1960s Iran: Cat-Eye Glasses and Vintage Style

I’m 16 here. I’m on the far right. That’s my sister, her husband, brother-in-law, and their kids. I wasn’t married yet. We were in Niavaran, behind the Shah’s palace, at a big picnic for Sizdah-Bedar, which is the last day of Norooz, the Persian new year. Boys and girls would go there to meet, flirt, maybe exchange numbers.

I was wearing my red turtleneck top, red shoes and white sunglasses. I bought those jeans from a store behind the British Embassy on Churchill Street, which was the place to go if you wanted Western clothes. This photograph is black and white but I still remember the colors.

I think I got the idea for this outfit from watching Cliff Richard’s movie Summer Holiday. I was very fashionable. My father sold fabric, so I’d take fabric from him and make my own clothes. My brother also worked at a French store called Dior, so I’d get fabric from him too. Girls from school would come to me for clothes when they wanted to go to parties! My mother knew a tailor, and sometimes she would use him. He was gay. We didn’t even know what gay was back then. We knew an Armenian man who made shoes, by hand, from scratch. The shoes I wore to school, kids just wanted to touch them. We dressed better back then than we do now.