Seams Like Destiny: A Conversation with English Costume Designer Afsaneh Aayani
Afsaneh Aayani is an Iranian/American multidisciplinary artist. She graduated with her MFA in Scenic design from UH in 2020 and her BFA from Art University Of Tehran in 2010. She has created work around the United States, Iran, China, Poland, Sri Lanka, and Germany. She has received multiple national/international awards for design, puppeteering, puppet-making, and directing. To learn more about her work you can visit www.afsanehaayani.com
Tell us about yourself and your journey to becoming a costume designer?
From the time I was five or six, I was already surrounded by fabric and patterns. Both my mom and my aunt were tailors, and my aunt even used to tell me I would grow up to be a fashion designer. Although my bachelors was in puppetry and my masters was in scenic design, I have always had a special place in my heart for costume design. Even as a puppeteer, I need to make the puppet costumes so it has been and continues to be an inseparable part of what I do as an artist.
How has it been to work on a story so close to your own lived experience? How has that informed your design process?
I’ve honestly really been enjoying the process. I was in Iran in 2008, so it’s not just doing online research or finding photos of random people, but also going back through pictures of myself, my family, and my friends. It’s been a really nostalgic experience that has also resulted in an authentic design for the show. In fact, one of the characters is styled similarly to my mom — you can see a bit of her in the final production on stage. Generally, all of the costumes you will see are reminiscent of the people I was surrounded by at that time in my life. To me these aren’t just fictional characters, these are people I know and have lived with.
What has been your creative process to design the costumes for this show? How did the personalities of the characters inform your costume designs for them?
One thing that I think will make this production special is the backstories we developed for each character. We had multiple meetings not just with the director but with the whole design team to come to a more profound understanding of who these people really were. This helped all of the designers to develop a common and deep understanding of each character. In the context of costume design, you’ll see this play out in all kinds of details—things like the length of the manto that each character wears, the type of headscarf they have, or the colors they wear. Each detail is intimately tied to the backstory of the character and the world we are trying to create.
You are traveling to Iran to source materials for your design of the show — why is it important for you to make this journey?
It is quite fortunate that this show coincides with the first time I’ve been able to visit my home in a long time. This is an incredible opportunity to bring the actual headwear that we would wear at school or the outfits that women would really wear. It is difficult, or in some cases impossible, to source the authentic material here in the US or to find it online. Since we are telling a story that is so personal and so real, I feel it is important to do this story justice, and to picture these people as they would have been in Iran in 2008. Also, it is important for the audience to understand that a woman’s outfit in Iran is a political statement. I would guess that for most of the audience when they wake up in the morning and choose their outfit, the political implication is probably not one of the major factors that helps them decide. For Iranian women, the clothes are a major part of the culture as well as personal identity so putting those clothes on stage as they were is special to me.
Is there one thing—a special detail or exciting nuance—that you are hoping audiences will notice in your design?
As the show progresses, the colors, patterns, and styles change with each of the characters as we unravel their story, their truth. I hope the audience notices or at least can feel this transformation for each of the characters and can enjoy the story within the story we are trying to tell.
