Alireza Massoumnia is an Iranian-American fashion designer known for his sculptural, high-concept clothing. He draws inspiration from artists like Alexander McQueen and seeks to push boundaries with conceptual pieces. Massoumnia's first collection featured ethereal, transparent fabrics with diamond patterns inspired by harlequin illustrations. He constructs garments himself and focuses on their three-dimensional forms over sketches. Massoumnia's goal is to make clothing that is not practical but requires confidence, taking fashion to a more artistic place.

1. “If you can design one thing, you can design everything.”
– Massimo Vignelli (1931-2014)
THE DESIGN ISSUE
Issue 01
FALL 2014

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THE CRAFTED COLLECTIONFASHION DESIGNER ALIREZA MASSOUMNIA BRINGS TECHNICAL MASTERY
TO HIS SCULPTURAL, HIGH-CONCEPT CLOTHING
By Dana Kopel • Photographs by Natalie Holt
In the living room of Alireza Massoumnia’s
small apartment-cum-workspace in Hell’s
Kitchen, a row of windows offers an improbably
gorgeous view of the Hudson River and New
Jersey. Light filters in through the slats of the
Venetian blinds, forming a striped pattern on
the white wall above the couch where we’re
sitting. It strikes me that this pattern—lines of
bright light against the darker wall—recalls the
way the pieces in the fashion designer’s recent
collection evoke a provocative tension between
light and dark, concealment and revealing.
A floor-length gown, modestly cut with long
sleeves and a high neckline, is rendered entirely
in an ethereal, light pink transparent knit. A
sheer nude veil that falls below the elbows is
trimmed in black lace, with an oval of sheer
black geometrically patterned fabric directly
over the face. It’s strange, and strangely elegant,
simultaneously concealing the face and drawing
attention to it. “I really wanted to do that [with
the veil], the mystery and the darkness but at the
same time transparency and light,” Massoumnia
reflects. “That was my challenge, to try to
accomplish the darkness without the weight.”
His process, the designer tells me, usually
begins with an idea, which he works over in
his head before turning to materials. “I develop

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ideas as I’m on the subway and walking down the street.
Sometimes I don’t even sketch it, I just make the pattern:
it goes from my head directly to the actual piece.” For
this first collection, most of which is hanging on a single
clothing rack in front of the window, he began thinking
about techniques and craft rather than any overarching
concept, and then discovered Maurice Sand’s turn-of-
the-century illustrations of harlequins and jesters. The
repeated diamond patterns that run across the bodice
of a black gown, or down the billowy raglan sleeves of
a sheer pink top, were inspired by these drawings.
“I took that idea of the diamond and the harlequin,
and I decided I wanted to break it up and then mix it
with formalwear,” Massoumnia explains. Further design
inspiration came from Marlene Dietrich’s iconic tailcoat
(“Which was on auction today!” he tells me, “I wish I
had $25,000. $25,000—and nobody bid on it!”) He picks
up where he left off: “I started working with lapel shapes
of a tailcoat. I wanted to do an all-black collection and
make it very dark, but somehow I kept gearing toward
that delicate quality, so I went for the dark romance of
it,” he says, all blacks and pink-nudes, structured silks
and flowing tulle. The pieces feel innately sculptural,
a reflection of his preoccupation with each garment’s
construction in three dimensions: “Every time I’m putting
it on paper, it kind of takes something away from it. It
disrupts my process.” For Massoumnia, garments are best
conceived in patterns and muslin samples and fittings.
The mood board for
Massoumnia’s first collection,
featuring black and pink-nude
silks and tulles

