Fashion in Iran

During the Pahlavi era around the mid-1930s, Western fashion was introduced to the country (then called Persia) and greatly influenced women's style.

After this, a high number of Iranian girls participated in the Beauty pageant and Miss Universe outside of Iran.

Attempts at changing dress norms (and perspectives toward it) occurred in mid-1930s when pro-Western ruler Reza Shah issued a decree banning all veils.

[9][6][7][8] A far larger escalation of violence occurred in the summer of 1935 when Reza Shah ordered all men to wear European-style bowler hat, which was Western par excellence.

[13] Later, official measures relaxed slightly under next ruler and wearing of the headscarf or chador was no longer an offence, but for his regime it became a significant hindrance to climbing the social ladder as it was considered a badge of backwardness and an indicator of being a member of the lower class.

[9] A few years prior to the Iranian revolution, a tendency towards questioning the relevance of Eurocentric gender roles as the model for Iranian society gained much ground among university students, and this sentiment was manifested in street demonstrations where many women from the non-veiled middle classes put on the veil[1][9][2][14][15] and symbolically rejected the gender ideology of Pahlavi regime and its aggressive deculturalization.

[19][20] In the Islamic law of Iran imposed shortly after the 1979 revolution, article 638 of 5th book of Islamic Penal Code (called Sanctions and deterrent penalties) women who do not wear a hijab may be imprisoned from ten days to two months, and/or required to pay fines from 50,000 up to 500,000 rials.

Some people believe that Movahed's action was based on Masih Alinejad's call for White Wednesdays, a protest movement that the presenter at VOA Persian Television started in early 2017.

[28] In 2020, two representatives of Iranian government leader Ali Khamenei separately said that improperly veiled women should be made to feel "unsafe".

[33] There is a range of fashion models from Iran (or of Iranian descent) that have made it to a high-level fame, such as Nazanin Afshin-Jam, Farzan Athari, Sahar Biniaz, Mandana Karimi, Aylar Lie, Leyla Milani, Shermine Shahrivar and Sadaf Taherian.