Paria Farzaneh (Q3566)
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Paria Farzaneh is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Paria Farzaneh |
Paria Farzaneh is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
We were in the lovely, hidden Phoenix Garden, a charitably established community space in a blessedly unimproved nook hidden within London’s increasingly dystopic, redevelopment-ravaged heart. Only a few dedicated attendees recalled the Osman show held here a couple of years previously. The audience was building into a chorus of weather-moaning—that English pastime—as Paria Farzaneh’s first models emerged through the scrappy foliage and paced the uneven yet lovingly-laid flagstones.There’s a kind of self-serving exoticism in the way London fashion’s discourse has seized then capitalized upon the details of diversity within the identities of its so-called emerging designers recently. Farzaneh, to me, is a designer who has been discussed in that way: she’s of Iranian origin and was raised in the north of England (another otherness). Admirably, she seems to be delicately developing a strategy of evasion in order to escape then elevate herself beyond that lazy trap. In an agonizingly-sourced pre-show spiel there was talk of this collection reflecting Iran’s apparently 1.68 percent of citizens who are nomadic. This felt like a loving obfuscation—lip service. Farzaneh mixes blatant ethnographic touches, almost costume, with highly sophisticated pieces that float above cultural codes; pants and shorts cut with a side-leg pleat, for instance, were fresh and new. The shroudy, geometrically cut lacy pieces that a lazy journalist (this one) might have assumed were a culturally-specific adaptation were in fact based on some curtains Farzaneh remembered in her grandma’s bathroom.“I think in the fashion industry, utmost honesty is very lacking,” said Farzaneh. So how to walk away from the table with a win in this dishonest business? The nomads of any culture who share Farzaneh’s roving curiosity, wherever they hail from, should understand her codes.
16 September 2022
To parlay with Paria Farzaneh is to grapple with big issues—“nothing has really changed and this constant need for new is still not sustainable, in my opinion,” she says—while also nudging for smaller answers: “The collection? In part it’s about dressing up character.”Front-of-stage role-play props here included the 10-gallon hats, big-buckle belts, and finely-worked boots which, along with the decoratively-piped Dundee-sourced denim, yeehaw’d U.S. cowboy codes. However Farzaneh, who said she feels increasingly detached from “pumped-up” contemporary culture and drawn to the past, seemed less concerned with costume design than creating a sort of semi-ironic wearable armor for real-world avatars. “It’s about being a real character,” she said. “It segregates a persona to be ready for any scenario. Whether you are going to Mayfair or a rave, why shouldn’t you be ready for both?”Farzaneh’s interwoven play with identity is becoming increasingly layered. The foundation is her back-and-forth between the Iranian codes of her family roots, expressed here in ghalamkar pattern fleece, and the contemporary tropes of so-called-streetwear and her Northern British upbringing, via her use of British milled fabrics, some upcycled. Of partnering with the Yorkshire-based mill on the woolen tartan featured in denim-hipped skirts and menswear pants, she said: “It was so nice because they are Northern: It made me nostalgic for being at school and wanting to be older. And it made me think of being nostalgic but challenging it into other formations.”Increasingly, she says, she is observing her defined sensibility resonate with a globally disparate audience: “We have had attention in Korea, Japan, Australia, and then also some very unexpected places in the U.S.: Missouri, Tennessee, Texas.” She recently sold some pieces to a Navy Seal based out of North Carolina. What sometimes connects the addresses in her order book is the Iranian diaspora: “There are millions of Iranians around the world who have sought refuge.” Yet there is a broader affinity at play here, too. As physical distance becomes increasingly abstracted by digital proximity, Farzaneh is soothsaying an irreverently pan-cultural mindset expressed through dress. This was reflected in her note: “There were no fit models for this collection, just inspiring individuals around us who were interested in the clothes, the story, the movement. And that’s all that matters in the end.”
