Keyvan Khosrovani

Keyvan Khosrovani (Persian: کیوان خُسرُوانی), also rendered Kivan Khosravani, was an Iranian architect, lighting designer, fashion designer and LGBT activist who spent thirteen years creating the official wardrobe of Shahbanu Farah Pahlavi without pay, and who helped make Iranian handicrafts visible on diplomatic stages from Persepolis to the Élysée and the White House. He was born in Tehran on 29 July 1938 and died in Paris on 4 September 2026, aged 88.

He came from a family woven into the late Pahlavi state. His father, Lt. Gen. Morteza Khosravani, headed the judicial department of the Imperial Iranian Army. Paternal uncles included Lt. Gen. Parviz Khosrovani (gendarmerie commander), Attaollah Khosrovani (labour then interior minister), and Khosrow Khosrovani (ambassador to the United States). In a 2015 RFI Persian interview he called himself the "black sheep of a thousand families": left-leaning, watched by security services, yet not a stranger at court. He was openly gay, a fact recorded by IranWire and English Wikipedia, and remembered as a prominent figure in Iran's pre-revolution rainbow community and as a founder of the Farah Pahlavi Foundation.

He began architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1957, returned after a year, and completed a master's with high honours at the University of Tehran in 1962 under Houshang Seyhoun. A French government scholarship took him to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris for two years; in 1964 he showed architectural drawings at the Maison Internationale of the Cité Universitaire. There, BBC Persian recounts, an encounter with a Pierre Balmain house model opened the door to Paris ateliers and to fashion. In 1965 he collaborated with Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry on work connected to the University of Sheffield, then spent a year in Rome on a UNESCO course in the conservation of historic monuments.

Back in Iran in 1966 he lit Persepolis and Hafezieh and designed amphitheatres for the first Shiraz-Persepolis Festival of Arts. As an unpaid television producer he brought nine Persian classical solo concerts to Iranian viewers. With Kamran Diba he opened Elegant 27, an early young men's boutique; alone he founded Number One and Miss Number One, which BBC Persian calls among Tehran's first conceptual fashion stores. Parallel to commerce he worked with Mehr Monir Jahanbani and seamstress Pari Zolfaghari to revive Isfahan silk and qalamkar, Oskou batik, Cheshmé-douzi, and Baluchi souzan-douzi, employing craftswomen in places such as Taftan and Zahedan.

Farah Diba had been a fellow architecture student. After she became empress, Khosrovani spent about thirteen years as unpaid creator of her formal and informal wardrobe, folding Baluchi embroidery, Kashan zari-weave, and Oskou batik into modern cuts that Farah wore at Persepolis celebrations, an Élysée banquet, and a White House dinner. He told interviewers the achievement would not have been possible without the empress's will. In 1999 he donated four of those royal creations to the permanent collection of the Palais Galliera, Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris.

His built work was fewer but lasting. The Nain Inn (Mehmansaray-e Naïn, 1967), for the tourism ministry on the Isfahan-Yazd road, used local brick, courtyard, wind-catcher logic and earthquake-aware construction; CAOI and RFI call it a manifesto of climatically intelligent modern Iranian architecture. In 1969 he designed, unpaid, a library for the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults in Tehran's Gowd-e-Zanbourk-Khouneh neighbourhood. He designed the family Villa Farmanieh (later demolished after the revolution) and the 1968 interior of Iran's San Francisco consulate. In summer 1977 he staged a street exhibition of sketches to defend the historic Oudlajan district of Tehran.

He left Iran for Paris in 1978, a year before the Islamic Revolution, and remained in exile. As an unpaid architect he contributed the "Persian Shabestan" inside the Grand Mosque of Paris (a 1924 monument), at the request of the Islamic Republic's embassy, a volunteer act that matched his lifelong habit of working without fee when heritage was at stake. Later decorative work included restoring an apartment once owned by George Sand and interiors in Geneva, Corsier and Rome (1999-2007). He kept promoting Iranian heritage through talks, his website, and interviews into old age, insisting he was a "citizen of the world" rather than a political nationalist, while still fighting for craft livelihoods and, late in life, quietly supporting charities for working children.

Keyvan Khosrovani died in Paris on 4 September 2026. English Wikipedia and BBC Persian give that date; some Persian wire copy rounded his age to 86 or 87, but the verified span from 29 July 1938 is 88. Tributes from actors and designers recalled the man who wanted to be remembered with a young face, who corrected the mispronunciation of his name, and whose hands, in Saber Abar's words, still had more to build. Cause of death was not stated by BBC, RFI, Radio Farda or Wikipedia.