WARNING: This is obviously distasteful satire. In case you don’t notice.
Tehran’s theocracy just took a permanent vacation—and the hemlines are already celebrating.
Gentlemen, loosen the tie, swirl the 18-year-old single malt, and lean back in the club chair. While the cable-news boys are still arguing about who gets credit for toppling the mullahs—Israel, the Americans, the price of saffron, or simple exhaustion—the rest of us can finally admit what really matters: Iran just declared open season on fabric.
For forty-seven years the Islamic Republic dressed its women like walking ink blots. Black from crown to ankle, as if God himself had spilled the fountain pen. Now the Supreme Leader’s successor is reportedly sipping tea in a Dubai penthouse, the morality police have traded their batons for Uber rides to the airport, and the women of Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz are doing what any self-respecting Persian princess does when the chains come off: shopping.
We are calling it New Regime Summer, and it is going to be glorious.
Picture it. The Azadi Tower at dusk. Instead of the usual sea of identical headscarves, the plaza looks like the front row at Milan Fashion Week after three Negronis. Silk headscarves—optional, and mostly used as sashes around waisted blouses—are giving way to actual hair. Glorious, waist-length, raven-black, shampoo-commercial hair that hasn’t seen daylight since the Carter administration. Miniskirts are back, but with a Persian twist: high slits cut like the pages of an illuminated manuscript, flashing just enough leg to remind you that these women descend from the same bloodline that once lounged in the harems of Persepolis wearing nothing but gold anklets and a smile.
The lingerie shops on Ferdowsi Street have already removed the blackout curtains. Word from our man on the ground (a retired British diplomat who somehow never left and still calls everyone “old boy”) is that French lace is moving faster than AK-47s did in 1979. One boutique owner told him, straight-faced, “We are no longer selling underwear. We are selling hope.” He bought three sets for his wife, two for his mistress, and one for the wife’s sister—just to keep the peace.
And the beaches. Oh, the beaches. Caspian coast resorts that once enforced “full coverage swimwear” (essentially a wetsuit with commitment issues) are now advertising “European standards.” Translation: the string bikini has returned, and the Persian woman, built like a 1950s pin-up who discovered Pilates and pomegranate seeds, wears it the way nature intended. Our photographer in Bandar Anzali sent back contact sheets that made the art director blush for the first time since the Clinton years. We’re running a six-page spread next month titled “The New Persian Riviera—Bikinis, Backgammon, and Baklava.” Subscription numbers are already up.
Of course, the serious fellows in Washington and Jerusalem will lecture us about democracy, human rights, and regional stability. Fine. Important stuff. But let us, for one glorious summer, acknowledge the collateral beauty. When a society stops forcing half its population to dress like depressed umbrellas, the other half tends to notice. Iranian men—those dark-eyed, poetry-quoting devils—are walking around with the dazed expression of prisoners who just discovered the warden left the gate open and the liquor cabinet unlocked. One taxi driver in Tehran told our stringer, “Brother, I have not seen my wife’s collarbone since our wedding. I feel like a teenager again. I may need a doctor.”
We sent him a case of Viagra and a thank-you note.
Fashion houses are already scrambling. Chanel is rushing a “Tehran Rose” collection. Tom Ford is rumored to be developing a scent called Regime Change—notes of oud, saffron, gunpowder, and liberated skin. Even the Italians, who normally pretend the Middle East ends at Capri, are booking flights. Expect the first post-revolution Milan show to feature models in chador-cut evening gowns that dissolve into sheer organza halfway down the runway. The message will be subtle: We mourn the past… but only long enough to appreciate how much better the present looks without it.
Travel tip for the Esquire reader of a certain vintage: get there before the Instagram influencers ruin it. Fly business into Imam Khomeini (they’re already talking about renaming it “Shah 2.0 International”), book the new Waldorf on the old U.S. Embassy grounds—irony is back in style—and request a corner suite overlooking the former Revolutionary Guard headquarters, now a rooftop bar called The Afterparty. Bring linen suits, a good Panama hat, and the understanding that “no” is once again a negotiable word.
Will it last? History says revolutions have a nasty habit of eating their own glamour. But for right now, in this shimmering interregnum between the turban and whatever comes next, the women of Iran are doing what women do best when left to their own devices: making the world a far more interesting place to look at.
So raise your glass, gentlemen. To New Regime Summer. To hemlines that rise with the temperature. To the quiet, magnificent revenge of fabric against dogma. And to the eternal truth that, no matter how complicated the geopolitics, a beautiful woman in a short dress has always been the simplest argument for freedom ever invented.
The mullahs are gone. The miniskirts are here. Pour another. It’s going to be a long, hot, glorious summer.
