one of her students.
After the flash went off, Mahla angrily told me “look, look, I don’t
have a headscarf.” I looked surprised, after which she remembered
“Oh, you are not a journalist, it’s OK.”
At some point in our conversation, one of Mahla’s two daugh-

ters entered the room and greeted us, after which she asked permis-
sion to “go out.” I had been surprised to recognize her as one of the
models in the photographs of the Tehran fashion show in 2001.
She was dressed in a nicely cut, gray overcoat, pateff trousers, and a
white scarf over her shoulders. I asked permission to take a picture
of her before she left. She asked me, “would you like it with or
without my scarf on my head?” I answered “Anyway you feel com-
fortable.” “I don’t care” she replied. Mahla had a strong reaction:
“You should care, dear, you should care, because you are Muslim”.
I did not know how to interpret these events that marked our
first conversation. I speculated at length in my journal about the
sources of authority in imposing a sartorial discipline for women.
In the further meetings I had with Mahla, I realized that she is
not somebody who strongly advocates russari (headscarf ) wearing.
Another incident, while at her studio, confirmed this impression.
While carrying some dresses to her car, she forgot to put her scarf
on. She came back laughing radiantly at this incident.
In fact, her reaction to my photo shot and her insistence on her
daughter wearing the russari may be explained through the contex-
tual conditions of these incidents. My camera represented a pos-
sible exposure to a larger public view, creating a different regime
of dress in the context of our private meeting (see Chapter 4). The
social position of Mahla (public fashion designer) would not allow
her to expose herself publicly other than in conformity with the
Islamic rules of dressing. At that time, her fashion journal was still
under the survey of the censorship commission. In addition, she
was trying to receive approval from the Commission of Islamic
Guidance for a new public fashion show. The practical contextual
position in which she was (is) allowed her only a certain degree of
public exposure of her ideas, and only according to these general

conditions.
Hirschman’s (2002) analysis of liberty through the practices of
veiling offers the necessary tools to understand Mahla’s (and other
Tehranian women’s) position. Hirschman (in Switzer 2003) argues
that liberty is a three-leveled social construction. On the first level
we have the ideological misrepresentation of reality as an instru-
ment of male power. The second level is constituted by the effects
that these ideological rules have on reality itself, the way they create
a new reality, what one may call “the effects of truth” of ideological
construction. The third level corresponds to desires and self-defi-
nition, the structures that enable us to define reality itself, that is,
“the discursive construction of social meanings.” Mahla, acting in
a predefined field of forces, is constrained by the ideological defini-
tion of reality (the public as a shari’a ruled sphere), and by her own
self-definition, and becomes a source of authority in suggesting (or
imposing) those rules on her daughter, or applying them to herself
(e.g. her reaction to being photographed unveiled). Nevertheless,
her own exposure unveiled in the parking lot does not have the
same weight in her “discursive construction of social meanings”,
since the event is very local, and the image cannot travel without
Mahla’s direct control (in fact it does not travel at all, except in the
memory of the persons who were present).
While visiting Mahla for the first time, she showed me “Lotous,
the first Persian fashion magazine”. Edited by her own fashion
house, it mainly presents “Lotous Fashion House” designs.The first
issue of Lotous, which I saw in her apartment, appeared in January
2003. The second issue of the journal was scheduled to appear in
March. Due to ashoora1, which took place in March of 2003, the
1 Public manifestation, and national holiday, mourning the death of Imam
Hossein, one of the important religious figures in shi’a Islam.
journal appeared three months later, in the beginning of June. The

second issue contains three articles, (as opposed to the one editorial
present in the first issue) but is mainly dedicated to presenting the
origin of Lotous house.
Lotous fashion magazine compensates for the lack of advertis-
ing for women’s clothing. In fact, although there are billboards all
over Tehran advertising various products, clothing is almost never
in their focus. Officially, following shari’a moral rules, bodies are
not to be shown in their entirety, especially women’s bodies. Thus,
advertising for commodities uses photos of the object itself, accom-
panied by bilingual texts (Farsi and English, an interesting detail
in itself ), and sometimes parts of the body, like eyes, or hands ma-
nipulating the commodity. Due to these regulations, “Lotous” has
had a difficult birth. In order to be able to publish this locally pro-
duced fashion magazine, Mahla needed to develop a strategy. The
journal is registered for professional use – that is, Lotous is officially
addressed to the people who are involved in the fashion industry.
Nevertheless, it is the first post-Revolution magazine showing the
faces of Iranian models:
Because we could not show the face of the person, the original
person in the photo. And even now, I was thinking they may
not accept it (my magazine) [...] and this is the first magazine
that comes out with the original faces of the models. Some years
ago they were like invisible masks. Sometimes it was a painting
instead of the face.
Likewise, the plastic women mannequins in the shopping win-
dows lack facial features, or the upper half of their head altogether.
On the contrary, the male mannequins have distinctly traced features,
painted eyes and hair, each with a specific expression (see Chapter 8).
During our first extended conversation, Mahla introduced me
with her manner of working. At a first it seemed strange to me that
Figure 6.2 Cover for the second issue of Lotous
she did not feel the need to draw. She explained to me that she does
not feel the need to draw, but rather cuts straight into the fabric. After
being accustomed to the standards I have met in Paris couture, this
procedure seemed particular to me (only few designers use it in Paris,
see Chapter 2). Later on, all of the designers I have met in Tehran told
me they use both procedures, that is they sometimes draw, but often
just cut straight into the fabric. Mahla, like all the other designers,
has employees, tailors that sew the clothing. She works with fifteen
employees, most of them students in the art and design faculty at the
University of Tehran.
Mahla’s main workshop and office is on Bahar street, not far from
the intersection with Enghelab boulevard, in downtown Tehran. I was
in her office many times, but was not allowed to spend too much
Figure 6.3 In Mahla’s workshop, some sources of inspiration.

time in the workshop itself. Looking to the windows of Mahla’s of-

fice, one can see the multicolored drapes of Sahla’s workshop, a rather
unusual contrast to the generally gray exteriors of Tehran’s downtown
buildings. Mahla’s schedule is regular: she arrives at the office around
2 pm, and she leaves after 6, depending on the volume of her work.
However, her work extends well beyond the four hours she spends at
the workshop. The office/workshop is in a three room apartment. A
young woman (about twenty), wearing a yellow headscarf and manto,
opened the door for me. The main door wads directly into a room of
about 8 square meters, that has four other doors, one for the kitchen,
the bathroom, and each of the other two rooms. I will call this first
room the main room. The office is placed in the first small room, with
a big opening towards the main room.
In the main room there is a big table, chairs, a bookshelf and a
TV set, turned off. In the bookshelf there is a complete collection
of Escada journal, and some random volumes of the French edition
of Vogue magazine. On the table, opened, one can see the spring/
summer 2003 Escada, and a Rosa Clara2 catalogue for bridal wear.
The office room is furnished with a small tea table, a working table
for Mahla’s accountant, with a phone, a vertical mirror and a win-
dow display for fabrics, similar to the one I have seen in her house.
Between my first and last visit to the office, the interior arrangement
was substantially modified, with the actual workshop extended to the
office room. The bookshelf and the TV set disappeared from the main
room, their place being taken by the small tea table, its chairs, and the
vertical mirror. The working table had also been moved to the main
room, Mahla transformed the office room into an annex to the work-
shop. On the walls of the main were neatly framed old fabrics.
2 Escada and Rosa Clara are catalogues for two fashion houses with the same
name.
I briefly entered Mahla’s workshop, which was equipped with five

sewing machines, one ironing table, and one big table for cutting the
fabric. There were no mannequins or patrons, and the walls were bare.
Mahla told me that normally she forbidds outsiders from seeing her
workshop, and limited my visit to a brief viewing. At the moment of
my observation, there were only two persons in the workshop, one
young woman ironing, and one elderly man sewing at a machine. The
incomplete dresses, fabrics, and fabrics were spread on the cutting
table. There were no paintings on any of the walls or the pieces and
bits of paper or fashion posters that one often finds in Parisian fashion
designers’ workshops.
Besides ready-to-wear collections, Lotous house also provides uni-
forms for air hostesses, Universities, Hotel Dariush in Kish Island3,
schoolteachers, and schoolgirls. In this respect, Lotous house is unique
in Tehran, being the only design house that produces for clientele of
this scale, and that is in the process of constructing a public image. It
also beneficiates of occasional international press coverage; the pub-
lic show in January 2001 was heavily commented on in European
press, and the second issue of “Lotous” magazine has been covered
in Financial Times Europe, on 17 March 2003. The usual journalis-
tic approach produced an article in which the Iranian fashion is pre-
sented as being in its “Dark Ages”. Temporal and historical references
are often used to depict non-western countries as lacking, or lagging
behind, modernity. Same mode of distinction is used in the process of
3 Kish is a free trade Island in the Persian Gulf, annexed to Iran by Mohammad
Reza Shah. The free trade status (Azadeh), allows the development of
commerce and exchange with Dubai, and makes the Island a main touristic
target for Iranians. Dariush Hotel is a project finished in 2003. Constructed
by a multimillionaire Iranian from Germany, it reproduces at scale the city
of Persepolis in a Las Vegas-like manner.
“self-othering”, explained in Chapter 3, and that is definitory for the

class dynamic in Tehran.
Other designers in Tehran characterize Mahla’s manner of work
as industrial. For example, while talking about Mahla, Parissa says,
“I like her, I know her, but she is a business woman, not a designer.”
This distinction, to which I will return in Chapter 7, reflects a series
of factors and changes in the Iranian economic landscape and their
corresponding effects in the international fashion industry. The big
industrial groups like Chanel or LVMH are the result of this eco-
nomic globalization. Their effect on fashion creation is visible both
in terms of the standardization of aesthetics, as well as the disappear-
ance of, or economic difficulties faced by individual designers or small
design houses. The case of “Le Sage”, the Parisian house producing
laces for the haute couture that has been bought by Chanel, is a tell-
ing one. On a small scale, the distinction between “business woman”
and “designer” reflects this tendency in Tehran. The new economic
conditions, partly determined by the global networks in which local
designers are embedded, creates a distinction between designers who
prefer to keep their craft to a small size (often explained, as a reclama-
tion from an artistic perspective), and those dedicated to business –
Mahla’s case belonging to the later category.
During my stay in Tehran, I had not seen the actual process of cre-
ation in which Mahla is involved. I did not see her drawing, nor did I
see any of her sketches. The dresses I saw, and the ones that appear in
Lotous magazine, are adaptation of regional or historical dresses, (the
Turkmen style4 and Qajar period are the favorite sources of inspira-
tion). The main products are tunics and overcoats, with embroidered
borders around the collar and at the end of the sleeves. Mahla also
4 Turkmen dress is identified as a tribal costume from the Turkmenistan
region, that « until the 1970s [...] formed the most elaborate tribal costume
still used in Persia » (Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. V, clothing XXVI)
produces evening dresses, (I have seen only one sample on a hanger,

a black robe with pearls sewn on the chest, bras, and a low cut on the
back.) While I cannot generalize, the style of her evening dress is rath-
er conventional, with not many artifices or any innovative design.
When I asked her if she considers herself a fashion creator she
answered:
Actually... my government ... Iran is an old, old country. And it
has old and many different designs. I am telling you, when I have a
great history in the dress, you have to do something for your coun-
try. This is the reason I mix my culture with modern. Because I am
a Muslim and the government wants us to be covered. This is the
reason I mix cultural dress with modern dress.
In relating to the public at large, Mahla legitimates her work
through national history. I asked her about the name of her brand.
Mahla said:
Lotous. Lotous is the name of the magazine, and Lotus is a flow-
er, and it is Iranian. It is a symbol of the ancient religion, the
Zoroastrian. It is the symbol of the three precepts: Good deeds,
good talking, and good thinking.
The name of Mahla’s brand is one of the multiple instances in
which tradition, and precisely pre-Islamic history, is invoked as an
underlying principle of the contemporary stylist. The first issue of her
magazine starts with an editorial entitled “Dress is the living museum
of the country”. Modern dress is, in her vision, something that must
be conceived in direct relation to traditional dress, maybe as moder-
nity itself must be integrated into the “old, old” national history.
The governmental restrictions are also taken into account in this
equation. It is interesting that, in her discourse, national identity and
the Islamic religion are separate from one another. History and na-
Figure 6.4 Page of Lotous journal No. 2/ 2003 The modern/ traditional
juxtaposition is visible in the interplay between pupil’s uniforms and the
“Barbie” handbag they carry. Note also the reference to Kandinsky on the
background.
tional identity belong to the pre-Islamic era, while Islam is identified

with the current governmental political orientation.
Many authors observe that, for Iranian diasporic identity con-
struction and among the upper classes in Iran, Zoroastrianism is used
as the referent in their claim to both national history and modern sec-
ularism. The historic roots of this phenomenon are deep, dating from
the period of the Islamic conquest of Persia (Tavakoli-Targhi 2001). In
modern Iran, during the Constitutional Revolution (1906) and in the
post-constitutional period Zoroastrian intellectuals shaped the secular
current of thought in Iran, and created a form of opposition to ulama
clerics (Bayat-Philipp 1981). The shi’a officials responded with a dis-
course that identified Zoroastrianism with the Western negative in-
fluence. The two poles of identity construction are constantly used in
different configurations of power, depending on the historic moment.
While during the Pahlavi dynasty the Zoroastrianism became the sole
official landmark of national identity, the post-Islamic Revolution
Iran officials tend to emphasize Islamism over the Zoroastrianism.
But stalking the Islamic Republic’s rigid enforcement of the rules
and mores of Shiism is the reality that the Iranian’s cultural dual-
ity always poses the Iran of the ancient Persians against the Iran of
Islam, the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda against the Muslim god
Allah, Persepolis against Mecca. (Mackey 1996: 377-378)
In this dialectical dynamic, many who left Iran during or af-
ter the Islamic Revolution are likely to reorient themselves towards
Zoroastrianism in their claims to Iranian national identity. Also,
local forms of resistance are expressed through the recuperation of
Zoroastrianism5.
5 The Zoroastrian minority remains nonetheless at the margin of the contem-
porary Iranian society (Keddie 1995).
SHADI, OR THE COSMOPOLITAN APPROACH 209
Mahla’s aesthetic and commercial strategies are now easier to un-

derstand. The choice of Lotous (a Zoroastrian symbol) as the brand
of the fashion house somehow separates it from the Islamic regula-
tion, while the products in themselves (at least the ones destined
to the public) meet the requirements of the government. “Mixing
culture with modernity” is both responding to the requirements
of the Islamic government and meeting the consumers’ desires for
fashion, elegance, and “modern dress”. In her discourse, “culture”
refers both to Muslim and to Zoroastrian traditions, depending
on the context. Mahla calls her evening dress “modern dress” or
“Western dress” interchangeably, using thus the generally accepted
symbolic geography that equates the West with modernity.
Shadi, or the Cosmopolitan Approach

Just off of Kolahdouz Blvd., in the same area of Northern
Tehran as Mahla’s apartment, I was invited to visit Shadi’s house.
Upon my arrival a woman domestic showed me to the main sa-
lon. There, and for a long while, I was kept company by one of
Shadi’s clients, a single woman in her early forties, Tanaz. Tanaz
works at the American Consular Mission of the Swiss Embassy
in Tehran, and she is one of the current clients and close friends
of Shadi. Repeatedly, at the beginning of our conversation, Tanaz
talked about her experiences at “the Mission”, and the misunder-
standings she faces while dealing with young American students
in Tehran; only after I asked for an explanation did I find out that
“the Mission” referred to the Consular Office of the United States
in Tehran. I was thus initiated into the exclusive language of a cer-
tain class segment of Tehran.
Shadi studied marketing in Paris and worked in New York
for three years, at the end of the 1980s, in a publicity company.
She returned to Tehran and continued her mother’s business. Her
mother had been a well-known couturier during the shah’s period.