4 May 2022
Big picture, since fashion gatherings resumed earlier this year, the most remarkable phenomenon has been witnessing how some designers have been tearing down the fourth wall between the audience and the runway.Walking into Paria Farzaneh’s event at the ICA in London was one of those what’s-going-on occasions. A casually dressed crowd was clustered around the bar, chatting, drinking coffee, and snacking on an Iranian picnic breakfast laid on by her mom, Fereshteh. It took a few minutes for it to sink in that this wasn’t the prelude to being ushered into another room to see her spring show. It was the show.“You know, the people who wear my clothes don’t really tend to be catwalk models,” Farzaneh shrugged, smiling with a pleasantly subversive glint in her eye. “So I’m not doing a catwalk show. These are my friends, people I work with who are important to me.”Among those standing about—demonstrating her point that there’s no false pretense of distance between Farzaneh’s collection and reality—were the designer’s pattern cutter, her accountant, a pro skateboarder, a DJ friend, a boxer, and two of her cousins. Regular role-playing formalities were suddenly collapsed and dissolved in a Farzaneh-created social-barrier crasher of a situation.It’s awkward to stare at what strangers are wearing, and an audience isn’t supposed to talk to models. But there we all were, nattering away almost as if it were…normal. Not quite, of course. Farzaneh’s dispensing of back-to-normal catwalk behavior was designed to celebrate, and cement, the importance of human interaction in these mid-pandemic times. She was part of her own invisible show herself, wandering around dressed in a curvy ankle-length khaki fishtail skirt with a central utility pocket and a gray-and-white checked zip-front camp shirt.It was part of a collection that she formerly aimed only at men but is now getting equaled up. There were extreme-flare jeans and box-pleat skirts and a dress and a halterneck top implanted with cartridge pockets. Something about Farzaneh’s crew looked ready for action: Hers is a re-rooted subgenre of military-utility clothing that comes stamped with a block-print signature hailing from the centuries-old artistic tradition of her family’s culture in Isfahan in central Iran.This season men and women both got similar shirts, cargo-pocket shorts, and bucket hats printed with those emblematic markers.
Meanwhile, in a semantic twist only readable in her collection notes, she’d redrafted the name of a bomber as an “anti-aircraft jacket.”The nuance, affect, and atmosphere of designers’ attempts to mount real-life confrontations with the absurdity of the runway are (ironically) impossible to transmit digitally. Demna Gvasalia got close to it as he smashed fourth walls between the real, fake, and hilariously meta during every passage of his red-carpet Balenciaga show. Francesco Risso did it by involving the entire audience in his Marni happening. Pierpaolo Piccioli attempted to break the elite-insider setup of a trad Valentino show by having his collection walk in front of a public audience on the street in Paris. Nowadays, to stay relevant, the work of a smart fashion thinker is as much about reinventing, satirizing, melting, and morphing the old rules of fashion shows as it is about designing novel clothes.Paria Farzaneh may be a very long way from those exalted places, but she too—and so many of her generation—is part and parcel of this great critique of the absurd 20th-century ways that persist in so much of the 21st-century fashion industry.
19 October 2021
Paria Farzaneh has never called herself a situationist, but the edgy way she marshals her abilities to jog her audience out of existential complacency is fully in that radical tradition. Her presentations persistently confront street surveillance, social media addiction, and conditioning, and ask how much our humanity loses by seeing the world through our narrow cultural lenses.This season, she organized “Country of the Blind,” a social experiment videoed in what looks like a sports hall. A formation of 25 young people wearing her fall collection are seen being instructed to dance in self-selected repetitive movements by a suited man who speaks in Farsi, the Iranian language of Farzaneh’s heritage. Their task—translated in English subtitles—is to look around and copy anyone who seems to be doing better than them. The experiment ends when everyone is eventually dancing in unison, repeating the same moves.As you follow what happens, it’s obvious that they all end up following a young woman to the left of the front row, who’s wearing a pink headscarf, a dark padded jacket, and matching trousers. Having no one in front of her, she was only looking forward and following her own instinct. Farzaneh is adamant that wasn’t some sort of symbolic setup. “Nobody knew what they were going to be asked when they walked in.” The maestro overseeing the proceedings, she adds, was “my uncle, who’s an English teacher.”Whatever, Farzaneh aims to be a thought leader as much as a fashion leader. The results of her experiment work as metaphor upon metaphor—about Farzaneh’s position as a young woman designer whose work is entwined with her British Iranian identity, about the influence of fashion as a whole, and about individualism versus conformity. She’s the kind of person who’ll always counter a question with a question rather than giving linear replies to what her work is about: “What do you think?” she asks journalists and fans alike. But this time, she had a more direct comment on her social experiment: “It shows what even a small level of influence on others can do.”Thereby hangs the issue of how Farzaneh can consciously use her own influence, as someone who’s grown up between two countries and cultures, as a woman in the still male-dominated streetwear field, and as a ’90s-born kid who reckons that people her age are “the last generation that had a childhood without being on phones and social media.” She finds that scary. “How far can the power of that influence go?”
