The Artist
Behind the Thread

Noorarash Charlie was born in America to Iranian parents and spent his early childhood in Los Angeles, inside the largest Iranian community outside Iran itself — a place where Persian was spoken at home, and where the homeland existed mostly as story, music and the smell of a particular kind of cooking.

In 1995 his family made a decision that most diaspora families never make: they went back. Not to Tehran, but to Shiraz — the city of Hafez and Saadi, of walled gardens and orange blossom, of a bazaar whose vaulted ceilings have been throwing the same shadows since the eighteenth century.

He was young enough to absorb it completely. The language stopped being something his parents spoke and became something he thought in. The ornament stopped being decoration and became grammar. He spent hours in the Vakil Bazaar, which is where most of this story really begins — not because he was studying design, but because that is where the craftsmen were.

“I did not choose Persian ornament. I grew up inside it, and later realised I had been given a language.”

He completed a degree in international law. It was, by every conventional measure, the sensible path — and it gave him something the purely artistic route would not have: a working understanding of how ideas move across borders, and how the things a culture makes get valued, protected, or quietly appropriated.

Then he moved to the United Arab Emirates and started making things. What began as a personal obsession with Sermeh embroidery — the gold-thread technique practised in Iran for roughly five hundred years — became a discipline, then a body of work, then a label.

The work now travels further than he does. Pieces have appeared at Cannes, Dubai Fashion Week and in Milan. Each one is still made the slow way, by hand, at a frame, in a process that has refused for five centuries to get any faster.