National Geographic has selected Shadi for the film “Global Young
Hot Shots”, in order to illustrate Tehran. While she considers her
mother “only a tailor”, Shadi describes herself as a designer. She
traces the distinction line based on the mode in which she struc-
tures her work, and in reference to her approach to brand name
(see Chapter 7). Shadi has both a haute-couture line, and a ready-
to-wear line for women. Her workshop is on the ground level of
her house and employs about twelve people.
Shadi’s salon was furnished with one couch, two armchairs, a
low coffee table, and a dress rack on the opposite wall. The current
issue of French edition of Vogue was placed on the coffee table,
and on another small table lays Officielle de la Mode, a journal
edited in Paris. The walls and floor were plaqued with marble. The
exterior wall gave into the garden, through a large glass door. The
right hand-side wall (with the couch) had a door, open, leading
into Shadi’s office. The left hand-side wall separated the salon from
the workshop. Near the exit in the garden, there was a “fake room”,
furnished with two chests of drawers, a big mirror, and a clothes
rack, and stand for the fitting room. Under the stairs there was a
door giving into the kitchen. It was through this door that a young
woman (a domestic) came and brought to me the sharbet, a refresh-
ing plant-based drink.
The salon communicated with the workshop, which was in the
next large section of the ground floor, sharing the garden wall and
the view over the swimming pool. From the salon one could pass
into the workshop through the garden, or through a hall behind
the interior stairs. The workshop is about 50 square meters, and it
is separated into two by a middle wall that leaves a passage space on
both sides. Against this wall there is a chest drawer used for depos-
iting zippers, buttons, and other parts and pieces that contribute to
the making of a dress. Their provenance is various, as Shadi pointed

out to me. She thus has zippers from Germany, Korea, Iran, France,
etc. She told me she does not choose by the country of production,
but by aesthetic and quality considerations. Same goes for the but-
tons. “If I see something I like, I buy it”. The chest drawers in the
fitting room are filled up with these types of accessories.
Only the half of the workshop side with the garden view was
fully equipped and functional, the other half being used (over the
period of my visits) for storing old furniture, and for storing works
in-progress and finished clothing. This later space also has a work-
ing table, which Shadi uses for designing and cutting textiles. Shadi
projected to reorganize and integrate the “storage area” in the func-
tional workshop.
Shadi’s workshop has six sewing machines, one big pressing
mechanism, one small ironing table, a big working table in the
middle, and a chest-drawer with shelves. Four of the sewing ma-
chines face the windows of the piece, three of them overlooking the
garden. The daylight is highly appreciated by the tailors and offers
them a comfortable working environment.
Around the working table there were six women and one man.
This is Shadi’s working team, and they were present during all of
my visits. Each works on a different item of clothing, mostly finish-
ing up, or manually sewing together pieces of fabrics already cut.
Only one of the women working here was wearing a headscarf. On
the working table there was a pair of scissors, a tailor meter, and
five different light colors of sewing wire, in five big cylindric wire
tapes. On one of the walls there is a panel with one hundred and
four wire-tapes supports, carrying different colored wires.
Shadi divides her time between the workshop and the salon. In
the salon she receives her clients, assists them in fitting dress, and
finalizes plans for eventual retouches. Normally, the fitting room is
Figure 6.5 Shadi’s workshop: the sewing wires on the wall.
a private space when occupied. Since this room is a “fake room”,

there is no door that separates it from the salon. This space par-
ticularity poses no problems, since the clients and their company
are mostly women. One ethnographic moment that revealed to me
the reorganization of space around social position and gender oc-
cured during one of my visits in the workshop. I was sitting at the
working table watching the making of a pearl decorated lace, when
a friend of Shadi, Sharona, came and told me not to come into
the salon because there were important people there for a fitting
session. A minute later, Shadi herself came out smiling and said:
“there are some hotshots here, I will call you to see the dresses”.
After five minutes she came and gestured to me to follow her. I
passed through the garden, and entered the salon from the side of
the essay room. Facing the mirror, a 16 year old girl was looking
at her two piece evening dress, pink colored, mid-length, with the
top cut in an oblique manner such that the navel was visible. She
smiled at me, and I made a compliment, directed rather to Shadi,
because I was deeply embarrassed. I greeted the two women sit-
ting (I guessed the mother and a friend) over a sharbet glass. The
contrast with the young client was amazing: the two women sitting
were wearing their roopoosh and kept their headscarves on, even
though they were in the intimacy of Shadi’s salon. They did not
seem deeply disturbed by my presence.
Afterwards, Shadi told me the women were nieces of an Iranian
political figure, she was not really sure which one (or did not want
to tell me). Some elements of this encounter point to the ways in
which space is conceived in terms of access and in relation with
the people populating it. Sharona came and told me not to go “in
there” in order to protect me and the women present from an even-
tual misunderstanding. Shadi probably negotiated my presence,
and created the access for me in a close quarter. It is worth men-
tioning however, that while previously Tanaz was trying her dress
on, I was not asked to leave the salon, on the contrary, Tanaz im-
mediately wanted my opinion on her dress. Two different regimes
of dress (Tanaz and the “important clients”) successively instated in
the same space in different moments.
A series of elements created the interdiction of my access there.
First, I was not acquainted with the clients (as opposed to Tanaz).
Second, they were “important clients” who may have been disturbed
by my presence. Third, and most important, they were all women –
one may speculated that if I were a woman it would have not been
the case. The fact that the young woman’s company was wearing
the scarf and the russari indicated to me their observance of Islamic
moeurs. I understood from Shadi that this happens regardless of
my presence. Nevertheless, in the dressing room a young woman
of their family was displaying Shadi’s creation for my eyes, without
traces of prudishness, and without visibly disturbing her mother.
Sharona’s first reaction was to protect the entire place6 from
my presence, but I understood that what primarily worried her
was the social position of the clients and their possible reaction to
my disturbance of that specific regime of dress (of course related
to the fact that I was a young man). Sharona herself is a relative-
ly liberal woman, and the owner and manager of a big Industrial
Transportation Company. In my opinion, my access was mainly
a function of my special status as a “foreign student/researcher”,
rather than as a “young man interested in fashion”. Shadi told me
that her husband never comes into this room of the house when
she has clients over.
6 See Chapter 4 for a definition of “place”.

THE PRIVILEGE OF EXOTICISM 215
The Privilege of Exoticism

At the opposite pole, Parissa cuts almost exclusively “Iranian
style” clothing. She does not use a label or a brand name because
“everybody knows me”. In fact, at my first arrival she advised me to
take a particular taxi service and to ask them to bring me to her,
because her house is well known to them. Parissa lives in the same
area of Northern Tehran where Mahla and Shadi live, and I first
visited her on a Sunday afternoon, her designated day for receiving
clients. Her house is at the ground level of an apartment-building,
and the first thing that surprised me was the color of her walls.
While in every house I have entered in Tehran the walls are paint-
ed conventionally white, Parissa chose a beautiful saffron color to
decorate her walls. A kitchen-bar separates the living room and the
kitchen; the living room is furnished with an old small round table
with the portrait of the Qajar king Nasr-e Din, a corner low couch
covered with hand made fabric from the North of Iran (shomal), a
round dinner table, and two bookshelves. Parissa’s favorite sitting
place is a round cushion-armchair opposite to the couch, around
the coffee table. The wall opposite to the couch is decorated with
four framed pieces of calligraphy. Parissa has a number of Indian
wooden statues of different sizes, representing various gods, dis-
played in the living room.
The other room is Parissa’s showroom. It is furnished only with
a rectangular coffee table and a small couch. The rack for clothing
spreads on the right hand wall, with clothes arranged on hangers;
on the far side of the room is a paravanne that masks the doors of a
wardrobe, creating thus a space for trying on clothes. On the walls
one can see photographs of Parissa dressed in her own creations,
dating from ten to fifteen years ago. Friends of hers took the pic-
tures in the garden of the house in which Parissa previously lived.
Although now divorced, Parissa started designing while she was

still married:
The first year of the revolution. Twenty-two twenty-three years
ago. When I decided to start, first of all it was because my hus-
band was broke with the revolution. I am not educated in fash-
ion, nor designing, it just came out.
In fact, her own manner of dressing has been the source of her
inspiration. She used to wear, and she still does, clothes inspired
by traditional designs from different regions of Iran. Following her
own account, this tendency was triggered by the beginning of the
restrictions imposed on clothes, and by the uniformization of col-
ors in the urban setting, that is, the generalization of black and
dark brown for outside dress.
I used to wear a little bit of rustic things. And everybody was
telling, “oh, how beautiful it is!” I mean every village woman was
wearing them, but wearing them out in the street [...] was very
unusual. They were quite Islamic, long skirts, and covers, and
these first few years (of the revolution) you did not have to wear
anything. But colorful you know, like the village women, full of
colors and everything.
The “fashion effect” of her clothing was based on the dislocation
of the geographic and symbolic borders between rural and urban,
lived as a class privilege. In Tehran the terms “village” (dahat) and
“villager” (dahatie) are used in order to designate an inferior social
position, along with the term amalleh (worker) discussed in Chapter
4. There is a significant difference between the two terms. Amalleh
designates a low class person, living and dwelling in urban area; da-
hatie is a social actor that “naturally” belongs to rural settings. While
in the villages their presence is “natural” (“every village woman was
wearing them”), and thus justified, in the urban setting the villagers
constitute an illegitimate presence (“wearing them on the streets was

very unusual”, see also Sciolino (2000). The privilege of the upper
class resides in disregarding these symbolic hierarchies, by appropria-
tion and dissimulation of the primary use of objects, commodities,
and dress7. Same dynamic grammar of class distinction, spatial loca-
tion, and taste is present in London and in Tehran. For Tehranian
dahatie the judgment of legitimate presence in the urban space is
based on aesthetic considerations of one’s dress, just as the case of
chavs in London reveals (see Chapter 3).
In Tehran, the result of this appropriation, and the parallel dif-
fusion in the lower social classes of modern taste, is the progressive
outmoding of things previously modern (that is Western inspired
commodities). While visiting the house of a young owner of a ready-
to-wear boutique in Tehran (Said), in a suburb of Tehran not far from
Karaj, I was accompanied by Irandokht. The house was furnished in
Western style, with a couch, armchairs, dining table, and a window
display of crystal wears. Mitra, Said’s wife, gave Irandokht a beautiful
handmade Turkeman purse (likely bought at the Jomeh Bazar) as a
gift. Irandokht explained the siginificance of the gift to me:
“See, these things are becoming modern now. Before those kind
of things were modern (she gestures towards the furniture), but
now they are traditional. Do you understand?”
7 During my first visit to Bahar’s house (a sucessful interior designer from

Tehran), I had the pleasure to admire her interior decoration; objects and
furniture mainly from India and Thailand were arranged in a minimalist
decor, surrounded by the jazz album played on a Bang and Olufsen music set.
Near a coffee table there was a rectangular wooden piece on the floor, with
a low border on one side, and a kind of pillow on the adjacent side. Bahar
said: “Ah, you like that? It is a Philipino woman’s bed. I don’t use it myself
(laughs), but I like it.” Similarly, while the “villager” is discursively stuck in its
social and geographic position, and at best laughed at in urban settings, the
appropriation of rural clothing in high-class circles is a privilege of power.
Uses of language related to fashion products mark this distinc-

tion in a similar way. While women from the middle classes, and
many young fashionable women prefer to use the French-inspired
term manto, the intellectuals and the upper classes employ roopoosh
for the same piece of dress. The recuperation of tradition among
higher classes in Tehran maybe interpreted at the first moment as
a nationalist reflex, combined with a revendication of pre-Islamic
origins. While Mahla explicitly describes this tendency in her Lotous
editorials, the role of aesthetic models and taste should not be un-
derestimated. As mentioned before, all of these designers are close to
European expatriates in Iran (mostly working at the Embassies). I
arrived to them through the intermediary of the July 14th celebration
at the French Embassy. For the European expatriates, Joomeh Bazaar,
the Friday Flee Market where one can find, among other handicrafts,
Turkeman textiles, is one of the main centers of attraction. Their taste
is also appropriated by their local friends. I do not mean to imply
that the designers I talked to make traditionally inspired dress solely
because their foreign friends like them. But it should not be over-
looked that many of their clients began to like and appreciate those
clothes once foreigners (Europeans) showed interest in them. Joomeh
Bazaar is one of the few public spaces in Tehran (alongside with
hotels and fashionable restaurants) where one can hear foreign lan-
guages spoken, and frequently see foreigners. In other words, Joomeh
Bazaar provides a cosmopolitan flavor for the all too homogenous
Tehran, where taste is displayed and difused.
There is a similarity in the power relation and social hierarchy
established between rural areas and urban centers and the global
relation between center and periphery, in which categories of class
and ethnicity are intertwined and expressed through clothing or
aesthetic choices. Exotic or rural inspired clothing (e.g. the 2002
“savage tendency” in fashion) styled in Paris and signed by famous
fashion houses place their wearers at the avant-garde of style, but

that does not necessarily mark the consumers in ethnic terms.
Without the brand name, the same kind of clothing, which may
have been the source of inspiration for the stylist, worn in an ethni-
cally marked neighborhood of Paris identifies the wearer in ethnic
terms. Many times it places him or her in a socially non-privileged
position, de-legitimizing his or her presence in the public space (see
the previously discussed case of the veil in French Public Schools).
Michele, the owner of Mozaique (see Chapter 5) describes the same
mechanism in her own terms and on a global scale. Speaking of her
Middle Eastern clients, she says:
Everything that has an Indian connotation, they do not like it.
Because... For example your blouse, for them... we love this here,
but they don’t like it. Because in their souk there are arrivals of
Indian embroideries (it is not far from India and Dubai), and
what is very fashionable here, for them it is “cheap”.
At the time of this interview, I was wearing a black blouse with
embroidery, a gift from a friend from Tehran. The taste and the
hierarchies are somehow reversed. On the one hand “we” can love
the Indian embroideries because they are far from “us”, and “we”
run a lesser risk of being ethnically identified with the dress. “For
them it is cheap” because they feel they run the risk of being aes-
thetically classified in the same category as the producers of the tex-
tiles. At the same time, in Dubai for example, Pakistani, Indian or
Indonesian women who are likely to wear “Indian style” dress are
those that generally perform the maid services, and the class dis-
tinction would be blurred. And of course, “for them”, the Middle
Eastern clients, the added value of prestige attached to a dress made
in Paris is not unimportant.
In this play of spaces and contexts, it is interesting to observe
how geography and aesthetics combine and create hierarchic cat-
egories in terms of class and ethnic belonging. From rural to urban

