The Image of Modern Man A Study on Iranian Men’s Dress Developments in Qajar Period

From the mid-nineteenth century, ideological contacts with the western world, through modern educational, bureaucratic, and military institutions, laid the basis of a new professional middle-class in Iran, who has been the main trendsetter of modern European clothing styles among Iranian men. With examining historical texts from late Qajar period, the process of appropriation and popularity of European-style men’s suit, and its social implications in Iran, is studied here, to answer the question that what is the connection between new middle class, new civil institutions, and modernization of men’s dress. European dress for Iranian modernists, represented a modern social and organizational perception, and was a symbolic manifestation of equality to the advanced western world, and also distinction from not only aristocracy, but also traditionalists. The aim of this study is to show that modernization of men’s dress in Iran has had a social basis in constitutional era, prior to political changes of dress in Pahlavi era.