A Life Across
Three Cities

Chapter One · Early Years

Los Angeles

Born in the United States to Iranian parents, into a community that had rebuilt a version of home on the far side of the world. Tehrangeles: Persian spoken in the shops, Googoosh on the stereo, saffron in the kitchen, and a country that existed for him mostly through the adults describing it.

It is a specific kind of childhood — fluent in a culture you have never physically been inside. It leaves you with an appetite that photographs cannot satisfy.

Chapter Two · 1995

Shiraz

The family returned to Iran — and not to the capital, but to Shiraz, the city Iranians themselves treat as the country's poetic centre of gravity. Hafez and Saadi are buried there. The gardens are UNESCO-listed. The light in spring comes through orange blossom.

He arrived young enough for it to overwrite him. Persian stopped being a heritage language and became his working language. And he found the Vakil Bazaar, an eighteenth-century covered market where craftsmen still worked in the open — metal, textile, glass, thread.

This is the period that supplies almost every motif in the current work. Not because he was sketching, but because he was looking, daily, for years.

Chapter Three · Study

International Law

He took a degree in international law — the responsible choice, and a genuinely formative one. It trained him in precedent, in reading systems, and in the machinery by which things cross borders and are assigned value.

It also clarified the alternative. Studying how cultural property moves through the world tends to sharpen your view of who gets to make, sell and be credited for it. He finished the degree. Then he went the other way.

Chapter Four · Present

Dubai

The UAE was the practical answer: a place where the Gulf, South Asia, Iran and Europe are all one short flight away, and where a luxury object can find an audience without first being explained.

Here the practice became a discipline. Sermeh embroidery — gold wire coiled, cut and stitched bead by bead — became the technical core of the work, applied to bow ties, chokers, clutches and headpieces. Roughly forty hours per piece, and no way to shorten it.

The pieces have since been worn at Cannes, shown at Dubai Fashion Week, and presented in Milan.