sites, dress is successively devaluated, re-appropriated, and reevalu-
ated. Urban upper classes reinvest rural aesthetics with prestige,
but the ability to construct this artifice remains exclusively their
privilege. Similarly, in European fashion centers like Paris, “ethnic
dress” forms a style in itself, fashionable, but an aesthetic choice
that is not accessible to those who actually live and feel their own
ethnic categorization created through this dress.
Parissa’s “ethnic dress” has a particular relation with the fash-
ion phenomena, humorously evoked by her in the first interview. I
asked her what fashion is in her opinion, and she answered
What I am not doing. I am not up to date with fashion, I mean I
make some clothes and things like this, which is never up to date,
and never out of date, you know [...] Fashion for me is something
that is changing all the time [...] something that in two-three
years you cannot wear it anymore.
Temporal references are at the core of distinction between fash-
ion and apparently unchanged dress. In fact, Parissa’s dress gradu-
ally changes style, form and colors alike, but not with the speed of
the fashion seasons in Paris. While browsing her portfolio, I could
see the reworking of styles over the two decades of her work.
The style of Parissa’s creations closely follows the forms and cuts
of the nineteenth century Qajar period, merged with a series of
modifications she brings in order to make them more “wearable”,
or practical. That means, in her own terms, reducing the quantity
of the fabric used for one dress, closing the usual holes that dress
used to have at the underarms and at the level of genitalia, in a word
making the clothes adapted to a mobile body that needs to move
continuously, a modern body populating an urban environment.
They were wearing so much trousers (sic!), and the skirt was
what, 15 meters. It’s not so practical to drive and to walk around,
not with this life now... So I make them thinner, fifteen meters
came to three meters...
The strength of Parissa’s style resides in her ability to combine
colors and motifs that suggest the “Iranian tradition”, while mak-
ing them appealing to a certain type of clientele. The formulation
of “Iranian tradition” in her design is of particular interest to my
research. Parissa takes bi-annual trips to India, Delhi or Karachi,
where she buys saris en gross from local producers. The retail price
is very low. Parissa takes only the laces and borders of the saris, and
brings them back to Tehran. In Tehran she buys fabric of foreign
provenance, European or Asian, from vendors on Zartoosht Street.
She chooses by the quality and colors, not by their place of produc-
tion. Once at home, she combines colors, fabric types, and borders,
and decides on the model of dress that she will make (for example a
tunic, a two pieces Turkeman style cut, an evening dress, etc.) Once
a week, her tailor comes by her house, discusses the models with
Parissa, and together they cut the material according to Parissa’s
measurements.
He [the tailor] is living downtown, he comes once a week here,
and I put the materials on each other, and the borders ... usually
he gets what I want, after twenty years working together. If he
does not than I will draw it for him. But actually I have to tell
him; I put the material on myself and tell him what exactly I
want, with drawing he does not get it.
This type of practice has its correspondence in Parisian couture
practices. In Paris I met only one designer who would not usually
draw. But, of course, he did make exceptions:
There are no drawings, only there you can see little things like
this I am drawing to show them to the people I am working with
what are we talking about. Only when it is difficult to visualize.
(Mark)
One can see, from this example and from the entire perspective
that analyzing fashion in the two cities provides, the different ap-
proaches to the practices of visibility and representation in Tehran
and in Paris, expression of the same system of fashion.
Parissa takes away the cut fabric and the borders, and produc-
es the dress. In this process of creation, there are no designs, no
standard patrons, no tracing paper involved. The combination of
Indian borders, European or Asian fabrics, and innovative cuts and
color mixing, gives birth to the Iranian style clothing for which
Parissa is so well known. But where, or among what people rather
is she well known?
During my second visit to Parissa’s place, I was invited to
lunch. When I arrived, her daughter (residing in England, on a
visit in Tehran), one of her sisters (living in Indonesia), a sister in
law (who studied social sciences in Paris and now runs an interior
design business in Tehran), and Parissa herself were present. They
effortlessly switched the conversation to English. I was invited to
enjoy her home-cooked baghali polo, a speciality of lima bean and
dill rice, served with veal shank. The taste of the dish is far richer
than words could ever describe. Around the table we talked about
life in general, and the hardships that Parissa’s children are experi-
encing in their lives abroad (in London and Southern California).
One of the difficulties they both continuosly face (along with many
others experiencing displacement) is homesickness. Long phone
conversations and occasional reciprocal family visit are artifices to
reducing this symptom of migration.
There is another way of coping with the nostalgic feelings:

dress. And this is mirrored in the preferences of Parissa’s clients.
Many among them are part of the Iranian diaspora from Southern
California. August is a popular month for visiting the home city, and
an occasion for renewing one’s wardrobe: “Well, they usually come
in the summer to see their families, and when they go back they buy
2-3 dresses...” Parissa is not the only designer who has an overseas
Iranian clientele. Shadi also receives orders from members of the
Iranian diaspora, sometimes even through intermediaries. During
the summer she produces more clothes for the diaspora rather than
for Tehran-based clients. Shadi quickly accounts for this:
The same product you buy here, it would be ten times more
abroad. So it is interesting for people come and make it here. The
service is nice, and they come for both reasons: for some there is
the price, for other the service and design.
While Shadi’s clients try to find products similar to those on
the Western markets, Parissa’s clients have a rather different ap-
proach. What attracts them to her work is the symbolic link that
her designs create with their homeland.
But they like my colors because they are a little unusual, and the
styles are Iranian, so when they are living outside and they feel a
little nostalgic, they wear it, they like to be a little more Iranian.
Fabric, color, and form may be simultaneously erasers of mem-
ory, as is the case with fashionable ready-to-wear part of the amne-
siac fashion system, carriers of messages of modernity, or material
support for conservation or creation of memories. For ready-to-
wear fashionable clothes, the constantly changing seasonal styles
carry little if any temporal referent. In most cases, when this refer-
ence exists, it sends one to the self-reflective idea of modernity as it
has been represented in a particular decade, for example, in 1970s
vintage clothing. In the case of Parissa’s creations, memory is actu-

alized and supported through the dress, which is both a-temporal
and “never out-dated”. Thus, dress is a prompter for times past,
and spaces lost, but always preserved in the forms and colors of
a newly produced piece of clothing (and in spite of the fact that
the materials are coming from various other geographic locations).
The mythological dimension of memory projects its own material
support (the dress) into a-temporality or immemoriality. Mahla’s
motto, “dress is a living Museum”, comes alive in the consumer
habits of Parissa’s clients from the diaspora. What makes her dress
“Iranian” is the intersection between the style, the place of produc-
tion, and the use and meanings that the clients attach to it. Used
as a mnemonic device, invested with the power of the evocation of
geographic spaces, Parissa’s clothing creations traverse untouched
the ephemera of fashion, becoming ageless in spite of the necessary
modifications Parissa brings to her designing style each year.
Although emotionally invested in by the clients, this style sets
Parissa at a commercial disadvantage, since the clothes she makes do
not meet the commercial logic of fashion. On the contrary, she says:
[Fashion] it is something that in two-three years you cannot wear
anymore. You have to throw it out, or leave it for another twenty
years [and] maybe it comes back again. But my clothes are always
there. And this is the problem with them. Because it never gets
out of fashion so people don’t buy them anymore. If they have
four or five dresses, they can wear them all their life. It hurts my
pocket.
While in Paris or other Western locations, “ethnic” styles are
incorporated into the fashion system, following the rhythm of go-
ing in and out of fashion, the clients’ use of Parissa’s creations, even
in Western locations, removes them from this logic. For example,
at Paris’ Fall 2002 ready-to-wear was swept under the “bohemian
trend”, and fashion reinvested in Eastern European clothing style.

The 2003 summer clothing suggested Oriental embroideries, in-
cluding those of Iranian provenance. But Parissa’s clothes escape
the ephemera of fashion system through their use as a depository
of memory among the Iranian diaspora.
The question is delicate, and one should not give in to the temp-
tation of characterizing her clothes as “traditional”. They combine
the class privilege of reinvesting rural aesthetic styles, with contexts
of use (diaspora), and with characteristics and adaptations of the
clothes to what I called a modern subjectivity (“walking around
and driving cars”) in order to define a particular type of elegance.
The timelessness of her style is contradictory, at least partially, to
commercial logic. The seemingly un-renewed collections may not
address a variety of clients looking for the promise of continuous
change that fashion carries. Nevertheless, Parissa’s elevated prices
compensate for this commercial disadvantage. As a consequence
(of her prices and style of design), Parissa has a well-defined catego-
ry of clients: high class elderly ladies from Tehran or the diaspora,
young actors, and various artists from Tehran.
But all the Iranians in Europe, they know me. Because if they feel
like having an old Iranian dress, they have to come to me. And
because I am expensive, they remember me (laughs).
Nostalgia and the a-temporal aesthetics combine in the taste of
Parissa’s clients from across the borders. However, the local clients’
preference for the “ethnic style” obviously has different explanations
than those of diasporic nostalgia. I will present a brief ethnographic
account to re-present the mechanism of aesthetic choices among
clients from Tehran. Before the Lotous public fashion show, I vis-
ited Mahla again. I saw her house at the same time as the Samsung
personnel who came to take pictures for the advertising banners. I
arrived around nine in the evening; in her living room there were
three young persons, one woman and two men, arranging the set-
ting for the advertising pictures. Four different colored portable
phones, of two models, and the richness of Mahla’s fabrics made
the background for the future banners. The two men were design-
ers and acted also as photographers, while the woman was the gen-
eral manager of Samsung in Iran (Maryam). She set the stage; in
the beginning, she explained to them that the fabrics add a value
of prestige to the product. They were supposed to find fashionable
fabrics that are classic but not outmoded in Mahla’s collection; she
emphasized the two photographers to be attentive in their selec-
tion. I asked Maryam what is the difference between outmoded
and classic fashion. Her answer was:
You know that there are old things that are outmoded, and there
are old things that are very fashionable. For example these (she
shows me an arrangement of bronze statues in Mahla’s living room)
are nice, and old, but out of fashion. And these (turquoise jewelry
from Qajar period) are very fashionable.
I insisted on getting a full explanation of why some old things
are fashionable and others are not. Maryam told me she couldn’t
explain exactly why; nevertheless, one element was the role of con-
sumers in this process. “The avant-garde people dare to wear this.
And because they have the courage to break the time bringing old
into the new, these things become fashionable.” Playing with time,
as well as playing with geographical locations (as Parissa does with
her “rustic style”) is the privilege of a few, and adds prestige to the
object, be it dress or other commodities; thus it brings a timeless
added value to it. Nevertheless, in her discourse, Parissa makes a
clear distinction between fashionable and eternal elegance, while
Maryam speaks about avant-garde (that is, being before one’s time,
anticipating) through the artifice of disjointed time. It is likely that
the young artists or actors, clients of Parissa, falls into the latter
category, that of the “avant-garde”.
Easily and light-heartedly bringing the past into the present
also affirms one’s separation from it, one’s ability to play easily with
those categories without feeling linked to them more than through
a privileged relation. Conversely, too much “fashion” (as London
chavs display), an overeager look, may mean “too great” a desire of
breaking with one’s past (mostly class position), bringing heaviness
into the necessarily light act of fashion. In any case, the “meaning”
does not take away the fact of practicing fashion itself, and the de-
sire to renew one’s appearance (and through it one’s self ). Willingly
following a sartorial discipline in the rhythm of fashion, regardless
of the style, is what makes the phenomenon more important.
Signature and brand name is another practice associated with
fashion industry and design. Some Tehrani fashion designers dis-
tinguish themselves from tailors by means of branding their cre-
ations. Some others rely solely on their fame. The next chapter will
compare Parisian and Tehrani designers’ attitudes towards brand,
signature, and copying. The inter-relations among legal space, eco-
nomic concerns, and daily practices of branding shape the engage-
ment of both cities in the modern repertoire, each creating its own
modern regime.
Chapter 
After Authors
When I returned from my second sojourn in Tehran, I went

to see some of my “stylists-became-friends” in Paris. I was curi-
ous to see their reaction to the pictures I brought from Tehran,
displaying stylists, models, and street scenes. While visiting Maria,
we talked again about making copies. She saw the photo display-
ing a drawing taken by an Iranian stylist from a European fashion
magazine. I told her copying is current in Tehran, to which she
replied: “Everywhere is the same. Here we also copy. It is normal,
you cannot create out of nothing.” Maria was preparing a line for
an outside contract, and some of her drawings were on her work-
ing table. She browsed through more of the photos and put aside
a couple of them. After finishing, she looked at me, smiling, and
said: “speaking about copies... I like this model, it is very nice, I
shall draw it. Don’t worry, anyway it will never look the same, but I
like the form of it.” She looked for a white piece of paper, and drew
a dressing vaguely inspired by the photo.
This chapter will explore the articulations among copyright
law (as understood in France), copying as a practice employed
or condemned by fashion designers (sometimes both at the same
time), and the meaning that copyright has for the capitalist mode
of production.
What Is a Copy?
In the world of fashion, the issue of copying is a sensitive one.
It is hard to define what stands for a copy; and what a copy is
anyway? From a legal point of view, in France, fashion creation is
230 7: AFTER AUTHORS
potentially protected under the incidence of two different rights:

