I kept being told to find Nina. When I did, she was cutting hundred-year-old nomad cloth into a coat you could wear to a gallery.
Some names you hear in every studio until you give in and go. Nina Ebadi was one. I found her surrounded by antique Qashqai weavings and bolts of termeh, scissors in hand, doing something I had not seen before.
She takes tribal cloth with a century behind it and cuts it with an architect's discipline — a nomad's pattern, a tailor's seam. Nothing is precious about how she handles it, and everything is precious about the result.
“The tribe wove it; the atelier cut it; you wear both at once.”
It is close to home for us. Our own coats come from the same instinct: heritage textile, modern line, made to be lived in rather than archived. I left her studio and re-cut one of our samples the following week.
This is the meeting I keep chasing in Tehran — the tribe and the atelier in the same garment, so you wear both at once and never have to choose.