8 May 2021
Paria Farzaneh has never called herself a situationist, but the edgy way she marshals her abilities to jog her audience out of existential complacency is fully in that radical tradition. Her presentations persistently confront street surveillance, social media addiction, and conditioning, and ask how much our humanity loses by seeing the world through our narrow cultural lenses.This season, she organized “Country of the Blind,” a social experiment videoed in what looks like a sports hall. A formation of 25 young people wearing her fall collection are seen being instructed to dance in self-selected repetitive movements by a suited man who speaks in Farsi, the Iranian language of Farzaneh’s heritage. Their task—translated in English subtitles—is to look around and copy anyone who seems to be doing better than them. The experiment ends when everyone is eventually dancing in unison, repeating the same moves.As you follow what happens, it’s obvious that they all end up following a young woman to the left of the front row, who’s wearing a pink headscarf, a dark padded jacket, and matching trousers. Having no one in front of her, she was only looking forward and following her own instinct. Farzaneh is adamant that wasn’t some sort of symbolic setup. “Nobody knew what they were going to be asked when they walked in.” The maestro overseeing the proceedings, she adds, was “my uncle, who’s an English teacher.”Whatever, Farzaneh aims to be a thought leader as much as a fashion leader. The results of her experiment work as metaphor upon metaphor—about Farzaneh’s position as a young woman designer whose work is entwined with her British Iranian identity, about the influence of fashion as a whole, and about individualism versus conformity. She’s the kind of person who’ll always counter a question with a question rather than giving linear replies to what her work is about: “What do you think?” she asks journalists and fans alike. But this time, she had a more direct comment on her social experiment: “It shows what even a small level of influence on others can do.”Thereby hangs the issue of how Farzaneh can consciously use her own influence, as someone who’s grown up between two countries and cultures, as a woman in the still male-dominated streetwear field, and as a ’90s-born kid who reckons that people her age are “the last generation that had a childhood without being on phones and social media.” She finds that scary. “How far can the power of that influence go?”
8 May 2021
Paria Farzaneh isn’t in it just to sell clothes, not really. For her, fashion is a device for exploding complacency, which is exactly what she did yesterday: She blew up a field. From a safe vantage point up a hill, it looked as if a sleepy, leafy corner of England had suddenly become a battlefield. Then her models—young women alongside the men, this time—walked through it and out the other side.It was a visceral shock. And yes, that achieved exactly the sensation Farzaneh wanted to force on spectators: making visible the fact that the world is in a state of strife, whether we’re aware of it or not. “What’s going on today isn’t new. It’s reality,” she declared.Confrontational, experiential shows have been nonexistent since Demna Gvasalia staged his Balenciaga show in a terrifying dystopian scenario in Paris in March. That was a dark warning against both the sinister powers that be and environmental disaster—the same terrors that have Paria Farzaneh’s generation rising up in anger. She’d lulled a few people into the event gently, inviting them to sit in the open air on a farm in Little Missenden, an hour west of London. It was a lovely English picnic sort of day. Then the explosions—like mortar fire—professionally organized by a cinematographic pyrotechnics outfit. “Yeah, they’re the people who do war movies,1917, everything,” she said afterward.Pandemic or no, Farzaneh is not one to be put off having her say in public. Her shows have always served as her way of telling people to wake up in one way or another: from being dominated by screens, from living under surveillance, from cultural ignorance. Now, in times more extreme than ever, there we were, being advanced upon by the Paria Farzaneh resistance unit.A press release had mentioned how she’d tried to collaborate on the collection with two friends in America. One had had to evacuate their home from the fires in California. Another, in Chicago, was telling her about being tear-gassed by police at BLM protests. “If we don’t talk about all of our experiences, what will change? We have to now. Keep asking the questions, that’s all I’m saying.”Another big question is what can fashion contribute to change? As far as this collection goes, with its camouflage prints, tent skirt, and cargo pants (everything with plenty of pockets in preparedness for whatever eventualities we may be meeting), Farzaneh’s partial answer is that half of it is upcycled. “I found them in Como.
There are rooms and rooms full of beautiful fabrics that have been rejected because someone, at some time, saw a flaw in them.”It’s something. What’s for sure is that if Farzaneh’s politically conscious generation is going to buy anything new, it will only be from someone who aligns with their beliefs. And if they can’t afford her goods? Well, at least she’s using her platform to speak of the uncomfortable truths.