the right of authorship and the protection of designs and models.
Among fashion designers in Paris, copying is a matter-of-fact issue,
it is something that exists and one has to deal with it. For many,
counterfeiting is an engine of creativity:
If you call yourself a “designer”(créateur) and you do not renew
yourself, you cannot hold the line., you cannot resist. If you have
one idea and you rework it every year, you will find your jewelry
and your bags at Monoprix1. The force of the designer is to renew
oneself.” (Gaby, Paris designer)
There are two major types of counterfeits closely related to
the legal definition of the counterfeit. One refers to the reproduc-
tion and commercialization of a model or design under a different
name. This is what Gaby is complaining about. In these cases, it
is very hard to establish, legally, what a counterfeit is. In legal lan-
guage, a counterfeit is an object that “does not differ in a significant
manner” from another product, already registered. This defines the
“proper character” of an object, recognizable, in legal terms, by
a well-informed observer. Beyond the discussion of what a “well-
informed observer” might be (Duchemin 2002), fashion is in a
delicate position regarding the “proper character” because both de-
signers and lawyers agree that in the fashion industry there is no ex
nihilo creation. As opposed to other industries, in fashion-related
production it is more difficult to determine the proper character of
an object. Thus, in the last decade one could see brands that pre-
cisely “follow fashion”, like Zara or H&M (sometimes pejoratively
called “IKEA of fashion”). These brands do not have a creative de-
partment, but they produce the same designs as well-known fash-
1 French chain of supermarkets that offers a large variety of commodities,
from office tools to clothes, passing through food.
WHAT IS A COPY? 231
ion brands every season at significantly lower prices. Zara has in its
budget an allocation for settling potential legal disputes involving
copyrights.
The second case of legally defined copyright breech is the use of
the brand name, logo, or designer’s name on a product of different
fabrication. This can be put under the category of the authorship
rights. In fashion industry, famous brand names and logos are used
to mark clothes and accessories that are not product of the brand
they wear. In the years after the Second World War, the house Dior
introduced the idea of licensing other products under their name.
By the 1970s licensing became one of the main sources of profit
for big fashion houses (Crane 2000). It is likely that the worries of
protecting one’s name or signature on fashion industrial products,
and the laws protecting it came in vigor after the “discovery” of
the economic utility that the use of name may bring. Practices of
licensing gave birth to the necessity of protecting the brand name
under a copyright law. If one follows the chronology of the prin-
ciple of the “unity of art” specific to French law of copyright, one
may observe a certain correspondence.
French law of copyright is based on the “unity of art”, mean-
ing that “there is no dichotomy between pure art and art applied
to industry and commerce.” (Benhamou 2002: 38). Although the
distinction was active in a law promulgated in 1793, the law suf-
fered a series of modifications which finally erased this distinction
(cf. Benhamou). The july 14th 1909 law regarding copyright re-
ferred solely to art applied in industry and commerce; in March
1957 (Dior started name licensing by that time) a new text unified
the two forms of protection (pure art and art applied to industry
and commerce). The last modification took place in 1992. Under
the incidence of the code of intellectual property from 1992, intel-
lectual property and industrial property came under the same pro-
tection. Every product with an identifiable author can be claimed

under the right of authorship, or intellectual property, and under
the right of design protection, in a cumulative manner.
The standardization of laws in the European Union fuels cur-
rent debates because some fear the “unity of art” principle will not
be recognized in the new laws. Without entering into detail here,
it is necessary to mention that fashion designers rely on the right
of authorship for practical reasons. Every season, a fashion house
produces a great number of designs, ranging anywhere from fifty
to five hundred; if each of these models had to be registered for
copyright, the costs would be detrimental to the profitability of the
enterprise. More important, the time frame of fashion calendars is
very tight. The bureaucratic time required for the registration of
designs would be too long, and the models would already be out on
the market (and out of fashion) by the time registration was com-
plete. Thence, fashion designers prefer to rely almost exclusively on
authorship rights.
The “field reality” of copying is much greater and it combines
the two infringements. There are fashion products that copy the
design and the signature, there are those that use the signature
without worrying about design, and there are those that reproduce
the model under a different name. Theorists and law researchers
agree upon the fact that the object of protection is an “immaterial”
one. The “object” of protection is the form, the appearance, or the
design. But even this definition is a problematic one, as Vivant
observes:
Take the example of the authorship rights and the particularly
interesting case of the rights over a title. We know very well [...]
that the owner of the rights cannot forbid the descriptive use of
the title. (Vivant 2003: 9)
SIGNATURE, MARK, TERRITORY 233
Following this reasoning, Vivant argues that the protection of

copyrights addresses only the “economic utility” of the object.
A copy is defined as such only after the registration of the mod-
el or brand name establishes something as “original”. The object
of protection is the one defined in the legal act of registration. The
design protection is thus an a posteriori fact, justified through a
“natural” law that attributes rights to an individual assumed to be
the sole generator of an immaterial object, be it form, sign, or in-
vention. The rights of authorship give to the author the possibility
to claim ownership of the object before the model has been regis-
tered. This difference between authorship rights and design and
model protection is another source of endless debate, but is not
central to our current inquiry.
The copyright establishes an ascendancy of the author over the
object of her/his creation. This is not, however the entire story.
The ascendancy is over the field of potential and actual profit that
the object may generate. The act of counterfeiting, in legal terms,
constitutes a use of this ascendancy by another individual. Vivant
identifies thus the copyrights with territorial rights. In legal terms,
the counterfeiter trespasses the intellectual territory of an author,
and uses, for economic purposes, the ascendancy over the territory
thus defined. For the purposes of this chapter, I will concentrate
on the territorial aspect of authorship, and on the way in which an
individual becomes an author, that is on the myth of authorship.
Signature, Mark, Territory

For an anthropological approach to the link between intellec-
tual property and potentiality, see Marilyn Strathern (1996). Her
argument links a dispersed field of intellectual property rights in
order to rethink the disembodiment of life (as form) from the body
(as vehicle). Legal discourses place form under the category of own-
ership rights, while the vehicle is non-legislated.
Thus, assemblies of independently created forms may consti-
tute new possible legal incorporations. The argument of this chap-
ter is that the author him- or herself is the cumulus of legal forms
that are economically sanctioned.
Around the middle of the nineteenth century, a hat maker from
Paris had clients returning to him asking to repair hats allegedly
bought from his shop. The hat maker was not sure if they had
indeed originated in his workshop. To avoid further confusion, he
embroidered a distinctive mark on the hats he produced. In oth-
er words, he signed the fashion accessories, thus giving birth to a
practice that today stands at the heart of copyright disputes. Today,
the form of the object is central to these disputes; its character of
“novelty and originality” demanded by law. In a way, in the fashion
industry today the signature is the warrant of the originality of an
object (especially in terms of a well known signature). If the fashion
designer invokes the authorship rights, the signature is indeed the
mark of originality and unicity of the object; prestige is the word
that expresses the cumulative qualities of a sign, and licensing is the
artifice that adds economic utility to prestige.
Nevertheless, it is imperative to observe that, for a variety of
reasons, our hat maker was interested in distinguishing his prod-
ucts from (similar) others, rather than establishing his models as
new and original. He was more concerned with having hats re-
turned to him that he never made (but could not distinguish from
his own) than with being copied or establishing his claim on a
model or design.
During the same period, Charles Frederick Worth, an English
designer living and working in Paris, transformed the role of fash-
ion designers and couturiers.
Worth’s position was above that of a dressmaker or tailor in that

he was not expected to copy designs created by others. He hired ar-
tisans and helpers to assist in the creation and realization of his
styles. He sold designs that epitomized the fashionable styles of
the period. He invented the idea of seasonal collections contain-
ing his latest ideas and displayed in the couture house by models.
(Crane, 2002: 136, my italics)
It is important to remark that he was one of the only persons
not expected to copy, even though copying was a legitimate prac-
tice. It was significant that copy was oriented towards styles, because
the practice of signature was not current in the nineteenth century.
In this sense, styles were a-temporal. Although changing with years
(and, following Worth, with the seasons), they did not belong to an
easily-identifiable person (designer) or fashion house for that mat-
ter. It was thus hard to say to whom a certain model belonged, and
this was not a primary concern for tailors or dressmakers. Also, at
that time the principle of unity of art did not apply, and a signed
dress would not be considered under the cumulative authorship
and industrial model protection rights. At that time, the concern of
being copied was much less present than today. In fact, since Paris
was the center of fashion for the Western world, all other couturi-
ers from Europe and the United States directly copied styles from
Paris. With the interruption of the Second World War, and with
few exceptions, this tendency continued until the 1960s, when the
explosion of media and visibility of alternative styles introduced a
great variety in fashion (cf. Crane, 2002). When taking this context
into consideration, we can perhaps better understand the famous
Madame Coco Chanel’s attitude on copying, who declared herself
delighted if her models were copied, because it was measure of her
prestige. Interestingly, while this statement may hold little mean-
ing for most of the fashion designers I met in Paris, it seems sen-
sible to designers encountered in Tehran, for reasons I shall explore

shortly.
Contrary to Madame Chanel’s position, today copying is not
only unappreciated, but it is even condemned. At the individual
level, an anecdote from maison Le Sage, a lace producer that made
laces for all famous Parisian fashion designers beginning with the
nineteenth century, is telling about the rivalries and accusations that
circulate in the world of Parisian fashion. While visiting Le Sage
workshops, I was invited to admire a robe carrying the signature
of a famous contemporary fashion designer. At the same time, my
guide pulled out from the archival drawers a lace ordered and used
by Elsa Schiaparelli for a robe in between the two World Wars. The
lace was almost identical with the one used for the robe of the cur-
rent design. My guide told me that, in fact, the robe I was admiring
was not the first one inspired by Shiaparelli’s work, but that there
had been another designer who had more recently accused the cre-
ator of the model I was seeing of copying. Nevertheless, both of
them passed by Le Sage’s archives...
At the legal level, commentators on copying equate it with acts
of banditry, international criminal networks, or even financing for
terrorism.
There is always need to remember that the counterfeit is a de-
linquent act, an attack to the public order, but also to eco-
nomic order (eluded charges and taxes), and to the social order.
(Benhamou, ibid. 39).
Beyond the interesting jump the author makes from economic
to social order (as if a “good society” is based on economic laws) it
is worth mentioning that counterfeit is a constructed delinquent
act. This became important because of practices such as licensing,
which brought benefit to the use of a name or mark of prestige.
This was not the case fifty years ago, before the practice was in
place. The economic order and legal spaces create their own catego-
ries of legitimate gain and illegitimate actions.
In the above summary, one can observe how the idea of copy-
right has been transformed in the fashion industry, and how it
transformed practices in the industry. It has shifted from an open
definition of creation and copy as a mode of diffusion of models
and popularity to today’s closed legal system, in which signs, sig-
natures, marks or models are defined as intellectual territories that
bring potential profit and that engender specific profitable practices
like licensing. This tendency emerged after the Second World War
and resulted from the convergence of several factors: the increased
importance of the figure of the designer (Steele 1998) to its trans-
formation into a superstar, the practices of signing and licensing
fashion products (first clothing license in 1940 by Schiaparelli), a
practice later generalized by Dior’s house (Crane, ibid.), and the le-
gal unification of pure art and art applied to industry in 1957 which
created a legal frame for this practice and subsequently constructed
the illicit counterfeit as we know it today. All these elements intro-
duce the historicity necessary to understanding the counterfeit in
fashion not as an inherently delinquent act, but rather as a histori-
cal product of social, legal, and economic transformations.
We can conclude this section with the observation that the au-
thor is created through the legal process of patent deposit, and that
the author is a posteriori rationalized as the agent of creation. That
is, even in the case of non-registered models, the author is assumed
to be the person “naturally” entitled to undertake the legal process
of patent acquisition. The roots of this assumption can be found
in the theory of possessive individualism as Locke formulated it.
The “natural law” of possession of one’s products of labor (that is,
anything that bears the mark of one’s labor becomes one’s property)
stands as the unquestioned basis of authorship rights. This concept
is of course complicated by further developments. An overview of

the attitudes of Tehran designers towards copy and of the dynamic
of the copyright laws in Iran help to clarify the multitude of factors
and their interaction that concur in the creation of a naturalized
legal territory.
“Everybody Is a Copy”
The practice of copying and the issue of copyrights, while un-
deniably linked, must be treated separately. As I have shown earlier,
copyright refers to the legal construction of an author, of an intel-
lectual territory, and of an illegitimate actor who copies, while the
practices of copying are multiple and sometimes hard to define. I
will venture to hypothesize that the practice of copying is a “natu-
ral” practice, unavoidable in any practice of creation, especially in
Figure 7.1 Luxury-like boutique in Tehran.

“EVERYBODY IS A COPY” 239
fashion creation, while counterfeit is a category emerged from its

legalization for economic (and political) reasons.
Foreign enterprises (and local ones) may register their mark
in Iran. Nevertheless, the brand copyright law has never been
really applied. Iran is not a member of OMC, and it did not
ratify all the international acts regarding intellectual property.
Consequently there is no juridical procedure effective to stop the
selling of counterfeits on the market. (Felizia, 2003).
Tehran offers a great variety of fashionable boutiques in which
one can find clothing produced locally or in Turkey, Taiwan, or
Thailand. Many of the boutiques bear Western brand names, with-
out being necessarily (or at all) authorized distributors of the brand
name in Tehran. Thus one can find Levi’s boutiques, Mango, Zara,
Esprit, or Armani (sometimes written in the Arabic script, as in the
picture below). These boutiques however seldom offer the com-
modities produced by the brand displayed. The usual brand names
are prestigious among Tehranian clients because of the private cir-
cuits that bring products in small number, and sell them at private
occasions. The original products also arrive from France or other
occidental locations via Dubai, through parallel commercial cir-
cuits (see Chapter 4).
Nevertheless, before the counterfeits arrive on the market, they
need to be produced somehow, somewhere. Although the issue of
copyright in Tehran is much greater, and it includes the market for
counterfeits, for my purposes here I will focus on designers’ prac-
tices regarding copying and brand-signature in Tehran, with brief
references to their Parisian counterparts.
What does it mean to copy? Is it legitimate to talk about illegiti-
mate copying in the age of mechanical reproduction? For the pur-
pose of writing this text, I constantly use the command copy/paste,
not to mention the fact that the format of my writing (the immate-
rial object of copyright laws) is itself the property of Microsoft, and it

is only licensed to me as a legal user of Word software. As my friends
in Tehran remarked, one can copy not only dress, but also ways of
moving, attitudes, language, and entire styles. While hesitant to use
the word “copy”, I will do so because it is used by the persons I inter-
viewed and there is no more accurate word (as of yet).
There are three different practices associated with copying to
which my friends in Tehran pointed. First, there is the copying of a
style, of a mode of behavior, of a kind of dress on the part of con-
sumers. As Saba, a young Iranian woman observed in an interview:
“Here if something becomes fashionable, everybody copies it. This
is not really fashion.” In slightly different formulations, this state-
ment was present among all the people I interviewed who knew
Tehran’s fashionable urban environment. While walking in the chic
locations of the city one has the sensation of seeing again and again
of the same kind of dress or styles. In Paris and other Western loca-
tion, this type of behavior is known as “fashion victimization”, and
it is many times used in a derogatory manner for those who do not
feel daring enough to experiment with clothing. As a Paris designer
observes:
[T]here are panoplies in the spirit of a stylist, and this is not really
interesting; the most interesting thing is what people are doing
with the clothing, how they appropriate it... make it exist, creat-
ing its history, but using it in a different manner.
In Paris, Japanese consumers are stereotypically associated with
fashion victimization. In an article on fashion in Japan, McVeigh
(1997) makes the argument that the conservatism of Japanese so-
ciety does not encourages innovation with dress, but rather the
direct copying of prestigious Western designers. The researcher ar-
gues that fashion in Tokyo is the expression of a hierarchical rigid
system, rather than of the social mobility and democratic fashion
“EVERYBODY IS A COPY” 241
uses in Europe. Although not completely confortable with this

