Inspired by my late father's childhood stamp collection.
Last summer, I had the difficult task of going through my dad's belongings after he died to decide what to keep and sell. I thought I was going to pass out from sadness when I suddenly came upon his stamp collection. I had only seen it once, when I was a kid myself and he had proudly showed it to me, but it had since been kept somewhere in storage, a bit forgotten.
As a boy in the 1960s and early 1970s, he lived in Tehran, Iran. He carefully saved all the fun and colorful stamps that passed through his family's home when the mail arrived and organized them in little books, the same exact ones I used to make this fabric. The stamps themselves are beautifully painted and tell the story of life in Iran before the 1979 Revolution. Evocative of a different world, a different Iran, seeing them instantly takes one to the past. I wanted to memorialize the stamps and the care my dad had taken as a little boy to preserve these art pieces. Wishing I could share my idea with my dad, I digitally scanned my favorite ones, assembled them into a collage, printed it onto fabric, and here we are!
An homage to my father, to the proudly colorful and creative Iran of the past, and to all of us in these modern times who continue to wear our cultural identity on our sleeves (literally!).
- Designed in Brooklyn, printed in Manhattan, cut & sewn in the Bronx.
- 90% Spun Polyester, 10% Spandex
- Drop-shoulder
- Stretchy
- True to size
- Double the sizes in the size chart for circumference