There are motifs that are never merely decorative. The nightingale and the rose—golo bolbol—have permeated Persian poetry and the decorative arts for centuries as a coded system, imbued with love, unfulfilled desire, and spiritual aspiration. For her fifth couture collection, presented in Paris in early July, Bahareh Ardakani chose not to simply illustrate this motif, but to give it a new voice—through twenty-six silhouettes constructed like a living manuscript.
Ardakani’s approach stands out immediately from a traditional culturally inspired design, in which a motif foreign to Western fashion is simply transposed onto a dress. The brand’s founder recounts growing up with this motif woven into the rugs of her family home in Gothenburg, painted in the miniatures hanging on the walls, and printed on the illustrated pages of the collections of Hafez and Saadi. It is therefore not a reference from a mood board, but a childhood memory that she chooses to bring back to life, this time through the workshop rather than through memory.
The technical work involved in bringing this memory to life resembles a form of almost narrative embroidery. An extremely fine red lace, developed in-house and embroidered with an interlaced bird-and-flower motif, is layered over iridescent red-orange muslins to create a sense of depth—the same effect sought, according to the house, in Persian tapestries dyed with plant pigments. The mathematical pleating captures the iridescence of a nightingale’s folded plumage on skirts and coat sleeves; geometric smocking recreates the architecture of the canopies in Persian gardens, the nightingale’s natural habitat. Zardozi embroidery, a technique that originated in Persia in the 7th century, adorns the hems with a deep copper-colored thread, like the borders of an illuminated manuscript.
This highly dense ornamental vocabulary finds a counterpoint in the structure of the silhouettes themselves, characterized by what the brand describes as Scandinavian modernism—the other half of Ardakani’s identity, an engineer and gemologist by training, rooted in both Persian heritage and Nordic sensibility. The wing-shaped bodices fasten at the back with an A-shaped clasp that traces the silhouette of a bird in flight. The long, flared skirts follow the exaggerated curves of the hips, a direct echo of the nightingale’s song, as the designer describes it. The brand notes that it has deliberately avoided the use of real feathers, preferring to recreate their texture through technique rather than raw materials—a choice consistent with the GOTS certification the brand has held since 2022.
Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of this collection lies not so much in the techniques as in the way Bahareh Ardakani asserts her role as a designer. In the text accompanying the collection, she describes herself simply as a seamstress, responsible for having her workshop produce nearly all the pieces in-house, while embracing a much broader ambition: that of passing on an ornamental culture that had previously fascinated figures such as Goethe, Oscar Wilde, and Paul Klee. She says she sees the nightingale’s song as a metaphor for artistic perseverance—the work of creating beauty even when the world does not immediately understand it.
Ultimately, twenty-six looks are enough to fulfill this ambition: neither a collection created for a specific occasion nor a mere nostalgic tribute, but a sincere attempt to align a craft—fashion design—with a more intimate form of transmission—that of a culture we embrace before we fully understand it.
It remains to be seen how this dialogue between Persian heritage and Scandinavian precision will evolve as ArdAzAei—who will be a guest designer on the official Haute Couture calendar in 2024—consolidates her place in one of fashion’s most exclusive circles. One thing seems certain: the house has no intention of telling the same story the same way twice.
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