Royal-nama: Translating Persian Heritage from Shahnameh into Contemporary Womenswear

This paper presents a practice-led design research study that develops and demonstrates a structured methodology for translating the visual grammar of Persian miniature painting, as preserved in the eleventh-century epic manuscript the Shahnameh (Book of Kings) by Ferdowsi, into a coherent contemporary women's wear collection. Despite the Shahnameh's extensive influence on Islamic decorative arts and luxury textile production across centuries, it has received remarkably little systematic engagement within academic fashion design research, particularly as a generative structural source rather than a surface-decorative reference. This study addresses that gap directly. The research proceeded through three integrated phases. First, primary ethnographic fieldwork was conducted across Tehran, Mashhad, and Qom, Iran, involving observational documentation, informal interviews, and direct engagement with culturally significant sites, most notably the Grand Bazaar of Tehran, where a Shahnameh volume central to the study's visual analysis was encountered. Second, individual elements from selected miniature paintings; architectural forms, armour, figural silhouettes, ornamental borders, and geometric motifs, were rendered by hand at enlarged scale, a process that produced an embodied, analytically grounded understanding of the miniatures' compositional logic: their organisation of space through overlapping planes, their use of saturated colour as structural rather than decorative, and their hierarchical scaling of figures according to narrative weight. These drawn elements were then subjected to compositional simplification and digital reworking in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, producing a vocabulary of design-ready visual components. Third, this vocabulary was translated into garment silhouettes, surface patterns, and textile constructions through iterative design development, culminating in five final garments constituting the Royal-nama collection. An additional and distinctive dimension of the research was the analysis of a textile portfolio belonging to the researcher's maternal grandmother, an Iranian woman whose collection of broderie embroidery, patchwork, and woven fragments preserved techniques associated with Iranian domestic textile traditions no longer widely practised. This portfolio served simultaneously as a technical source for embroidery methods incorporated into the collection's surface treatments, and as an autobiographical archive through which the researcher's own Iranian cultural identity was interrogated and reinterpreted. The grandmother's portfolio situates the Royal-nama collection within the emerging scholarly literature on intergenerational textile knowledge and diasporic design practice, drawing on Bhabha's (1994) concept of the third space as a theoretical frame for hybrid cultural artefacts. The five garments of the Royal-nama collection were produced in pure and synthetic silk, using digital printing developed from the researcher's own rendered drawings, hand embroidery incorporating traditional Iranian stitching techniques, machine embellishment with metallic threads (dabka, cora, and tilla), and appliqué. Silhouettes across the collection were derived from architectural canopies, tent structures, layered armour forms, and overlapping building planes observed in the miniatures, meaning that the Shahnameh's visual logic informed the structural resolution of cut lines and panel organisation, not merely the surface decoration. The colour palette was taken directly from the four dominant hue families of the Shahnameh source volume: deep indigo, burgundy-red, warm gold, and earthy ochre. All five garments were resolved for practical wearability, demonstrating that structural derivation from historical manuscript sources need not produce archaic or commercially unviable outcomes. The study's primary contribution is methodological: the sequential process of fieldwork, close observational drawing, compositional simplification, textile exploration, and iterative garment production constitutes a replicable framework that other designer-researchers can adapt for engagement with comparable classical manuscript traditions, including Mughal, Ottoman, and Timurid painting. The research also argues for analytical drawing, rather than digital scanning, as a primary research instrument in heritage-engaged fashion design, on the grounds that the sustained, time-intensive process of hand-rendering generates an intimacy with compositional logic that directly enables deeper structural design decisions. By privileging the compositional and figural vocabularies of Persian miniature painting over the calligraphic surface quotation that characterises most commercial Shahnameh-referencing fashion, the Royal-nama collection proposes a form of cultural engagement that constitutes genuine structural dialogue rather than aesthetic borrowing.