21 September 2020
How ineffably poignant that the first fashion event of 2020 was an invitation to an Iranian wedding. The day after Donald Trump bombed Iran, Paria Farzaneh ushered us into a school hall in the City of London, asked men to sit on one side of the aisle, women on the other. Curtains opened on the school stage to reveal a bride in a white lace dress seated under a traditional religious canopy, with her groom next to her, wearing a hoodie printed in the textile that Farzaneh sources in Isfahan. The marriage ceremony was conducted in Farsi by an officiating gentleman in a black suit; guests were offered Iranian pastries, baked locally.The political relevance of the performance only provided an exaggerated context for the point Farzaneh continually puts over—that of welcoming people to the dignity of her culture, and the peaceful sharing of ordinary human values. “In uncertain times, it’s good to have a moment of celebration, of calm,” she said. “It’s a time to come together, to remember where you come from. Even though I was born here [in England], I have been to Iran every year of my life. I feel I am doing them proud, speaking for them, and that’s important to me.”The creative energies generated by the revelation of the differences and the samenesses of cultures is a unifying feature of London’s men’s shows. For some reason—perhaps because the excitement around menswear is a far newer frontier of action than the long-established women’s scene—there’s now a wave of young designers with intersectional British heritages whose work talks of representation, masculinity, and the strength of former colonial and immigrant voices. Grace Wales Bonner and Martine Rose flagged the way; they’ve been joined by Samuel Ross of A-Cold-Wall, Nicholas Daley, Priya Ahluwalia, Bianca Saunders, and Saul Nash.Farzaneh stands alone as the only British-Iranian, though her exploration of streetwear links her into a broader genre. The “groom” wore a padded jacket with a hood which he zipped up to a balaclava hood as he stood up to lead out the show. Was there something meant by that image of protective, face-concealing clothing? There have been riots and unrest in the streets of Iranian cities recently. “That is for you to say,” she replied steadily when someone asked her if the cargo pants and olive drab looks were referencing combat uniform. “Every male in Iran has to do military service. It’s mandatory.
”But concealment of identity, aggression, and fear did not read in this collection. Rather the opposite—Farzaneh wanted to talk about the specifics behind the traditional wood-block prints she’s adopted as her signature. “They are completely sustainable, though I’ve never shouted about that. They’re hand-made by a man in Isfahan. The dyes are all natural, using turmeric and saffron, washed in the river and dried in the sun.” And they are pretty.She used the prints for piping, to edge woven yellow sweatshirts, and patched them into curvilinear cutting running through the sleeves and chests of her coats and anoraks. In a way, it seemed to insist on accessing a kind of gentleness for urban boys.And maybe that’s where her female point of view as a men’s designer asserts itself. As part of the experience of her “wedding,” she asked if people had noticed that the female side of the hall was less populated than the male. That, too, she implied, was an immersion in her consciousness as a woman designer operating in a male-dominated field. Many conditions cut across cultures, wherever we come from. That’s what she’s saying.
4 January 2020
Big brother is watching you. Or at least that was the mood at Paria Farzaneh’s show this afternoon. Old school televisions were piled up in the middle of the runway, appearing like some abstract art exhibition or the wreckage of a bygone decade. As the first models emerged from backstage, the fuzzy screens came into focus, projecting not a live stream of the runway, but of the audience, many of whom were documenting the experience themselves.The effect was unsettling: Suddenly the front row was under surveillance. To add to that sense of foreboding, all the models wore identical bobbed wigs (a curious trend that has emerged at the shows these past few days) and masks fixed with mechanical grins and garish makeup. Was Farzaneh questioning the threat that technology poses to our privacy? Reflecting our compulsive obsession with social media back at us? Was the joke here simply on us?“When you are a creative the biggest judge is yourself. I always think, if it isn’t good enough for me, then it won’t be good enough for anybody else,” read the show notes. “Sometimes I feel I should completely stop, but then there is still so much that needs to be said.”In the last few seasons, the 25-year-old designer has emerged as one of several new voices on the London fashion scene. Born to Iranian parents who immigrated to the country 30 years ago, her origin story speaks to a modern and richly layered British identity, one that’s threaded through her work. The distinctive Iranian block-prints she’s used before came through in baggy, drawstring pants, along the panels of smart zippered jackets, and spliced through a patchwork suit, an impressive finale look. They covered many of the high-top sneakers made in collaboration with Converse, too. The show’s standout was a zippered coat with matching trousers made from what looked like repurposed shipping packaging. It came tagged with airport stickers and, more ominously, plastered with “border force” tape issued by the British government, perhaps as a reference to the public outrage over tightening immigration laws that continues to bubble up in the wake of the Windrush scandal.The show ended on an uplifting note, as models distributed yellow roses to members of the audience. Farzaneh was reticent to give comment backstage, though she did explain that the yellow roses have been a symbol of peace and love in the Middle East since the 18th century. Enough said.
