Laleh Ghasemi

Laleh's grandmother ran a zardouzi workshop in Rasht, on the Caspian coast, where court embroidery techniques survived long after the courts themselves had gone — passed down as a trade for weddings, ceremonial coats, and religious textiles. Laleh apprenticed there from childhood, learning to stretch fabric taut on a wooden frame and lay metallic thread in the couched, panel-by-panel method the craft requires, building a design one small anchored stitch at a time rather than sewing straight through the cloth. She now applies the same construction — the same frame, the same thread count, the same sequin-by-sequin patience — to garments meant for a different kind of night: pieces designed to catch stage and festival lighting rather than chandelier light. A single panel can take upward of forty hours. Her work reaches ATG through a screened export partner.

Laleh trained in zardouzi — the centuries-old Persian court craft of metallic-thread and sequin embroidery, historically worked onto royal robes and ceremonial coats — in her grandmother's workshop in Rasht before turning the same needle and the same panel-by-panel construction toward a garment built for a different kind of ceremony: the desert, at night, under lights instead of chandeliers. She still stitches every sequin by hand, one thread pass at a time, the same tension and spacing zardouzi has always demanded; only the palette and the destination have changed.

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She wants a craft built for royal ceremony to hold its own under a different kind of spectacle, without losing the hand-stitched discipline that makes it real.