BY Azadeh Moaveni
Photographs by Forough Alaei

December 7, 2022

TIME

In the winter of 2017, a young woman called Vida Movahed stood on top of a utility box on Revolution Street, a busy artery of central Tehran, and dangled her white headscarf on a stick. As an act of dissent, it was strikingly peaceful, giving the appearance of a white flag of surrender. Still, by not wearing her hijab, Movahed was challenging the system’s dress codes. She stayed there for an hour, until she was arrested for breaking the law. Imagery of her silent, brave act raced around Instagram. A month later, a graduate student named Narges Hosseini performed the same defiant act on the same street. Soon, more women launched similar protests, and their movement took the name of where it all began: #TheGirlsofRevolutionStreet.

When I lived in Tehran in my early 20s, writing a TIME column called “Lipstick Jihad,” we used to flout the rules by wearing brilliant colors and tighter and shorter overcoats, pushing against the gloomy black and navy of official dress codes, and bringing some individuality within the bounds of an attire that was meant to erase distinctiveness. It was a way of refusing to be a model Islamic citizen, of showing the state that its plan had failed, and that we rejected its conservative vision of women as dutiful wives and mothers. It was millennials who drove the Girls of Revolution Street demonstrations of the late 2010s, leaving flowers at spots that had been sites of protest and showing the next generation how powerfully civil disobedience could challenge inequality.

These younger women are now in the streets. The movement they’re leading is educated, liberal, secular, raised on higher expectations, and desperate for normality: college and foreign travel, decent jobs, rule of law, access to the Apple Store, a meaningful role in politics, the freedom to say and wear whatever. They are quite unlike those who came before them; sometimes they feel more like transnational Gen Z than Iranians: they are vegans, they de-Islamicize their names, they don’t want children. I’ve often wondered what has made them so rebellious, because their ferocious character was evident well before 22-year-old Mahsa (Jina) Amini, arrested at a metro station by the morality police who enforce the dress code, died after being held in their custody on Sept. 16, setting off the most sustained uprising in the 43-year history of the Islamic Republic. The average age of arrested protesters is notably low—Iranian officials estimate as young as 15. I can only conclude that when a generation’s aspirations for freedom appear tantalizingly within reach, the more humiliating the remaining restrictions seem, and the less daunting the final stretch of resistance feels.

In the past two or three years, young women effectively already canceled the compulsory hijab. I was struck on a round of bureaucratic visits to government offices last summer by how casually and liberally young women dressed in even these traditionally austere official outposts. I felt ridiculous in a long black robe and a navy headscarf, as though I were a tourist who’d read all the wrong travel books. I was struck when a relative told me she’d received so many fines for driving without a headscarf that her driver’s license was about to be suspended. She was obliged to attend a mass lecture, the equivalent of moral traffic school, and after promising to abide by the rules, her fines were canceled.

The state has known for some time it’s on the back foot with dress codes, and is clearly spooked. Last winter, instead of the usual dreary billboards of a pious woman in black chador with some hectoring message about modesty, a panoramic image went up over Modarres expressway in Tehran of a woman in a minimalist, sport hijab sprinting up a mountain, with the words “you chart the path. #findyourself.” >>>