Artist feats traditional Iranian costumes
A COLLECTION of Iranian women’s traditional attire was put on display at the Asian Center of University of the Philippines Diliman, Rizal Park in Manila and at the University of Santo Tomas.
The collection has been made by Shahin Ebrahimzadeh-Pezeshki, a famous Iranian artist and expert in traditional Iranian dressmaking. Her collection features traditional dresses from different cities of Iran.
“Iranian women’s attire feature forms of art, and the women draw inspiration from the regions in which they live to represent the culture of the regions through the art,” Ebrahimzadeh-Pezeshki said during an opening ceremony for the exhibit.
Although the majority of Iranians are Persian, Iran has a diverse population of ethnic groups, each with their own language, tradition, and clothes—all of which shape the country’s rich cultural tapestry. Women’s clothes are strong identifiers of regional and ethnic groups. People can differentiate which groups they belong to based on the colorful fabrics, embroidered patterns, decorative jewelry, and style of the traditional dresses of Iran.
“The exhibit shows different tribes in my country, they manifest the identity through designs and colors,” Ebrahimzadeh-Pezeshki Shahin Ebrahimzadeh-Pezeshki told .
“In all honesty, due to the matter of the development of Information Technology, little by little, the culture starts to become colorless. So by this type of action, by putting up these exhibition, we revive the cultures which itself is considered one of the heritage or one of the basis of the life of each nation. I felt doing this is an obligation in order to show even a part of our culture to our countries so that those students and people can observe even just the introduction of our culture,” she added.
Ebrahimzadeh-Pezeshki is the author of “Seven Standards in Teaching Needle Sew- ing and Classic Decoration of Today’s Modern Dresses,” and is an expert on Sormeh sewing, needle sewing, Iranian silk sewing, and the modern methods of sewing with native designs. Her work has travelled the world over, exhibited in Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey, Kenya, Spain, England, and Romania.
“The life of the human being changes already. The technology now show that people are already tired of using too much time in order to wear some of the dresses over and over like these in the exhibit so they just wear simpler dresses in order to move freely. This is also a factor that separated from those traditional dresses,” she said.
“But despite all of those changes, our children should know about all of those tradition in order to build the future. It is necessary to teach and tell them who we really are and then use it as a base to construct and build a better future,” Ebrahimzadeh-Pezeshki noted.
The exhibition held on the first and second week of October has been organized in collaboration with the Pinay-Irano Family Community (PIFC), the Philippine-Iran Cultural and Scientific Society, and the Embassy of Iran.