type of explanation, I found it interesting to think about the unity
of style among the Tehranian young people who can afford to be
fashionable. There may be a multitude of explanations for the style
copying in Tehran.
“It is very very hard to buy, but my opinion is because we do not
see a lot of good stuff here, we see on Mtv or Fashion TV, and
we do not have fashion designers, all the girls and boys I think
they copy. They copy too much. They have to, they do not have a
choice. It is very sad, actually...” (Neda, scenograph)
Indeed, styles in Tehran are mainly diffused through satellite
TV channels like MTV or Fashion TV. While Fashion TV mainly
offers high-end fashion product imagery, MTV displays the coun-
terculture style, recuperated and filtered for the mainstream youth
culture. Neda additionally explains in her interview that there is a
lack of fashion designers in Tehran. While fashion designers exist in
Tehran, there are not widely known, because they are not mediated,
and thus out of reach for most potential consumers. The sources of
inspiration for creating a style are thus limited. Nevertheless, TV
fashion styles are wide-spread among the population:
Everybody in the street sees what is going on, try to copy, make-
up wise. I think everybody wants to follow, with Fashion TV.
Even my employees, very Southern Tehran (low class part of the
city, my note), they can have fashion TV. So they follow. (Shadi)
It is important to observe in this quote that the sense of copy-
ing is somehow reversed in relation to designers in Paris. Street
styles are sources of inspiration for many Western designers, while
in this case the “street” is inspired by mainstream fashion. The cir-
cuit is closed.
A further limitation for style creation in Tehran may be the

scarcity of the options, in terms of variety of clothing.
I think you have a choice in Europe, you can go to fashion stores
and buy something you like, or you just can construct your own
style. You can create by yourself and just wear it. But here you
do not see young people being creative, like have their own style.
They wear all the same short mantos, same make up, everyone !,
jeans, scarves, I don’t like this. (Neda)
Nevertheless, there is something else which induces an absence
of creative spirit. Most of my interviewees identified it with the
conservatism that characterizes social relations in Tehran. While
I partially agree with this argument – especially when it concerns
male consumers – I think there is another important factor that
plays into the widespread “style copying” in Tehran. The social
pressure and the complicated surveillance system in public spaces
(see Chapter 4) create a context in which experimentation with
clothing is gradual and prudent. Beyond the “natural” tendency
of feeling part of the group through clothing identification, there
is the step-by-step experimentation with space and social relations
specific to the place. This experimentation may include Parissa’s
story of her copying the abba, the overcoat specific to the mullah.
She said she made her first abba in the years immediately succeed-
ing the imposition of dress codes and Islamic morals on Iranian
public space. The style eventually caught up, but she humorously
evokes the moments of experimentation with the new style.
I mean I started from outside, I copied the mullahs, what they
were wearing (nobody was wearing them), the first thing I started
to make was abba. And I wear it myself first. And everywhere
I went they catch me and they stopped me” What is this, why
are you copying the mullahs”, because I put the scarf around
my head in the same way. They did not like it at all. I told them
ART FOR DESIGNERS 243
“don’t you tell us everytime to copy them? They are the best,
what’s wrong then? I am copying them!?” “No, no, we were talk-
ing to the men, not the women!” (laughs)...
There are several elements that emerge in this fragment: first is
the widespread idea of identification with a group through imita-
tion of its clothing style. Parissa used the abba ironically, but she
also proposed it to the public as a practical way of dressing under
the new regime. Copying dress and “copying” behavior is automat-
ically linked and ironically used in this case. Her first remark, “I
started from outside” marks the locus of inspiration exterior from
the designer’s realm, that is somehow not in her “pure creative ter-
ritory”. Nevertheless, as I remarked further in the interview, Parissa
does not seem to see copying as illegitimate as long as the artist puts
a personal touch in the creation (an opinion shared to a certain
degree by all the designers I met in both Paris and Tehran). On
the contrary, she has a rather open opinion about copying, rest-
ing assured that the designer’s or artist’s touch will always mark an
original dress. But she, as well as many others I interviewed in Iran,
complained about a sort of “national character” in Iran that makes
copying widespread:
We, Iranians, are the best copymakers in the world! (laughs) We
copy everything, you know. But what to do? Everybody copies
everybody. It has always been like this, and it will always be. Not
everybody has the brain to bring out something new [...]. So
everybody is a copy!
Art for Designers, Copyrights for Business

The second level of copying is industrial copying, the large scale
production of fashion commodities bearing prestige names like
Chanel, Louis Vuitton, or Dior. While important and not without
Figure 7.2 Brand-name tags for sale on Sa’adi street in Tehran.

significant impact on the market, it is not the purpose of this chap-

ter to analyze this phenomenon.
The third kind of copying refers to the clothing production by
tailors and designers and the use of a prestigious name to increase
the value of clothes. One of my first days in Tehran I went to Sa’adi
street, in the center of the city, where many low-end tailors are
concentrated. In the window of one store, I saw big rolls of brand
names like Nike, Boss or Ralph Laurent, that could be bought, cut,
and applied to locally-produced clothing. In the same store one
could find a variety of branded buttons, zippers, and so on. I later
found out that there are many such stores, and that in the Great
Bazar there is a special section dedicated to them.
It is a common practice among tailors in Tehran to offer to their
clients not only copycats from fashion magazines but branded copies
of the client’s choice. In contrast, fashion designers of Tehran refuse to
provide such services. As Shadi once told me:
I had this request from some man who wanted me just to copy an
Armani jacket, I said : ‘I am sorry I will not do this’. I don’t accept
when a customer comes to me and says : « I want to have this »...
well, no!
This fact constitutes the main distinction designers make be-
tween themselves and the large number of tailors active in Tehran.
While one may go to a tailor and order a dress directly copied from
a Western journal (French Vogue is the most widespread but I have
also seen various other journals, or just pages cut from fashion maga-
zines), a designer will always propose a particular style of his own
(see Chapter 6). Shadi does not deny that she is inspired by Western
fashion magazines:
I definitely do not copy. I do get inspired by magazines and every-

thing to see what the trend is, to see what has been done, what has
not been done... But I really do not copy.
Shadi signs her dresses with her name, hand-embroidered with
golden letters on a black tag. In pre-Revolutionary times, her mother
was a well-known dressmaker for high-class women. Shadi started her
work by helping her mother and eventually took up the business.
While she kept some of her mother’s clients, she formed a younger
clientele of her own. It was at that point that she invented her sig-
nature. I asked if her mother had a signature, and a friend of Shadi
present during our conversation responded “she didn’t need one”. The
implication was that she was so well known that she did not need to
sign her creations. Although Shadi is also well known, she has a signa-
ture. I will argue that there is a series of other factors that play into the
presence of a signature, not only in Shadi’s case, but in that of other
designers in Tehran. For the moment, it is important to remember
that Shadi has a large clientele from Tehran and from the Iranian
diaspora. She sometimes receives orders by mail or phone from clients
in Paris or London; the clients usually ask her to duplicate a piece in a
different size, for a friend or relative. At the same time, Shadi has what
she calls a ready-to-wear small line, dresses made for daytime use that
she produces. During the 1990s, Shadi worked in a publicity produc-
tion firm in New York. From previous interview excerpts, one can see
Shadi’s discursive rejection of copying linked to her practice.
The issue of copyright seems to be a new concern among fashion
designers in Tehran. Consequently, not all of them had developed
brand names. In general, the idea of copy and copying does not seem
illegitimate in itself; the many opinions expressed on the topic ranged
from considering the copy as a stimulatant to imagination, to the
copy as inoffensive “because everybody knows me and my dress”.
Copying is also present in other domains, for example, in the

market of art reproduction in Tehran. In the same commercial spaces
where one finds counterfeit clothing, one may also find painting re-
productions. The reproduction of famous or even lesser known paint-
ings on different backings (from canvas to carpets) is also a common
practice in Tehran, and there are boutiques in which one can watch
the entire process of copying.
But having one’s own signature and not accepting client’s requests
for copies are mechanisms of distinction among Tehran designers. The
idea that “everybody copies” in one way or another is however regu-
larly invoked. While designers and stylist in Tehran generally main-
tain that they do not copy when asked in interviews, in practice they
Figure 7.3 Reproduction of a portrait in an art boutique in Tehran.

are clearly inspired (and in some

cases more than just inspired) by
Western journals like Vogue, and
professional catalogues (Secada)
at least for the clothes designed
for evening use.
Other designers I met pro-
duced clothing in larger num-
bers and created their own
brand. While Shadi uses her
own name hand-embroidered
in golden letters on black or
dark brown, Nafisseh brands all
of her products with the label
Z.A.N., accompanied by the
logo sign for femininity (the
circle and the little +); zan in
Farsi means woman. Nafisseh Figure 7.4
forms a working team with Fashion journals offer inspiration.
Roxanne, which may explain
why the brand is an abstract name. Nafisseh also told me, showing
me the label on her own manto : “It makes more mark, more like
a fashionable occidental logo.” The labels are produced locally, and
Nafisseh brands her “Islamic mantos” that she sells in a series of
small boutiques in Tehran.
Not all designers have a brand name. For example, Azadeh makes
only one piece of every creation, and she does not feel the need to
brand her products. Nonetheless, Azadeh brands the bags in which
she packs her clients clothing with her signature and phone number.
This idea was greatly appreciated by a Parisian designer I visited after
my return to Tehran, and it may appear in Paris in the near future. By
labeling her bags, Azadeh essentially engages in the same practice that
a ready-to-wear or a prestigious fashion house does. In many parts of
the world shopping bags wear the sign, signature, or logo of the store
or designer2.
Azadeh’s approach to her work, in her own terms, is an artistic one.
She explained to me she does not sign her clothes because everyone
knows her style and because she is very inspired by traditional cloth-
ing. Azadeh differentiates between her creative work and her business-
oriented work, giving the example of Mahla as a business oriented
designer.
Mahla is the creator of “Lotous” dress brand, of the Iranian
fashion journal with the same name, and the organizer of the only
two public fashion shows held after the Islamic Revolution as of
now. Among the designers in Tehran she is the synonym of big
business and of the differentiation of dress-making from art. When
we touched on the issue of copyrights, she shared with me her
opinion that copy is a stimulus for creation and that being copied
also means being well known. When I asked her if somebody had
copied her models, she answered:
They did not copy it yet. (Laughs) They did not do it, yet. But
they cannot. Do you know why? Because I applied for copyrights.
It is a very new office. In a special place they give us a number,
and than we put that number on our brand. Nobody else can use
it. But as you know, all around the world is the same...
From a legal point of view, Iran offers complete protection to
brand names and patents. Nevertheless, there is no regulation re-
garding designs and dress models protection, because they do not
2 Branded bags from Europe like Zara, Gap, or Mango are used daily by
wealthy women in Tehran as mark of distinction, while shopping or simply
visiting friends. Imitation luxury boutiques also use Western branded bags
in order to decorate the shop-windows.
enter under the incidence of Industrial Property law. The author-

ship rights have won recent recognition, and only in 1971 did Iran
adopt a law regarding authorship and copyrights. Although Iran
signed the convention of the World Organization for Protection of
Industrial Property, it did not ratify the Bern convention, meaning
that designs and models are not protected. It is likely that Mahla
registered the brand name for the Industrial Property protection.
This did not however stop the circulation of the first issue of Lotous
magazine on the internet. On circuits of email among friends, just
two weeks after its commercialization (March 2003), the journal,
scanned in its entirety, arrived in electronic mailboxes.
Of all the designers I spoke with, only Mahla had her brand
name registered. There may be many reasons for this. Except for
Mahla, who is a public figure, most designers prefer to keep their
visibility in public and in legal spaces as low as possible. The main
reason for this appears to be the delicate nature of their craft, and
its intersection with Islamic regulation. Nevertheless, fiscal con-
siderations may also be at the basis of the desire of invisibility. In
any cases, besides Mahla, the designers who have a brand name
seem to ignore even the existence of the patent office. Shadi was
sincerely amazed when I asked her about registering her brand. It is
important to remark that the use of a brand name precedes the reg-
istration of the mark, and is a practice independent from the legal
space conferred to it. This is completely unlike the young designers
I have met in Paris, who mark their existence as such from the mo-
ment of brand name registration.
From the perspective of the dynamic of brand name practices
in Tehran, Parissa is the designer who epitomizes the transforma-
tions in this craft with regards to copyright and branding in Tehran.
Although professionally active for more than twenty years, Parissa
never signed her clothes. Her opinion on copying is liberal, and she
is persuaded that there is no real ex nihilo creation.
So I start first with copying these things which they wear in the
village, mixing them a little with the Western style, and slowly
they start to come out of my own brain, you know, not copy-
ing anymore... Well, altogether, I have the ideas from Ottomans,
Ismaili, you know the turks, all these... Turkeman colors, things
like this, and all Qajar style. Copying a little, but making them
a little different...
As Parissa goes on to explain in the interview, her originality
comes from the artistic “touch” she confers to her dresses; she does
not even present herself as a clothing designer, but rather as some-
body with a special gift for colors, and their inspired combination.
Her clients come from the upper Tehran classes, as well as from
the Iranian Diaspora, mainly from Los Angeles. When I asked her
about branding her clothes, she told me that “everybody knows
me”, and therefore there is no need for her to do so.
Later in our conversation, Parissa shared the details of her cur-
rent dilemma. She never claimed rights of property over her de-
signs. She told me she could always recognize her clothes by her
personal “touch”, as could her clients. Nevertheless, recently she
received phone calls from Los Angeles, from clients turned friends,
who urged her to tune her TV to an LA Iranian channel in order to
see her own clothes presented by somebody else as her own work.
Following her account, supported by other friends I met later, the
clothes she made and sold to members of the Iranian diaspora were
apparently re-bought and presented under a different signature by
an Iranian designer from Los Angeles. Parissa told me:
If my head was made for business, I could sue her and make a lot
of money, because I have pictures with these clothes on me taken
ten years ago. But I am not like this. And this is my problem.
She explained to me that now she is intending to make up her

own brand, but not in Iran. She does not want to make it under
her own name, either, for the reasons I mentioned before. Parissa is
invited to an international show that will take place in London in
2004. “Because of this, now I have to think about a name, about a
brand, maybe a website. Now I have to look for a photographer to
make a portfolio.” Thinking about a portfolio, a brand name, and a
(commercial) website in fact is the recognition from her part of the
necessity of embracing new practices linked to fashion as business.
All the three elements she mentioned are in fact part of the creation
of a territory, a brand territory that would ideally bring economic
gain, and the possibility of exploitation of a name, or signature.
From Parissa’s perspective, these “things” are far away from her ar-
tistic preoccupation and approach on fashion. The incident of her
creations being resold under a different name does not stir in her
the desire to recuperate what is “naturally” hers.
The distinction between artist and business-person is a valid
and operative one in Tehran, among the designers I interviewed.
On the contrary, in Paris the designers (créateurs) I interviewed op-
erate in the logic of the unity of art and industry, talking about
their work as both an artistic creation and a legally regulated source
of economic gain. Being copied is a constant concern for my inter-
viewees in Paris, and to a lesser degree in Tehran.
It becomes evident that in Tehran the preoccupations with
copyright started in the later period, along with two important
mutations: firstly, the changing of status of dress-makers from tai-
lors to couturier, and their entry into the logic of market. It is no-
table that three out of four designers that I have met and who have
a brand name belong to a younger generation (between 35 and 50
years old), and all of them studied or worked abroad in Europe or
in the United States. As previously mentioned, Shadi transformed
her mother’s tailor-shop into a fashion design workshop upon her

return from New York. Unlike her mother who relied on her pres-
tige among her frequent clients, Shadi created a name, marked thus
the dress, and gave birth to a recognizable brand beyond the net-
work of familiarity.
Nafisseh (Z.A.N.) produces mantoha on a large scale, and de-
veloped her brand in order to differentiate herself among the in-
dustrial producers. Z.A.N. is presented as a ready-to-wear deluxe
line. Lotous also started as a commercial brand (Mahla, the owner,
studied banking in Holland). Lotous is a special case to which I will
give more space. The development of internal textile production,
due to a protectionist economy (importations were forbidden up
until March 2002), created a very concurential internal market.
The stylists distinguish themselves through their name, prices and
the clientele they developed (mainly persons from the same privi-
leged class position).
Second, the increased diffusion of locally produced designer
clothing threatened those very designers’ economic gain. The cli-
ents from the Iranian Diaspora buy and bring clothing from Tehran
to their homes in London, Paris, or Los Angeles. Some of the de-
signers I have met were warned by their clients about being copied
by Iranian stylists from abroad (as was the case for Parissa, as de-
scribed earlier). The movement of clothes outside Iranian borders
(or rather outside the small “controlled” area of Northern Tehran)
and their exposition to a larger public made poignant the issue of
distinction through brand or signature. The individualization of
clothing through name is important when the diffusion of style(s)
becomes broader, and there are economic gains in view.
In Iran, fashion practices and market logic, along with the slow-
ly introduced legislation geared towards the copyright and patents,
lead to the ideas of signature and copyright among the designers
of Tehran (parts of the myth of authorship). Although most of the

designers do not know or follow the legal procedures for registering
their brands, they put names on their creation, and construct pres-
tige and status attached to their name. Nevertheless, in the absence
of a law for design or model protection, this advantage cannot nec-
essarily be exploited through licensing.
Authors, Power, Territory

