Revolutionary fashion
Updated on 10 February 2009
International editor Lindsey Hilsum reflects from Iran on what unpublished photos of the Islamic Revolution tell us, 30 years later.
At an exhibition of previously unpublished pictures of the Iranian Revolution by photographer Mahmoud Kalari, I asked a young women what she found most interesting.
"What people were wearing," she said.
I knew what she meant. For a start, having been born after the Revolution, she would never have seen women on the streets of Tehran with their heads uncovered.
But it's also the men's fashion - the wide-lapelled jackets and bell bottom trousers. Not to mention the moustaches.
When you watch archive film, you see western male reporters dressed similarly with wispy hair touching their collars. (I will say nothing about the fashion sense of our own Jon Snow, but, believe me, he blended in well.)
I wondered what had happened to a young woman wearing a fur coat, pictured riding on the bonnet of a Hillman Imp displaying the newspaper headline (in Farsi) "Shah is gone!" The car next to her was a Mini.
Somehow stills are always more evocative than film. One showed three boys next to a stone head of the Shah, with a rope around the neck - a statue had been pulled down, just as the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled a quarter of a century later.
An older woman wandered round the gallery, lost in nostalgia. "I remember the great feeling we had in those days," she said. "We felt we could achieve anything."
Ayatollah Khomeini's image is carried by the crowd, but not all revolutionaries wanted an Islamic Republic. Many were simply calling for an end to the corrupt rule of the Shah. It was an era of competing ideologies - socialism, nationalism, anti-imperialism, maybe even feminism. But it was Islamism which won in the end.
The photos gave us a glimpse of what might have been, as well as what was. The rest, as they say, is history.
See more on the exhibition of Mahmoud Kalari's photos at the end of this report:
