In modern Iran, fashion is not a decorative side story to politics; it is one of the principal terrains on which the state tries to make obedient subjects and on which society rehearses more democratic futures. Across the last century, Iranian governments have repeatedly treated women’s dress as a state problem: Reza Shah’s forced unveiling of the 1930s made the veil a target of authoritarian modernization, while the Islamic Republic reversed the polarity after 1979 and made compulsory veiling a cornerstone of theocratic rule. In both cases, the female body became a site where sovereignty, class power, religion, and national identity were staged. The result is that dress in Iran carries unusually heavy political meaning: it can mark class aspiration, urban belonging, piety, dissent, fear, generational rupture, and collective courage all at once.
The strongest left-wing reading of Iranian fashion politics begins from a simple proposition: compulsory dress codes are not merely “cultural” restrictions but mechanisms for organizing labor, public space, sexuality, and citizenship. They regulate who may appear, how one may work, how women move through streets, schools, cars, offices, media, and digital platforms, and how dissent is detected and punished. This is why struggles over hijab and fashion have repeatedly fused with broader democratic demands, from the March 1979 women’s protests to the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising and the continuing refusal of many women to comply with compulsory veiling. A democratic left in Iran cannot afford to repeat the fatal error of parts of the post-1979 secular and left opposition, which failed to defend women’s autonomy when hijab first became a revolutionary litmus test. The strategic lesson is that bodily autonomy is not secondary to labor, anti-authoritarianism, or redistribution; it is one of their preconditions.
Any serious history of fashion in Iran has to reject two easy myths at once: first, the monarchist nostalgia that imagines pre-1979 fashion as uncomplicated freedom; second, the Islamist claim that post-1979 veiling simply restored authentic morality. Dress has been politicized in Iran for more than a century because states and movements alike used it to fabricate social order. As Alexandru Balasescu notes, understanding contemporary Tehran fashion requires tracking “sartorial history and its link to political change.” Under early Pahlavi modernization, laws first targeted male clothing, but after Reza Shah’s 1934 visit to Turkey the regime accelerated Westernizing reforms, required unveiling in certain institutions, and in 1936 forbade veiling in public space. Balasescu stresses that for many women this meant confinement to the home, while women’s public participation depended on prior bodily discipline; in his summary, women first had to be trained in “veiling in the absence of the veil.” This history matters because it shows that coercion did not begin in 1979. One authoritarian state compelled unveiling; another compelled veiling. Neither treated women as democratic agents capable of choosing for themselves.
If pre-revolutionary Iran cannot be romanticized, neither can the post-revolutionary promise of justice be separated from its immediate gendered betrayals. After the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic moved step by step from decree to discipline to codified compulsion. The most politically consequential early resistance came on International Women’s Day in March 1979, when tens of thousands protested compulsory hijab and chanted, “In the dawn of freedom, there is an absence of freedom.” Narges Mohammadi’s account is especially important because she places those demonstrations in a longer genealogy reaching back to the Constitutional Revolution and argues that women’s later leadership in 2022 was “neither sudden nor spontaneous” but rooted in decades of organizing and everyday resistance. Azam Khatam’s scholarship adds a hard internal critique from the left: the March 1979 protesters “could not sustain the support of secular and left-wing revolutionaries,” even though compulsory hijab soon became law for all women and girls over nine. That failure is not a historical footnote. It is the hinge on which much of Iran’s later democratic tragedy turned. When a revolution allows women’s bodily autonomy to be bargained away in the name of anti-imperialism, class unity, or cultural authenticity, it teaches the state that gender is the easiest frontier on which to build counterrevolutionary power.
The legal architecture of dress control reveals that hijab policy is less about cloth than about jurisdiction over everyday life. Iran’s constitution simultaneously proclaims popular sovereignty and equality before the law while subordinating rights to “Islamic criteria.” Article 20 promises that men and women equally enjoy human, political, economic, social, and cultural rights, but only “in conformity with Islamic criteria”; Article 21 similarly frames women’s rights through that same qualifier, while Article 27 protects public gatherings only insofar as they are not detrimental to the “fundamental principles of Islam.” In practice, that framework has enabled penal enforcement. Article 638 of the Islamic Penal Code penalizes women who appear in public “without hijab shar‘i” with imprisonment or fines. The 2023–2024 “Law to Protect the Family by Promoting the Culture of Chastity and Hijab” escalated this machinery, expanding sanctions, bureaucratic punishments, surveillance, business liabilities, travel bans, and penalties tied to virtual platforms; the bill was later paused and, as of the latest high-confidence reporting, remained suspended rather than repealed, even while older compulsory hijab laws and enforcement practices stayed in force. That legal duality—selective retreat without repeal—is central to understanding contemporary Iran: women’s defiance in the street is real, but it is not the same thing as legal emancipation.