Based on Taussig’s concept of mimesis, Rosemary Coombe
(1996) discusses the trademark as a mode of legal spatial appro-
priation that effaces the original referent (oftentimes an/other who
does not benefit from the economic gains brought by the trade-
mark, in her case Native Americans). The (figurative) trademark is
the expression of the mimetic capacity that influences the original.
Thus, Native Americans and indigenous people have to claim in-
tellectual property of trademark images that are imitations (and
oftentimes mockeries) of themselves. The question of the exten-
sion of copyrights to culture as a product of collective human ac-
tions preoccupies anthropological inquiries in the legal systems.
Strathern (1996) observes the cognitive difficulty of presenting
cultures as discrete bodies that may acquire intellectual property
rights. See also Michael Brown (1998).
In Iran, the process of introduction of a law regarding copy-
rights is paralleled by practices in the fashion industry that point to
defining the individual as author. The idea of author already exists,
of course, but the economic construction and the establishment of
an intellectual territory to be exploited is in some ways a new one.
In France, in the case of licensing, the fact that the designer ac-
quired a new social status, and that prestige became attached to his/
her name, created the economic opportunity of using one’s name
AUTHORS, POWER, TERRITORY 255
or signature for economic gain. The license protection law came

after this practice was in place.
The economic law of authorship induces new conceptions of the
individual and new approaches to art. The unity of art as conceived in
French law does not make sense among Tehran designers. The design-
ers from Tehran and their clients discursively separate an artist from
a business person. In the opinion of my Tehranian interviewees, an
artist does not look for the economic gain, since her work is defined
by the timeless creation rather than by temporal economic laws. That
is, in many cases, even if a creation belongs to a person, the sources of
this creation are diffused in an a-temporal tradition. As Azadeh told
me repeatedly, she finds inspiration in old architecture, in villages, or
in the clothes of the kashkay (nomad tribe of Iran). Azadeh does not
sign her clothing, nor does Parissa. They are the two designers most
inspired by traditional clothing and the furthest from the market log-
ic. While timeless, the inspiration is very well delimited territorially in
the designers’ views. It is either Iranian or Western.
It is interesting to relate traditional clothes to national territory
and to the idea of the territoriality of the copyright. Many designers
in Tehran talk about the ease with which Western designers integrate
Iranian style or patterns in their models, signing them afterwards and
gaining intellectual (territorial) primacy over them. “Ethnic”, “orien-
tal”, or “bohemian” are as many styles that designate in Paris or else-
where the procedure of author-izing unsigned models. Extended, one
may talk about a territorial possession through signature. Tehran de-
signers complain about the fact that they have to copy western styles
that seem a-territorial (because of the universalist value attached),
whereas fashion designers in Paris do not hesitate to employ “tradi-
tional” or “exotic” styles, which seem timeless and thus non-authored.
In both cases there is a power relation. The Western fashion centers
dominate, based on ascendancy, territorial and signature primacy.
Practices of copyright entitle those who apply them to conquer new

spaces, new territories. The universal characteristic of Western fashion
and the engagement with modern forms through desire make many
Tehranian designers create in a Western spirit that may be permanent-
ly identified as copying. That is because, in contrast to non-western
clothing, Western clothing comes always already signed, integrated
into a system of copyrighted territoriality.
Among the Tehranian designers, Western clothes are equivalent
to haute couture, gaining thus a universal dimension similar to mo-
dernity. But, as in the Eurocentric discourses of modernity in which
non-western locations are always mimetic of modernity, fashion de-
signers in Tehran are always already “copies”. The ethnological ap-
proach I presented here argues that this is clearly not the case, and that
it is the organization of copyrights and authorship into a legal struc-
ture, among other elements, that confers to western designs power
and ascendancy. Time and space, profit through exploitation and ter-
ritory are brought together in copyright laws.
In Tehran, practices of commerce and industry (and anticipated
profits) introduce the needs for law, and the application of law creates
ideas of authorship. The French Embassy puts at the public’s disposi-
tion a list of local lawyers specialized in copyright legal matters. Even
though most of the designers I talked with do not know how these
laws would apply to their products, they are signing their products,
thus making possible an eventual recognition of the author. But “au-
thor” does not necessarily have the same meaning in Tehran as in
Paris, at least not yet. Significant differences remain such as the sepa-
ration between art, and art applied to industry (in Tehran but not in
Paris) and the absence of a legal provision space that makes “author” a
profitable category. A wealth of literature deals with the consequences
of generalizing property and reducing the space of common owner-
ship. For a review of this literature see Keith Aoki (no date). Biopiracy
AUTHORS, POWER, TERRITORY 257
is given special attention for two reasons: first, the ethical and onto-
logical questions it gives rise to (e.g. property over life, legally solved
in some spaces through the separation between forms and vehicles of
life). However, this separation is constantly contested and rearranged
in practices dealing with biological matter(s); see also Paul Rabinow
(1999). Second, the impact that the patents of forms of life have on
peasant populations (and on global food supplies) who are obliged to
buy from multinational corporations the patented technique that they
previously used and was part of common knowledge. (See Vandana
Shiva, 1999)
Chapter 
Pictured Bodies:
Photographing for Fashion in Tehran
Driving or walking through Tehran, one cannot but notice the

advertisements of “e-cut”. “E-cut”, a ready-to-wear fashion brand
for men, uses “stars” to advertise their products. Mohammad Reza
Golzar, the lead singer in the Aryan band, appears on the banners
in two different poses: at the seashore, barefoot, dressed in an e-cut
three- piece suit, and petting a horse (only the head of the horse is
visible, and Mr. Golzar from the chest up). At the moment, “e-cut”
is the only brand that uses advertising on public billboards for fash-
ion products. As a consequence of the interdiction of showing the
forms of the women’s bodies in public, women’s dress advertising
through billboards is almost entirely absent.
Since body visibility is a delicate issue and spatial segregation of
the sexes is an important moral concern in Muslim contexts, prac-
Figure 8.1. Advertising for E-cut brand in Tehran, 2003.

Figure 8.2. Photos of two fashion boutique-windows in Tehran. Note the dif-
ference between female (above) and male (below) mannequins.
PICTURED BODIES 261
tices surrounding representations of bodies are predictably sensitive

to these contexts. Photography is a matter of concern in any public
space, be it Muslim or not. Representing an object (body) through
photography means not only invoking the specter of that object
but also recreating its material presence, albeit a two-dimensional
one. In the streets of Tehran, representations of women’s bodies
are subjected to the same requirement of modesty, or hidjab. This
refers not only to photographs for billboards, but also to window
shop mannequins that lack the upper half of their heads and fa-
cial features (as opposed to male or child mannequins, realistic in
their representation). As opposed to women’s bodies in movement,
mannequins and photographs are fixed, identifiable, and thus more
easily subjected to the dominant discourse. Photography practices
in Tehran’s fashion world reveal a certain mode of imagining and
representing (women’s) bodies in relation to modern repertoires
(like fashion), in the spatial regime of ideal public and private sepa-
ration along the lines of gender.
As argued in Chapter 4 and chapter 5, in Iran gender segre-
gation and its spatial inscription are part of a historical process.
However, this segregation does not follow a rigid framework along
the lines of Muslim/secular, non-modern/ modern. In her ac-
count of the modernization of women in early twentieth century
Iran, Najmabadi (1993) shows how women were trained to “veil”
their language and their body language in the absence of the veil.
Modernization meant the exit of (some) Iranian women from the
homosocial space of domesticity into the the public (masculine)
space. The early twentieth century modern Iranian woman was ide-
ally portraited as an un-gendered person, chaste, and restrained
in her bodily motions and expressions. Therefore, woman’s ap-
propriation of a modern Iranian public space was accompanied by
the creation of a new type of woman subjectivity, through new
262 8: PICTURED BODIES
subjectivation processes that emphasized immobility and restrain.

The following pages show how this early twentieth century modern
asexual woman’s body is now thought of as non-modern. This is
the very body that the Islamic regime idealizes in its representations
and that women call into question and re-work in daily fashion
practices.
The Ideal Body of “Modern” Photography

Many of the designers in Tehran have their creations worn by
models (always amateurs, mainly friends, or the designers them-
selves) and photographed. They arrange the pictures in catalogues
or portfolios to be presented to their clients. I had the occasion to
see a number of portfolios, the most impressive one being Parissa’s.
She had collected the photos of her creations since she began de-
signing, twenty years ago. Although the photos were not neatly
arranged, I was able to see the transformation in the style of her
design. The photographer was a friend of hers, and the models were
also friends. The pictures were taken in her own house or in her
garden. One of the most interesting settings was an empty swim-
ming pool, in the Fall, with autumn leaves spread all over the blue
background (in fact the Fall collection is Parissa’s favorite, precisely
because of the colors).
Although I met three photographers who worked with fashion
designers in Tehran, I would hesitate to speak of an established
field of fashion photography in Iran. A young designer, Mehran,
first took me to the workshop of the photographer he works with.
Situated downtown, not far from Baharestan, the studio was on the
fourth floor of a building, in a modified apartment. I was invited
to have a tea by the photographer (a young woman, very dynamic,
wearing glasses, well coiffed, Laya), along with her other guests,
three young women in their twenties. I later found out that one of
THE IDEAL BODY OF “MODERN” PHOTOGRAPHY 263
them acted as a model for Mehran’s creations. None of the women

wore headscarves or manto inside the studio. They were sitting on a
low bed in the middle room of the apartment, now converted into
the office of the studio. On the desk there was a telephone, a set of
photography journals (Aks, the local photography publication), a
calendar, and fiscal receipts, along with other office supplies. The
room to the left of the entrance was the laboratory to which I did
not have access. I was invited into the studio, the room at the right
of the entrance. The space only contained a metal-shelf against the
right hand wall, and a chair in the far-left hand corner. In the same
corner hung big drapes in three colors (blue, red, and yellow, the
main colors of the spectrum). They were used for backgrounds in
taking pictures. The studio was equipped with two projectors, some
tripods, and an electric heater, which the host turned on.
During our talk, we mainly discussed the photography as pro-
fession in Tehran. The lack of an appropriate space for a studio is
what bothered her the most. Nevertheless, she showed me some of
her works, most of wich were protraits; her passion was doing por-
traits, especially women’s portraits. Laya confessed that due to the
specificity of the public spaces in Tehran, not all of her work may be
exposed. Her collaboration with Mehran limited to the collection
he did as a student for his BA degree. That collection was later sent
in Finland for the international exhibit in fashion 2002. At first
glance, her photographs disturbed me, but I was not exactly sure
why. Only later, while witnessing at a photographic session (which
I will describe in detail shortly), did I realized that what seemed
odd to me was the static position of the fashion models in the
pictures. The bodies in the photographs suggested immobility in
their poses, even the photographs of fashion creations had a quality
reminescent of old-fashioned wedding pictures. The bodies suggest
a static, albeit elegant, pose. In contrast, the fashion photographs in
Europe are characterized by a certain mobility of the body, achieved

through different techniques, from rapid shooting to images col-
lage. This is rarely seen in Tehran fashion-photography.
In Tehran, the body, and the female body in particular, is repre-
sented in an immobile position. In public spaces one can easily ob-
serve the immobility of women, their restraint in movements and
gestures. This was a characteristic that seemed strange to my eyes
since the beginning of my first sojourn in this city. Women on the
street are generally very conscious of their body position, almost
always looking straight ahead, eye-contact is generally avoided.
Hands are kept near the body, when they are not hidden by the
chador. In her analysis of body movements in Tehran, Shahshahani
(in press) explains how public/private spaces are differently marked
through body postures and gestures. She argues that while men’s
bodies, which are allowed a great liberty of movement, dominate
the public, the private gives women more mobility. Dance move-
ment is the final expression of this domestic mobility, to which
men are merely spectators.
I found the same tendency in fashion photographs for Lotous
magazine. Destined for public use, these photographs show mod-
els taking up static poses, standing and, more rarely, sitting. There
is one notable exception to this rule: a moving woman’s body is
acceptable only when associated with home appliances. The pic-
ture below advertises for the vacuum cleaner LG, and it can be
understood in the movement schema discussed above. Although
a public representation, this photograph is of a domestic woman’s
body, admist the home chores. In the configuration of patriarchal,
religious, and state power at play in public, this is another instance
of unproblematic-motioned woman’s body, besides dance.
The only fashion photographs I have seen with models giving
the impression of movement were in private portfolios. However,
as Nasser, a photographer told me later on, posing in motion is

frequent for private designers. To designate difference in types of
fashion photographs, Nasser used a term that immediately inter-
ested me:
[...] And I can take many kind of poses for girls, but it is forbid-
den to take modern pictures. Just you have to show the quality
and the dresses. (my italics)
This formulation suggests that “the quality of dresses” is insufficient
to ensure the modernity of a picture. In Nasser’s opinion there is
something that is missing in a non-modern picture, a constitutive
part that adds to the form, colors, cut of the dress, in order to give
it the modern quality. I, of course, immediately inquired about his
Figure 8.3 Advertising for vacuum cleaner on a bus in Northern Tehran

