History of Iranian Costumes: from the Beginning of the Islamic Era to the Mongol Invasion

One of the most visual and vivacious examples of a society’s cultural life is the sort of clothing they use. Familiarity with the history of clothing in Iran not only provides us with an image of people living in different eras, but also gives information on tastes, design and colors of different clothes, texture of different fabrics, import and export and cost of them and receiving influence and imitating other region’s clothing, association of certain type of clothing with a definite social class and also about the process of transformation of clothes. Due to the vastness of its subject matter, the history of Iranian clothing needs to be studied in three different historical phases.
The first phase: clothing in Iran from ancient times to the Sassanid period which includes the clothing of civilizations before the Aryans in Iran like the Elamites’, the Lulueis’, the Guties’, and the Aryan clothing such as that of the Medians’, Achaemenians’, the Seleucids’, the Ashkanids’, and the Samanids’. The second phase: clothing in Iran from the beginning of Islam to the end of the Zandi dynasty, (clothing in Islamic Iran). The third phase: clothing in Iran from the time of the Qajarids to the present.