Because law alone cannot discipline millions of unwilling bodies, the state has extended dress control into policing, administration, and digital surveillance. Amnesty International documented a “draconian campaign” using public-space surveillance, mass car confiscations, threatening text messages, plainclothes reporting, and the police reporting app Nazer. Reuters reported that the 2024 “Noor” campaign revived street enforcement amid a broader domestic crackdown, and the UN fact-finding mission found that morality police and security officers continued to beat and violently arrest women and girls accused of violating mandatory hijab laws. The same system reaches into cyberspace: Iranian authorities have blocked Instagram accounts, targeted online “modeling,” and prosecuted cultural expression deemed to normalize unveiling. Here fashion becomes a relay between analog and digital repression. A headscarf sliding backward in a taxi, a photo on Instagram, a YouTube performance, or a street-style portrait are all folded into the same disciplinary grid. That is why fashion in Iran is best understood not as consumer display but as contested appearance under surveillance.
Yet the same terrain has generated forms of resistance that are subtle, social, cumulative, and often far more durable than spectacular protest alone. Asef Bayat’s vocabulary remains indispensable here. In his account of the 2022 uprising, he argued that Iranian women had long resisted through “their ‘art of presence’ in public,” through “non-movements and quiet encroachment,” and that this everyday practice had already produced “new norms in society and new realities on the ground, like public presence and the hijab as a matter of choice rather than compulsion.” He described the uprising as “a movement to reclaim life.” This is a deeply left-wing insight because it shows how minor acts—pushing the scarf back, redesigning the manteau, reclaiming color, circulating images, refusing segregationist aesthetics, or simply appearing unveiled—can sediment into social facts before they become recognized political victories. In Iran, fashion resistance has often worked this way: dispersed, improvised, and embodied before it is programmatic. Mohammadi’s essay makes the same point in more openly political language when she argues that women’s activism has disrupted patriarchal family structures and contributed to Iran’s “secularization and democratic aspirations.”
That everyday resistance has always been stratified by class, neighborhood, and geography. Balasescu’s work on Tehran haute couture is valuable precisely because it resists the cliché that Iranian fashion is simply imported Westernism. He shows instead how taste circulates “across class and geographic borders,” how upper-class Tehran fashion reworks Qajar and regional motifs, and how access to “Western taste and desires” rather than literal Western dress shapes elite subjectivities. He also notes that after forced unveiling under Reza Shah, dress became an indicator and constructor of education and class difference. In the Islamic Republic, veiling later enabled some lower-class women to access schools and mobility without family obstruction, helping form a new Islamic middle class. In the contemporary period, affluent north Tehran has often appeared as the visual frontier of defiance, but recent AP reporting emphasizes that unveiled women are now visible not only in northern Tehran but in more conservative districts as well. Even so, evidence remains more urban than rural: a 2023 Iran Open Data survey found that 86 percent of female respondents said they had appeared in public without hijab that year, but 98 percent of respondents in that sample were urban. Class also mediates risk: elites can sometimes absorb fines or closures more easily, while working women, teachers, market sellers, and service workers encounter dress rules as immediate threats to wages, mobility, and employment.
Gender does not exhaust the social meanings of dress, because religion, ethnicity, and urban-rural divides are woven through the same fabric. That is why the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom,” rooted in the Kurdish feminist-political lexicon Jin, Jiyan, Azadî, mattered so much: it made the “woman question” the strategic center of a broader anti-authoritarian coalition. Bayat argues that the current cycle of struggle brought together the urban middle class, the middle-class poor, slum dwellers, and ethnic groups including Kurds, Azeris, and Baluchis, all under the same slogan. Recent scholarship likewise stresses that the movement quickly exceeded compulsory hijab as a single-issue campaign and became a rebellion against authoritarian rule, ethnic oppression, and economic crisis, while also warning against flattening the tensions inside that coalition. In this sense, dress in Iran is not only a feminist issue; it is a mediating symbol through which other subordinations become legible. A Kurdish woman arrested for “improper hijab,” a labor activist facing death sentence, a schoolgirl punished for unveiling, a shopkeeper whose business is sealed, and a singer lashed for appearing without head covering are not separate cases. They are different points in a single system that allocates dignity unevenly.
For a left analysis, the relation between fashion and labor is decisive. Women’s clothing in Iran is not controlled only to preserve a symbolic religious order; it is controlled because it organizes the laboring body. Dress rules shape who can work where, how women appear in offices, schools, universities, hospitals, transport, factories, entertainment, and digital commerce, and how easily the state or employers can expel them from those spaces. The proposed hijab/chastity law explicitly extended obligations to teachers, transportation companies, public venues, civil servants, and private businesses, and empowered a wide array of security and intelligence bodies to monitor compliance in physical and virtual settings. When the state closes cafés, seals shops, impounds cars, or criminalizes online style content, it is not only asserting morality; it is disciplining the infrastructures through which people earn, gather, and circulate. The case of labor activist Sharifeh Mohammadi, whose death sentence became an international cause, shows the convergence point vividly: a regime that fears independent worker organization also fears uncontrolled female public presence, because both threaten the same monopoly on social organization. Narges Mohammadi’s own formulation is exact: the women’s struggle became entwined with “the struggles of marginalized ethnic groups, labor unions, and civil organizations.”