(Tajrish square).
meaning of “modern pictures”, and was surprised (and delighted)

to find strong references to the theoretical framework I have con-
structed. As expected, his response raised several key themes:
Of course you have seen the Elle magazine, or Vogue, but we can-
not do this here. When you see Elle or Vogue, or other fashion
magazines, you see the model maybe moving, maybe in a special
pose, lying or something like that. But here, no, we cannot do
this. Just straight looking and it has to be simple.
Thus, modern is equated with bodies in movement, leaving tra-
dition to the realm of the immobile, static, and unfashionable. The
modern woman’s body is a dynamic one, having inscribed upon it
the deeper characteristics of modernity: acceleration of time, social
flexibility, and mobility, all expressed in fashion’s rhythm and its
capacity of transforming the body’s expression, or the body itself.
In Tehran, restrictions regarding the pose of the body, coupled with
the equation ‘fashion equals modernity’, led the photographers I
interviewed to conclude that fashion is non-existent in Tehran.
However, many stylists involved in fashion production have a dif-
ferent opinion. Fashion is constituted as a contested domain be-
cause of its immediate reference to modernity. For Nasser a mod-
ern body is simultaneous visible and mobile, following Western
ideal-types. For the stylists creating in the context of Tehran fash-
ion production, the Western ideal type, while present, is only one
reference among others that contribute to the creation of a variety
of aesthetic styles.
In spring 2003 I visited Nasser’s studio, a three store building
in red brick, not far from Hafte-tir Square. I have arrived there
invited by Mahla, in order to witness the photographic session for
the second issue of her fashion magazine. The studio had the of-
fices in each of the stores, leaving for the photographic room a very
tall ceiling, with a metallic bridge at the height of about nine-ten
Figure 8.4 Picture for a private portfolio (reproduced with permission)
meters. The architectural plans were brought through a friend of

the photographer from Germany. Due to the various uses of the
studio, Nasser explained to me that they needed a high ceiling:
One of my friends in Germany took the plan, and I built it here.
I needed a tall ceiling to take pictures from above. We take pic-
tures of many Persian carpets. You have to be above of the carpet,
in its exact center. That is why I needed a nine meters height.
I came to the studio at around 3 pm, after I helped loading the
dresses for the photographic session in Mahla’s car (a Mini Morris,
old model). Three young women in their early twenties arrived,
models, and, as a first gesture, they take off their veils and comb
their hair. I was offered potato chips, very popular among young
people in Tehran.
The first session was for school uniforms. Presenting children’s
fashion and school uniforms was a new idea for Mahla. The first is-
sue of her journal did not have such presentation. The three models
she used for the children photographic session were between six
and nine years old, and their mothers accompanied them. At the
ground level there was the hall for taking pictures, in the under-
ground there is another big hall, used by the young women to pre-
pare themselves for the session – there are no real cabins, just a big
hall, with a small table, chairs and a telephone in one corner, and a
big tap on one of the walls. I later found out that this room is also
used as a studio. I make light conversation with the models, one
of them knows Spanish, another German. We are at the ground
floor. Three men prepare the studio. A frame of polyester is set up
to protect the photographer from the light of the projectors. There
are three umbrella projectors, and two big canon-like ones.
During the photographic session I had the occasion to talk with
the photographer, the models, and with Mahla. The models were
all University students, and Mahla personally recruited them. She
told me the story of one particular young woman that she has seen
while driving her car. Mahla made a U turn and followed the young
woman’s car until it stopped. Mahla proposed the job directly to
the young woman who now came to the Lotus office (at the time of
my visit) accompanied by her mother. Over tea, Mahla explained
the kind of work she does, showed them the dress she is currently
producing, and the Lotus magazine (then at its first issue).
The models I talked to told me that there is no material gain
in this work, but they do it as a hobby. One man is running from
projector to projector modifying the light’s intensity. The other two
are talking about the photographic materials. The school-girls enter
the studio, accompanied by their mothers, and Mahla very care-
fully ties their shoes, talking gently with them. In the conversations
I had, fashion, dress codes, and modernity intertwined, bringing
the contested social meanings of these terms to the surface. The
photographer (Farshid) complains about having to do fashion pho-
tography, as he is a specialist in still photography. “Fashion pho-
tography is new here. I do not like to do it.” Mahla is prompt to
answer: “He doesn’t like it, because he doesn’t like the headscarf ”.
The photographer replies: “I don’t like it but I have to do it. Each
country has a tradition. Here we have to deal with this tradition.”
Farshid perceives “tradition” as an impediment in the develop-
ment of fashion, as something that directly opposes it, and opposes
Mahla’s efforts to create a fashion magazine. His experience abroad,
in Switzerland, where he spends most of his summer, contrasts with
his manner of working in Tehran:
You are looking at fashion in Tehran?! This is my question to
you: (amply gesturing towards the little girls wearing blue head-
scarves). If you think this is fashion, I will say it is fashion! And
these are the children of fashion.
Leaving aside his ironic and caustic tone, Farshid’s affirmation
distills the meaning he attaches to the term fashion. For him (as for
many others I interviewed) fashion is everything but the work he is

engaged in at the moment of our meeting (always fashion related),
even though he is photographing for a fashion magazine. His af-
firmation became even more interesting when he discusses the issue
of body posture, and pose:
Fashion (in Switzerland) is different, he continues. You can do
everything you want ! Here you cannot ! I see women as men, no
difference. So it should be no difference here, too.
The difference is both gendered and geographically marked. In
Farshid’s words, there is a “here” where gender organizes fashion
photography, and a “there” where gender is erased. “There” is mod-
ern (and fashion exists) while “here” is not. This difference is deeply
reflected in Tehran fashion practices, but also the dynamic of these
practices may reflect shifts in the meaning of this difference. The
restraint in women’s bodies movements and postures, the limited
tolerance in most public places towards experimental clothing, are
indicators of the difference between men and women in Tehran.
Thus, while talking about fashion, Nasser was telling me:
Young people like to be fashionable. You can see it everywhere,
and there is no problem for the guys. But for women... In the
houses yes, in the parties, yes.
Here one can find the same perceived and perpetual separation and
juxtaposition men/women, public/private. “In the houses, in the
parties” are private locations open to “modern bodies”, and to the
display of fashionable clothing.
I witness photographing for “private portfolios” in Shadi
Parand’s workshop, a designer that gained momentum after she was
invited to expose her work in London, at the Victoria and Albert
Museum, in January 2004. A night of Iranian fashion animated
the Statues’ Hall of the Museum, featuring Iranian designers from
Figure 8.5 Sofra posing for Shadi’s portfolio (reproduced with permission)
Tehran, Paris, and London. Now, after the show and after a series
of articles on her creation published in Western European journals,
Shadi started to build a portfolio using clients as models. The de-
signer uses the portfolio for showing to her clients and for promot-
ing herself in Western fashion journals. She also recruited a young
woman (Safro) who finished her studies in Iranian handicrafts, and
who is both assistant and model. Safro initially was Shadi’s client
and became model after she showed interest in working in fashion
design. Shadi herself takes the photographs of her creations, and
sometimes she invites a male friend to help her. At the time of
my visit, using two digital cameras, Shadi and her friend took pic-
tures of Safro and a client wearing the clothes she ordered. While
Safro displayed a relaxed bodily attitude, moving freely and posing
for the cameras, the client was rigid in her posing. Shadi’s friend
and my presence, both of us armed with cameras, obviously made
her uncomfortable. Knowing that the photographs would be used
only for private showing did not contribute to changing the cli-
ent’s body attitude. In a certain manner, our presence there already
constituted a public. On the contrary, Sofra was used to having
a certain public for her posing. Her photographs wearing Shadi’s
creations were also used in foreign journals (e.g. La Libre).
As previously shown, the practice of fashion advertising in
Tehran urban spaces follows the same gender separation inscribed
in the spatial regime. Easier to control, visual representations gen-
erally follow the dominant discourse that allow visibility for men’s
bodies, while women’s bodies are invisible or at best immobile
when in public. Particularly the association of women’s mobile
body with fashion products is rendered invisible in the spaces that
fall under official control. Fashion boutiques for women in Tehran
do not have women models images on the banners above the door,
in contrast to men’s fashion stores.
Figure 8.6 Entries in fashion boutiques for women (above) and for men
(below).
But in Tehran there is one important exception to the rule of the

representation of women and women’s bodies in public: film post-
ers. The importance of the film industry on the bodily aesthetic,
and the marriage of fashion and film, is not recent. In spring 2003,
to celebrate the long collaboration between fashion and film, the
Parisian stores Printemps and Bonne Marché both organized exhi-
bitions presenting famous actors and their fashion choices, in film
or in private life. In winter 2000, Guggenheim Museum in New
York organized an Armani retrospective. One special section was
dedicated to stars and their Armani dresses, as they appeared on the
silver screen. And everybody knows about the lifetime “aesthetic
marriage” between M. Yves Saint Laurent and Mme. Catherine
Deneuve. In many cases film stars set the trend in fashion, or fall
themselves into the trap of fashion victimization...
Tehran is no exception to this rule. Azadeh is one of the most
famous costume and set designers in Iran (nominated twice in the
last year for the 6th Iranian Cinema Festival Award). At the same
time, she is a keen observer of the aesthetic influences film has on
the fashioning of the body in Tehran.
For example, when I worked on the movie Haman, in ’68 (1990),
[...] I tried to change a little the dress of women appearing on the
street. I give to actresses appearing on the street to wear not only
mantos, but two pieces dress or things like this.
The film is set in contemporary Tehran and tells the story of a
woman who tries to divorce her husband. He opposes the divorce
because he is still in love with her (and because the shari’a laws ad-
vantaging men allow him to do so). At the time, two-piece dresses
were not seen on the streets of Tehran, and Azadeh used this arti-
fice mainly in order to suggest the changing of setting from public
spaces to private houses.
The film has been very popular, and it was the first movie after the
revolution in which we could see women dressed differently. After
this, I have seen how the designers from Tehran, in their small cre-
ation houses, started to change the clothing style: colors, cuts...
I cannot but rely on her account regarding this film as the gen-
erator of the new style, but what is interesting in this case is not
the “originality” of the design, but rather the back-and-forth of
aesthetic canons from the screen to everyday life. Presently, some
banners for popular movies in Tehran show the actors in their en-
tirety, dressed in street clothes, walking towards the viewer. Women
occupy an important place in these posters, they often have lead
roles contemporary set films1. One of the most recent examples is
the movie Ghogha, which follows the story of a woman who escape
prison in order to inquire her dark past, and to avenge her sister.
The film touches actuality urban themes, like AIDS, class division,
and prostitution. The poster shows Ghogha (the hero), dressed
with blue russari, dark blue roopoosh, jean, dark glasses on, walking
towards the viewer, and followed by two young men, also dressed
streetwise. It is interesting to remark that on this banner (and in
the movie), the woman is the leader, the center of the image, (while
generally in other posters women usually follow men, e.g. “Youth
Dreams”). Except film posters, no other banners at the time of my
fieldwork in Tehran showed women’s bodies engaged in movement
in a publicly meaningful way.
These posters constitute an ad-hoc sort of advertising for wom-
en’s dress, proposing, through the actresses’ presence, different
styles of body in public. While this may be not a new phenom-
enon, I have only remarked it during the summer of 2003. It must
1 For a detailed discussion about representation of women in Iranian
contemporary film, see (Naficy 2003)
be remembered that in all of the cases, including movie posters, the

women wear the russari.
While body mobility and exposure is equated with Western-
type modernity, in Tehran’s public spaces women’s bodies are ideally
immobile and covered. Nonetheless, while one may find this ideal
in most of the public photographic representation and in manne-
quins of shop windows, women’s fashion practices introduce new
dimensions and meanings to the use of urban space in Tehran. Just
as in the movie Ghogha, certain types of modern (mobile) women
are making their place in the predominantly masculine urban pub-
lic space of Tehran.
Figure 8.7 Banner for the motion picture “Ghogha”, center Tehran.
Conclusion
Modernity in Motion
This study started with a presentation of theories of fashion,

focusing on the intimate link between fashion and modernity.
Using Warnier’s approach on subject formation and material cul-
ture, which draws from Mauss and Foucault, it defined the role
of fashion in the processes of subjectivation as the fulcrum of this
book. Fashion informs modern subjectivities through actions on
three levels: time, space, and the body. Fashion organizes time, in
that it sets a calendar of events that in turn re-organize urban life,
and operates class distinctions; it introduces seasonal aesthetic can-
ons; and it divides long-term time into style-epochs. The interac-
tions of various urban spaces with fashion practices reinvest both
dress and architecture with meaning and affect. Geographical space
is also organized through fashion styles that borrow their name
from “exotic” locations. Aesthetically organized times and spaces
are frameworks for the dressed body that is constituted through
its movement. Clothing is central in shaping body conduits that,
in turn, form the matrix of subjectivation. Fashion lends its char-
acteristics to these three categories, and expresses the ideal of the
modern order of things: time that both anticipates and conserves,
spaces that are functionally organized around the ideal of visibility,
and bodies that are subject to freedom of (consumer) choice. A
fashioned subject is a modern subject. Nonetheless, the study of
daily practices of fashion shows contextual variations of these three
socially constructed categories, and it problematizes some of their
assumed characteristics.
278 MODERNITY IN MOTION
In Paris I followed mainly the processes of fashion produc-

tion, and retailing strategies for Middle Eastern clients. There the
fashion calendar organizes time and sets consumption patterns.
Anticipating the next aesthetic canon is the mark of distinction op-
erating both at the designand consumption level. The distinction
operates through the alternation of seasonal fashion presentations
and the bi-annual period of sales. Commodities follow this circuit
as they become devalued or out-dated. Among consumers, distinc-
tion is marked through access to clothing one season ahead of their
use (e.g. access to summer collections in late winter).
In this study the fashion system emerged as another expression
of techniques of governmentality that inform a special type of sub-
ject, the consumer. In the passage from class fashion to consumer
fashion (Crane 2000) the subject of fashion as we know it today,
integrates, mixes and explodes the social categories of race, class,
gender, ethnicity, and age in the multitude of styles laid before the
self in an array of “possible choices.” Fashion and consumerism
are resonant with a type of internalized form of control, pivoting
around the idea of “desire.” In advertising, one may discern the
contradictory messages of “acceding to desire” as well as the moral
impetus of “resisting desire,” practices that concertedly inform the
new subject, the branded subject. A combination of old principles
of citizenship with new consumer-oriented practices characterizes
this type of subjectivation. This reflects as in a kaleidoscope both
the bourgeois social order and its moral precepts, and the organi-
zation of power in a system of governmentality that anticipates
individual trajectories.
The discussion on Middle Eastern clients of Parisian fashion
houses brought to front the question of Orientalism. The practices
of fashion in Paris relate in two different ways with this question.
First, one encounters the perpetuation, under a different form, of
MODERNITY IN MOTION 279
stereotypes about an imaginary Orient. Fashion-related Orientalism

