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Staging the Emperor's New Clothes: Dress Codes and Nation-Building under Reza Shah

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Houchang E. Chehabi
Houchang E. Chehabi*
Affiliation:
Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University
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Extract

One of the most enduring legacies of Reza Shah's rule is the problematization of dress in Iranian politics. In the course of the twenty years that he was in power, the state promulgated a number of policies that had a deep, and at times traumatizing, effect on the everyday lives of Iranians. Following the example of Turkey, but unlike other Muslim governments in the Arab world, in South Asia, or in Southeast Asia, the first Pahlavi state set out to standardize and Europeanize the appearance of its people. This policy led to state-society and intra-societal conflicts that flared up again after the Islamic revolution of 1979. This article analyzes the state's dress policies, argues that they were mainly meant to promote nation-building, and ends with a translation of a short story that, better than any official documents or historical accounts, illustrates the impact of these policies on the everyday lives of ordinary people.

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Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 26 , Issue 3-4 , Summer Fall 1993 , pp. 209 - 233
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1993

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Shademan Akhavan, Hesameddin Ashna, Olga Davidson, Shahla Haeri, Pratap Mehta, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, and Nayereh Tohidi for their suggestions, and Kavous Seyed-Emami, to whom this article is dedicated, for his hospitality.

References

1. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from non-English sources are my own.

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115. Here Parvizi employs an untranslatable pun. He writes that “instead of a crown they wanted to put a hat on his head, but the hat would not fit.” To put a hat on somebody's head means to hoodwink him; in this case it is also an allusion to the new Pahlavi hat.