Overview
Iran is unusual in having legislated women’s dress twice in one century, in opposite directions. Reza Shah banned the chador in 1936 and had police remove veils in the street; after the 1979 revolution, covering became compulsory instead. Both were state projects that treated clothing as the visible test of what kind of country Iran was.
Key garments and style
The required form for women is hair covered and body concealed. In practice that is most often the roosari, a headscarf, worn with a manteau — a coat cut to obscure the line of the body, which is the garment the code effectively created — over trousers. The chador, a full semicircular cloth held closed by the wearer, is the more conservative alternative and long predates the republic as Iranian dress.
Men’s clothing is Western in cut, with one conspicuous absence: the necktie, read as a mark of the Pahlavi era and the West, largely disappeared from official life.
Within the code there is constant negotiation. Manteaux have grown shorter, brighter and more fitted, scarves are worn further back, and enforcement has tightened and slackened by period and by city — so what is worn on an Iranian street is a running argument rather than a settled uniform.
Transition
Iranian dress today sits between the legal code, a long Persian textile tradition, and the same global fashion cycle as everywhere else.