Iranian of the Day

Al-Monitor met on the sidelines of Paris’ fashion week with Leila Yavari — an Iranian-American former political science Ph.D. student at Berkley turned fashion model, turned fashion director for StyleBop.com. The stunning young woman was born in Iran in 1978. A year later, she left with her family during the revolution that toppled the Shah and gave birth to the Islamic Republic. She talked about her trip back to Iran as young adult and her Persian heritage, which informed both her professional choices and esthetics. She would love for Iran to be known beyond the news, as an art-loving country.

Al-Monitor: You left Iran as a baby, have you been back since?

Yavari: I went back twice as a child and in 2001 to do research on Brechtian theater in Iran for my Master’s essay. I felt more connected to Iran before I went back as an adult […] I realized that not having lived through the Iran-Iraq war, not having lived there through the past 20 years, I didn’t have a meaningful relationship with what the people have gone through so I felt a little bit inadequate, not very authentic.

Having left right during the revolution, I think I grew up with a lot of assumptions of what the country what like before and what the country was like afterwards, and a lot of those assumptions were put to the test. For example, Brecht’s plays were not allowed to perform before 1979 and they were after 1979, which is really interesting. And a lot of the people I spoke to were playwrights, artists. These people were kind of the foot soldiers of the revolution and they hadn’t really given up on the revolution, and they were saying, “You know, before the revolution I could wear mini-jupes [skirts] and drink whisky, but I couldn’t vote.” That was really interesting >>>