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At right: Massoumnia’s library
of art and fashion books.
Below: a diamond-patterned
dress based on turn-of-the-
century harlequin illustrations
by Maurice Sand
In Tehran, where the designer grew up, his
mother and grandmother often made clothes
for themselves, working in their house. “They
used to make patterns from newspapers, cut
a dress on the floor,” he remembers. “I was
always around there playing with the fabric
scraps and watching them.” Observing the two
of them as they transformed newspaper and
fabric into dresses was a formative experience
for the young Massoumnia, who also helped
his “very fashionable” mother choose her
outfits. “When I was little,” he recalls, “people
would always ask me if I was going to grow
up and be a doctor like my father.” His
response? “I want to be a fashion designer!”
Tehran at the time was a very cosmopolitan
city: “If you wanted to wear a miniskirt you
could wear a miniskirt, if you wanted to wear
a hijab you could,” Massoumnia tells me. “My
family was very open-minded. My father was
not religious,” taking the family traveling and
to movies. Then, in 1978, when Massoumnia
was in middle school, the Iranian Revolution
happened, and the Iran-Iraq war began soon
after. He remembers the transformation from a
very Westernized Iran to one in which “Western
films were illegal—on TV they showed only
Chinese and Russian movies, always very serious
movies about war and [with few] women.”
With his mandatory military service looming,
Massoumnia says, “my parents wanted me to go
and live with my sisters,” both of whom were
living in Italy at the time. So he left Iran for
Turkey, which was the only country he could
get to without a visa; from Istanbul he applied
for an Italian visa, but was rejected: “The Italian
government was not issuing visas to teenage
Iranian boys, because they knew that we were
going there to stay.” He managed, however, to get
a student visa—and eventually political asylum—
in the United States. He tells me, “Believe it or
not, at that time it was the easiest place to come.”
In 1985, Massoumnia arrived in Boston,
where he attended English school and quickly
became fluent. After six months or so, one of his
sisters moved from Italy to the San Francisco
Bay area, and he soon followed her there to
finish high school. After graduating, he studied
for two years in a fashion program at a small
community college in San Francisco’s East Bay.
The summer after his second year, he interned
for a menswear designer. “They kept asking
me if I could help the pattern-maker, if I could
help the designer—it was a very small company
and they could see that I was very open to
trying anything. When it was time to go back
to school, they offered me a job.” Massoumnia
came to the conclusion that there was “no better
education than actually having a real job,” and
so, rather than returning to college, he worked
as an assistant designer for the menswear
company and took a few courses on the side.
Though Massoumnia left the company, and
San Francisco, after a couple years—“the fashion
industry in San Francisco was very small,”
he explains—his background in menswear

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At left: Massoumnia flips
through some vintage
fashion magazines
remains an obvious influence. In addition to his tie
company, Monsieur Gris, his recent collection includes
several tuxedo-inspired pieces for women, including
experimental, architecturally draped suit jackets and
vests and a pink silk skirt with a cummerbund. He
tells me, “I love tailoring and I love menswear. I always
find it exciting to take something that’s so tailored
and so classic, give it a twist, and put it on a woman.”
He continues, “I’ve always been fascinated by that,
taking something classic and kind of messing it up.”
Once in New York, Massoumnia took a job as a
pattern-maker, working nine to five and dedicating his
nights, weekends, and vacation days—and much of his
salary—to working on his own collection. “Because
I couldn’t afford to pay sample-makers and pattern-
makers, I started doing my own patterns and samples,
which kind of went full circle to the way my mom
and my grandmother worked. And in the beginning
I didn’t even have a table to work on; I worked on the
floor.” Developing this early collection while serving
as a full-time pattern-maker and freelancing on other
projects for companies like Cartier and Calvin Klein,
was both exhausting and rewarding, Massoumnia
remembers. Among his favorite projects from that time
was a collaboration with Thierry Mugler for Cirque du
Soleil, which Mugler initiated after seeing a women’s
tailcoat Massoumnia had designed and tracking him
down. “I was a huge fan, and still am,” he says of
Mugler’s work. “In college I used to save every tear
sheet. I still have them. So that was really exciting.”
“But I found myself working seven days a week and
really long hours, never being able to take vacations,
spending every dollar I made on fabrics and shows,”
he admits. “And [though] I was enjoying it, it got to

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a point where it took the pleasure out of the
creative process, and I decided to stop and
just work as a designer for others. Which was
amazing—my first job as a full-time designer
was for Zac Posen.” Like Massoumnia, Posen
visualized clothing ideas in 3-D and also “loved
to drape.” After a few years, Massoumnia
switched to freelance, working with Marchesa
and Monique Lhuillier, a designer known
primarily for bridal. “It was a lot of fun to
take her bridal language and translate it to
womenswear,” he reflects. And it wasn’t all
that different from his own work: “I’ve always
had a love for lace and delicate fabrics like
tulle, and I find myself kind of gearing towards
that, the romance of something so delicate.”
Perhaps the most influential, most creatively
rewarding of these jobs was working as the head
designer for Isaac Mizrahi’s high-end collection.
Mizrahi is “very creative and he has a lot of
knowledge,” Massoumnia says admiringly,
especially when it comes to the fine details of
working with fabric, an obvious passion for
Massoumnia.“[Mizrahi] was unlike anybody else
I’ve ever worked with,” he continues. “I would
show him sketches, and he would sketch, and
he would tell me about the grain line, how the
grain line should be”—a technical aspect that
most big-name designers would leave to their
drapers. “There was a lot of mutual respect, and
the fittings were fun,” Massoumnia tells me.
“He could take a lot of pleasure in the simplicity
Above: a hand-cut lace detail in the works for Massoumnia’s forthcoming collection.
Opposite page: pieces from his first collection