operates with, and reflects the concept of branded subjectivity. The
type of judgments passed on Middle Eastern clients emphasize the
eccentric choice of colors, and the excess of brand-names that are
supposedly transparent in the process of buying. Despite some
exceptions discussed earlier, Middle Eastern clients are described
through their excessive taste. The propensity for brand-names de-
picts a new imaginary space of “immorality,” of conspicuous con-
sumption that facilitates the distinction between “us, the aestheti-
cally educated and moral subjects” and “them, the immoral consum-
ers.” The same type of distinction cuts across French, English and
other Western European societies, distinguishing the mainstream
bourgeois taste from new subcultures that are emphasizing brand-
name clothing styles, such as “the chavs.” Although important con-
sumer populations for prestigious houses like Burberry or Chanel,
“the chavs” are stigmatized by urban middle and upper classes. As
the colonial Other had its mirror at home in the marginal groups
of Western societies, the post-colonial subjectivity finds a corre-
sponding other in the chavs – “the peasant bourgeoning class,” as
some define them.
The second observation on fashion and Orientalism has to do
with the organization of space and power, and with the distinction
between public and private, exterior and interior, masculine and
feminine, and modern and non-modern. Patterns of consumption
among Middle Eastern clients seemed to my interviewees not so
different from others; at the same time, some designers in Paris
observed that a “different system of dress” seemed to inform these
patterns. Some of my interviewees claimed that, while in Europe,
the dress style became “boring and linear,” the “Middle Eastern
system of dress” allows more spaces of experimentation in private.
The Orientalist view of a non-modern East is based on the idea
of the absence of women’s bodies from the public space. The dif-
ference West versus indigenous is imagined and concentrated on
the woman’s body and/or its absence (covered by the veil). In this
colonial and post-colonial discursive configuration, the presence of
the veil is equated with the absence of women from public (politi-
cal) sphere, because women’s bodies were not visible participants in
the scopic regime of power. In other words, the veil meant a non-
modern social space and indicated an otherness against which the
Western self is constructed.
The “Middle Eastern dress system” as presented by my intervie-
wees is reflective of a slightly different understanding. The separa-
tion of public and private marked on clothing pointed out to a dif-
ferent relation with the regimes of power organized on principles of
visibility. The constant scrutiny, surveillance, and the pervasiveness
of power in modern European states seemed to have an expres-
sion in standardized dress, and a standardized asexual subjectiv-
ity. Different modes of subject formation seemed to be present in
Middle Eastern locations, reflected by a different “dress system.”
The book presents an in-depth discussion of one of these “dress
systems” by looking at fashion practices in Tehran. I approached
the question of the intersection of dress, nation state formation,
Islam, surveillance, and urban spaces from both consumers’ and
designers’ points of view.
This approach questions the stereotypical representation of
Islamic social organization as a spatial dichotomy between public
and private. In Chapter 4 I discussed the formation of a new sense
of citizenship in the Islamic Republic based on the entitlement of
personal surveillance of the other in public. I have shown how dif-
ferent “regimes of dress” characterize different urban spaces. The
argument is that different combinations of power relations, person-
al engagements and relationships, and the structural organization
MODERNITY IN MOTION 281
of space and times contribute to the definitions of these “regimes

of dress.” I have argued that they are all expressions of the same
“repertoire of modernity,” that is the configuration of citizenship
constructions, legal understandings and contestations, and specific
social structuration in contemporary Iran. Consumer attitudes,
and the approach toward fashion is not, as some would have it, a
form of contesting a non-modern society by its somehow newly-
modernized subjects. What we have is rather a specific modern re-
gime, characterized by a constellation of power that combines the
above-mentioned elements in specific matrixes of subjectivation.
State reinforced patriarchy and Western style fashion are not mutu-
ally exclusive but symbiotically developed in a place like Tehran.
Fashion design practices offer the same image. A combination
of specific moral considerations, political concerns, and aesthet-
ic affiliations define the attitude towards clothing creation. As in
Paris, design choices inform class subjectivities, and taste divides
along the class lines. Nonetheless, there are significant differences
regarding the standardization in design practices between Paris and
Tehran. These include design techniques and the fashion calendar
(strictly enforced and highly standardized in Paris, and more flex-
ible in Tehran). While Paris is the fashion capital of the world,
in Tehran one finds a dynamic albeit small emerging industry at
the fringes of public recognition. A special chapter was dedicated
to copyright laws and their conceptualization in Paris and Tehran.
Chapter 7 both shows how copyright laws historically emerged
in order to standardize practices that existed before, and how, in
Tehran, partial application of standards coexists with authorial
practices that are not the subject of any Iranian law.
Fashion photographic techniques in Tehran are sites of con-
testation for the signification of the modern women’s bodies. For
many of my interviewees in Iran the ideal type of modernity is
Western modernity, and the ideal type of body is the mobile body.
Photographic representations of mobility, when dealing with wom-
en bodies, are subject to specific contextual principles (Chapter
8). While many interviewees perceived fashion photography (and
fashion) as “non-modern” because “non-Western,” others urged for
the understanding of its specificity. A discussion on the specific of
mobility in Paris and Tehran will bring to light the grammar of as-
sumptions and the structure of power in fashion’s motion from one
city to another.
Forms of Mobility, Forms of Modernity

Different regimes of dress in urban Tehran are places in which
modern subjectivities are formed. In Paris, the body’s engagement
with the local modern regime reveals a mode of subjectivation
based on generalized surveillance, and on forms of governmentality
through signs. The bourgeois morality of restraint, reflected in fash-
ion practices and in its forms of contestation is always already part
of the overarching discourse of individual liberty measured through
“choice.” At the core of this discourse, mobility and body exposure
are presented as forms of universal freedom, rather than being modes
of individual subjectivation through techniques of governmentality.
Engagements with fashion practices are forms of subjectivation that
dynamically construct the individual in categories of class, age, gen-
der, or ethnicity, all the while questioning their social significance.
In Tehran, different engagements with a modern repertoire (fash-
ion) meet the overarching patriarchy and the modern state project
that legitimizes it. At this intersection one finds the matrix of sub-
jectivation, and the various forms of engagement with it.
In Tehran a new mall-like construction, on three levels, opened
its gates for the public in the summer of 2003. Commercial spaces,
restaurants, and various recreations are offered to the consumer
FORMS OF MOBILITY, FORMS OF MODERNITY 283
public. Thousands of visitors come on a daily basis to enjoy the

air-conditioned environment and the modern setting in the com-
pany of family and friends. The main attraction of this new place
is the third floor, the space that lends its name to the entire fa-
cility: Wonderland. Electronic games and simulators, bumping
cars, bowling, are all available for a small entrance fee. The space
is crowded in the evenings, with many visitors, young and old,
practicing their skills at driving high-speed cars and motorcycles,
sliding on snowboards and skateboards, even handling machine
guns. Men and women mingle in a relatively relaxed manner, in
this public place characterized by a decreased degree of state sur-
veillance, as described in Chapter 4. The visitors experience, first
hand, body motions and conduits associated with a modern way of
being: skating, snowboarding, and driving high performance cars,
as well as mingling, consuming, dressing in fashionable outfits, and
displaying their bodies for the view of others.
As mentioned at the beginning of Chapter 4, after the Islamic
Revolution a self-imposed veil was cast over the modes of analysis
by which some researchers and most European or American jour-
nalists presented the Iranian social context. The emblem of the
Islamic Republic was the black chador, the women’s dress that never
changed; Iranian women became fashion-less, Iranian society was
an exile from the historical times of ever changing modernity into
a space of non-changing Islamic tradition.
Since the reformist president Khatami came to power in 1997,
this optic has slightly changed, and the tendency has been to pres-
ent a young Iranian population with liberal western orientation
“deceived” by the political performance of the president. Fashion
and consumption are the arguments in this very new debate, which
lead journalists and documentarians to show a young secular Iran
entirely opposed to the Islamic religious regime. Here, consump-
Figure 9.1 Entry in Wonderland
tion is equated with modernity and a freedom whose development

requires a non-secular regime.
A recent article in “Le Monde” (05/03/04) suggestively entitled
Iran : le président Khatami annonce un processus réformiste irrévers-
ible pour la République islamique presents the publication of a book
signed by Mr. Khatami. The book comes as a political testament of
the president who will finish his last constitutional mandate next
year. The president states that, “neither secularism, nor tyranny will
ever take a foothold in Iran.” Immediately after this affirmation
follows a subsection entitled “Les Attentes Déçues de la Jeunesse.” It
covers important political and social matters like the existence of
political prisoners, the slow pace of reforms in the judicial system,
as well as the issue of the last legislative elections in which more
than 3000 reformist candidates were blocked from participating in
elections by the High Consulate of the Guardians of the Revolution
(the highest religio-political authority in Iran). All the while this
article section asserts that the increasingly young, westernized, and
secular population is critical of the non-secular regime. This vision
appears in a nutshell in a New York Times article1 entitled “Those
Sexy Iranians”
The latest fashion here in Shiraz, in central Iran, is light, tight and
sensual. […] Worse, from the point of view of hard-line mullahs,
young women in such clothing aren’t getting 74 lashes any more
– they’re getting dates. […] I don’t think Iran’s theocracy can
survive them. (Kristof 2004)
The young woman in the picture above is engaged in skating.
Most probably she will never use a skateboard on the sidewalks of
Tehran, but her body experiences the motion conduits of any skat-
1 I would like to thank Tom Boellstorff for sending me this article through
email.
er. Her outfit is attuned to Iranian fashion sensibility, and friends

of both sexes most probably accompany her. I watched her per-
formance to the end. I noticed that her veil fell off once or twice
and she did not bother much about it. Unlike skaters of Europe
or the United States, she does not appropriate the publicness of
the streets. She does, however, appropriate an equally public place,
although one that is partially protected from the state/patriarchal
mode of surveillance of the open street. She subjects herself to a
modern matrix of subjectivation, and she does it regardless of her
religious or political convictions. Her body (herself ) is in a modern
hyperspace, with all local specificity. The fact that she engages in
modern patterns of consumption and modern body conduits does
not necessarily turn her towards secularism, if she is religious at all.
Figure 9.2 Skateboard simulator in Wonderland, Tehran 2003

Her religiosity would not impede her modernity. In fact, she expe-
riences a form of hyper-modernity insofar as her body partakes of
similar global changes to which the emerging fashion industry of
Tehran is subjected by fashion’s political economy (see Chapter 6
and Chapter 7).
In Western representations of Iran there is a strong association
between modernity, secularism and youth, and this representation
is mediated through observations on consumption. All the while
acknowledging the discontent of a certain part of Iranian popula-
tion with the regime in place, my argument is slightly different: in
Iran, a modern type of political subject emerged after 24 years of
Islamic Republican regime. The exponents of this type of subject
are the very young men and women whom the Western press pres-
ents as opposed to the Islamic regime. My research shows that they
are modern without being necessary secular. Forms of democracy
and democratic re-forms are part of the Iranian political landscape
and interact dynamically with Islamic rule, just as fashion or skat-
ing (or all modern motion conduits) interacts with the spatial and
moral configurations in a predominantly Muslim environment.
Bayart (2004) proposed a vision of globalization as mode of
total political subjectivation through objects (patterns of consump-
tion and the standardization of the use of similar objects around
the world, implying the development of glocal body conduits). In
the long run this mode of understanding would do away with the
“rhetorics of lack” that depict the non-western world: lack of fash-
ion, lack of democracy, lack of free market, etc. Studying social
practices such as fashion as they exist, and not as “they should be,”
points to specific modes of subjectivation, agency, and local types
of empowerment, rather than to a vision of a world divided along
the lines of “absences.”
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ZETA SERIES IN ANTHROPOLOGY & SOCIOLOGY

PARIS CHIC, TEHRAN THRILLS

preface by Vintilă Mihăilescu

Cover design: Carla Szabo

Distribution: Owline. Online Book Store

© 2007 Zeta Books for the present electronic edition

LIST OF FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .ix

CHAPTER 2: ON THE TIMELY SUBJECT OF FASHION . 49

CHAPTER 3: ORIENTAL FLAVORS. DESIGNING FOR

Orientalism and its discontents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

CHAPTER 4: SPACE, TIME, DRESS, AND AESTHETIC

CHAPTER 5: GENDERED SPACE AND FASHION

CHAPTER 6: TRADITIONALLY MODERN:

CHAPTER 7: AFTER AUTHORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229

CHAPTER 8: PICTURED BODIES: PHOTOGRAPHING

CONCLUSION: MODERNITY IN MOTION . . . . . . . . . 277

REFERENCE LIST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289

Figure 2.1 Fashion Designer Workshop in Paris . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

Figure 8.3 Advertising for Vacuum Cleaner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265

I would like to thank to all those directly involved in the mak-

sible without my friends in Paris, who helped me ﬁnd shelter, both

Some chapters of this book were previously published under

Doing his ﬁeldwork on three continents, Alexandru was pop-

progress, experiencing fashion in his own body, loving his object as

As reminded by the author, “fashion has been approached from

A book about oriental(ist) fashion, about trendiness in a con-

All these links and processes do happen, indeed, in Paris and

The ideas of exchange, of devaluation,

Hossein Chalayan is a London-based fashion designer who is

always coincide. The context of Chalayan’s show prepared the pub-

Tehran, both as a creative practice and as a practice of consump-

a presumed fundamentalist government in Tehran, the ultimate

Fashion creates material objects (dress) invested with signi-

by the value and signiﬁcation we attach to those coverings. The

barrier, so exact numbers regarding fashion markets are absent. The

ration between asphalt and bare ground in the countryside. I had

specialized audience, and may be easily skipped without lessening

Chapter 3 looks at the links between fashion industry and the

The chapter opens with a short history of dress reforms in Iran,

twice a year avant-garde designers who show their collections for

with lack of originally-designed dress. Fashion practices in Western

Body Practices Subjectivation

In the last chapter of History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault

and moreover renounce the idea of separation between subject and

conduits” refer to the integration of movements necessary to oper-

In other words, I propose a theory of material culture that takes

to fashion, inspired by linguistics and which draws its origins from

productive, the semiotic perspective privileges the sign, sometimes

increased (material and symbolic) means to erasing inequalities4.

4 Some contemporary thinkers (Lipovetski 1994), disregard the power of

the client’s wardrobe. It is also about the movement between the

expected to study Romanian topics (with the notable exception

This question goes largely unquestioned among young research-

nographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence,

jectivation of the researcher, his/her total “mis en objets” in the fol-

Urban Methods or How to Take the Metro to the Field

Reading Gandhi in the light of the material culture theory that

Objects of (for) Research

meta-communicational level, and it is not presupposed by all the

the French circle of pragmatic anthropology, which embodies the

lations in the speciﬁc moment. Consequently, a better understand-

addresses one is supposed to meet the future interviewees. If it is a