10 June 2019
There have been some hair-raisingly dystopian underground performances around London these past three days. The one young Paria Farzaneh put on was skeweringly on point about the social media–altered existence we’ve all surrendered to today. She led her fans to a hole-in-the-wall club under a railway arch and involved them in a scenario that felt like aBlack Mirrorepisode.There was a front door at the end of a darkened runway, with a boy in a bed behind it. Suddenly, the unmistakable, piercingly loud, universally despised sound of an iPhone alarm went off. The boy got up, stepped through the door and onto the “street,” phone in his hand. As we all do. Only the street wasn’t a street but a rolling conveyor belt. The boy stood still, raised his phone, checked himself out, and started videotaping himself as he moved along. Almost as one, the audience auto-responded by lifting their own phones—as we do, at fashion shows—and videotaped him videotaping himself.All the boy models—and a couple of girls—then did exactly the same, before stepping through the transparent plastic curtains of a room that looked like a sterile decontamination unit. With a loaded irony pointed at our obsession with posting every second of our existence, Farzaneh titled her show Here, Right Now. “It’s the mundanity of it. The alarm we all have. The conveyor belt we’re all on. People aren’t thinking what’s going on,” she said. “I just wish people would put their phones down, start looking each other in the eye, and start talking.”Ironies withinBlack Mirrorironies: Backstage, the models were taking photos of themselves, and the audience lingered until they’d pressed post on their Instagram feeds. Instagram is where what happened in the club lives. But Farzaneh only posted still photos of the clothes she’d designed. You see them here. They were a stepped-up development of what she’s established in two short seasons—clothes that retain her British-Iranian identity in the printed fabrics, a stamp now implanted more as a detail in piping and some terrific laminated cross-body bags. But she’s moving on into smarter, more tailored looks and some terrific hand-knits, too.And beyond the salutary commentary she delivered about screen-dominated consciousness, she had another message for her youth following. “I feel it’s time we get away from the streetwear movement. That’s fast fashion now. It has a shelf life,”she declared. “We need to smarten up.”
8 January 2019
Despite the times we live in, new voices from all sides of multicultural British communities continue to rise in London fashion—particularly in menswear, for some reason—in a way that is truly encouraging. One is 24-year-old Paria Farzaneh, a fireball of energy and determination, who ordered up a truck with drop-down sides that revealed seven scenes displaying her love of Iran and her Iranian family heritage as a backdrop for her new collection. It’s her second presentation, actually, but her first in which she’s been listed as One to Watch by the NewGen committee. So a crowd traveled to the South Bank of London to see this show-in-truck not far from City Hall, which is presided over by Sadiq Khan, who is, famously, London’s first Muslim mayor. (And who, incidentally, has crossed swords with Donald Trump over his Muslim travel ban, calling him “ignorant.”)Farzaneh told her story. She’s a second-generation daughter of parents who immigrated to England 30 years ago. “I was born in Devon, then lived in Hull [in the north],” she said. The concept behind each of her seven sets was about the symbolic customs of Nowruz, the Iranian new year, which falls the moment day breaks at the spring solstice. “The media constantly undermines the image of Iran and the way it depicts the Middle East in general,” she explained. “I just thought:If only people understood the beauty of the culture!”It’s really a pity that these pictures don’t show today’s truck installation—being a Brit, Farzaneh hedged against the weather by shooting a lookbook in advance (against simulated daybreak skies). But at the event, her open-air reveal was drenched only in brilliant sunlight, as visitors inspected her scenes of home, a barbershop, and a landscape of sand dunes. “I’ve dedicated this to my uncle, Dr. Ali Farzaneh, who was an agriculturist, who passed away in February,” she said, explaining how he’d inspired her use of khaki uniform fabric. The prints on baggy shorts, bombers, and shirts were “hand-blocked and made in a city called Isfahan.”Farzaneh has ambition to build a brand long-term and make it as accessible as she can. She already has her own e-commerce website. It was a feel-good, community-spirited note on which to wind up the week.
11 June 2018