This is also why contemporary Iranian fashion culture cannot be reduced to either resistance chic or consumer individualism. Tehran’s underground and online fashion scenes are political not simply because they violate the law, but because they reclaim image-making from both state piety and Orientalist voyeurism. Hoda Katebi’s project Tehran Streetstyle defines itself as “radical identity reclamation through fashion and portraiture.” Her explanation is worth quoting because it captures the semiotics of the field: “clothing is a universal language of self-expression, power, culture, and political tensions.” She adds that documenting “illegal fashion in Iran” is about “challenging political realities here and abroad.” Balasescu, in a different register, tracks how designers such as Mahla and her Lotous fashion house navigated censorship, private showrooms, and public fashion shows; he notes that the first post-revolution fashion magazine to show Iranian female models’ faces had to be registered as a professional trade journal to survive censorship. Mahla’s own phrase—“Dress is the Living Museum of the Country”—shows how fashion can also become a way of contesting the Islamic Republic’s monopoly over national identity by invoking pre-Islamic, regional, and plural visual histories.
Artists and cultural workers have made this struggle visible to the world while paying heavily for it. Shirin Neshat has long used the veil as a site for exposing the contradictions between visibility and control; in one interview she said, “The veil creates a war between what is private and what is public,” and in another she emphasized that her work “break[s] the silence” imposed on women. The singer Parastoo Ahmadi framed her online performance in similarly political terms: “This is a right I could not ignore.” After the concert, AP reported, she was arrested; subsequent reporting in June 2026 indicated that she and members of her team were sentenced to flogging and artistic bans. Mehdi Yarahi, whose song “Roosarito” urged women to remove the compulsory hijab, later said he was ready to “pay the price of freedom” after being flogged on a separate conviction. These cases matter because they show that in Iran fashion, music, and performance are converging into a single field of aesthetic-political illegality. Style is punished as speech; speech is punished as bodily disobedience.
The left strategic question, then, is how to convert scattered acts of bodily autonomy into durable democratic power without subordinating them to authoritarian alternatives. Bayat is explicit that “real political transformations have always been achieved through the coalition of different deprived, dejected and oppressed social groups and classes,” and he argues that “Woman, Life, Freedom” has the capacity to articulate those demands into a common good. But he also warns that any powerful movement is susceptible to abuse by opportunists at home and abroad. Recent scholarship similarly notes that the movement contains internal tensions and competing imaginaries, while recent commentary on Iranian politics warns that foreign intervention or externally managed “solutions” can strengthen hardliners, militarize the field, and marginalize the democratic social forces that made the uprising possible in the first place. A left democratic strategy would therefore need at least four commitments: first, never treating women’s autonomy as negotiable; second, linking dress politics to labor rights, anti-carceral reforms, and ethnic equality; third, defending plural coalitions that include secular, religious, socialist, feminist, student, worker, and minority currents; and fourth, resisting both theocracy and any restorationist or externally imposed politics that would once again ask women to postpone freedom until after “the real revolution.”
There is a final reason fashion remains so politically explosive in Iran: it is one of the most immediate, ordinary ways people experience democracy or its absence. Elections can be manipulated, parties banned, unions broken, newspapers closed, and internet access throttled, but dress confronts power every morning in the mirror and every evening in the street. A woman walking unveiled in Tehran, Rasht, Shiraz, Sanandaj, or Kermanshah is not simply “making a fashion statement.” She is testing whether citizenship belongs to the people or to the state. That is why the recent visual relaxation visible in parts of Iran should not be mistaken for reform from above. Human Rights Watch notes that compulsory hijab policies remain enforced and that the harsher hijab law was suspended, not repealed. AP and Reuters alike describe a dual reality in which more women appear unveiled in public even as political repression deepens and the legal framework of compulsion remains. The most honest conclusion is therefore dialectical: the state has lost part of the cultural battle over dress, but it has not relinquished the legal and coercive instruments through which it can still punish dissent. For the Iranian democratic left, the task is to turn that cultural defeat of the regime into institutional defeat as well.
Short quotations that illuminate the field include Hengameh Golestan’s memory that the 1979 women’s protests were about “freedom of choice”; Asef Bayat’s insistence that the current uprising is “a movement to reclaim life”; Narges Mohammadi’s call to “criminalize gender apartheid”; Hoda Katebi’s claim that clothing is a “universal language of self-expression, power, culture, and political tensions”; Mahla’s phrase “Dress is the Living Museum of the Country”; Shirin Neshat’s observation that “The veil creates a war between what is private and what is public”; Parastoo Ahmadi’s declaration, “This is a right I could not ignore”; and bell hooks’ reminder that “The fierce willingness to repudiate domination in a holistic manner is the starting point for progressive cultural revolution.” Read together, these quotations suggest that in Iran fashion is not peripheral to democratic struggle. It is where domination is made intimate and where freedom first becomes visible.