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of an idea. He would be happy if he saw a simple shift
dress but it was perfect—which is not an easy thing to
accomplish. I learned that from him, which helps me
take a step back and make sure that I don’t overdo it.”
Mizrahi helped develop Massoumnia’s evident gift of
giving a more traditional piece “a twist, without overkill.”
He remained at Isaac Mizrahi until they closed the
high-end division, though he continued working with
Mizrahi on special projects. But, he says, the closure
led him back to the idea of his own collection, which he
“missed terribly.” So he got to work on his own again,
first developing the concepts for the collection—the
dark yet weightless romance, menswear influences,
harlequin prints—then making patterns, which he does
himself even today: “I prefer it, because when I design
something I know exactly how I want to approach it and
make it into 3-D.” From the patterns, he creates muslin
samples and fits them to dress forms and, eventually,
real models; laughing, he tells me about one piece that
the model couldn’t even get her arm into—he hadn’t
realized until that moment that there was only space
for one arm. Then he starts looking for fabrics, both in
the garment district and in less likely places. “One of
the laces that I use is a hundred-and-thirty-five-euro
antique lace that I found on eBay. That was a lucky find.
I don’t like using lace as is, I like to do something with
it that breaks it apart, so I trimmed it to the shape that
I wanted it to be and got rid of certain flowers in it.”
The result—applied asymmetrically to a sheer gown, for
instance—is at once classically elegant and experimental.
Now fully committed to his own line, Massoumnia
is driven to take risks, to push the limits of what’s
considered wearable, salable, and interesting in
contemporary fashion. For this he looks to another
major influence, Alexander McQueen, who produced
rigorously conceptual, sometimes shocking collections
for Givenchy and then at his own label until his suicide
in 2010. “What I loved about him,” Massoumnia tells
me, “was that he pushed so many boundaries and, the
majority of his career, never cared what people thought.
He did what he wanted, he always told a story. There was
At left: the designer’s trusted sewing machine.
Below: sketches from the first collection

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always an intellect behind it.” When McQueen died,
Massoumnia reflects, “in a way it killed the excitement
for me.” At the time of every show, he says, he would
calculate the time difference and “I would be on Getty
Images waiting for the images to load up because I didn’t
want to wait until the next day to see them. It always
gave me chills and inspired me to take things further.”
Massoumnia references a few up-and-coming British
designers whose work he admires—Jonathan Saunders,
Mary Katrantzou—but says that, outside of London,
he doesn’t see much conceptual energy and risk-taking
in fashion these days. “Every six hours there’s a new
designer,” and much of the clothing ends up looking
similar—easy to wear but not terribly original. “And
there’s a place for it, you know, I think there’s plenty of
people that do beautiful, wearable clothes,” he concedes,
“but for me, the conceptual art is kind of missing.”
Massoumnia wants his next collection to be even
more conceptual, and less commercial, than the first
one—not that he considered selling the first one. “The
idea never even crossed my mind,” he admits. Though
deeply influenced by the history of fashion—evidenced as
much in our conversation as in the massive bookshelf of
designers’ monographs, photo books and vintage fashion
magazines in his apartment—Massoumnia situates his
work outside of the mainstream fashion industry. With
this next collection in particular, he hopes to push his
aesthetic “to a more artistic place, but without taking it
too seriously.” Yet it seems that this has, in a way, been
his goal all along: to make clothing that seems, at first
glance, classic and elegant, but that reveals an unexpected
twist or complexity—clothing that is resolutely not
practical, clothing that requires confidence above all.
He recalls an early collection he worked on, recounting,
“I did these tailored tuxedo jackets but they had long
kimono sleeves.” Massoumnia showed one to a buyer
at Barney’s, whose response was, “You can’t eat soup
with that. That was her comment. I was like, Okay?
[laughs] It wasn’t meant for someone that eats soup!”
COLLECTIONPHOTOS:COURTESYOFTHEARTIST
MODEL:EYENCHORM,HAIR:ROBERTODICUIA,MAKEUP:CLAIREBAYLEY
Right: a dramatic yet ethereal
veil and dress ensemble