About

I learned to thread a needle before I learned to ride a bicycle. My grandfather kept a tailor shop off Ferdowsi Street in Tehran, and I grew up underneath his cutting table - literally, that's where the off-cuts fell, and whoever sat down there sorted them by weight. By ten I could sew a straight seam. By fourteen I could name a wool's weight by rolling it between two fingers, a party trick I have never once been asked to perform at a party. Modelling found me years later, at a friend's lookbook shoot in Milan. The shop found me first, and it still runs everything I do.

Tailoring taught me the things castings can't. I know where a jacket wants to break at the shoulder, why trousers move differently half a centimetre shorter, and how to stand so a garment shows its cut instead of my opinion of myself. Photographers tell me I don't fight the clothes. That's because I know what the person who made them wanted them to do - for most of my life, I was that person, kneeling on the floor with pins in my mouth. On set, patience is the whole job: hold the line of the seam, wait for the light, don't rush the cloth.

Milan now, most of the year. I model menswear and editorial work, and between castings I still take in seams - my own, and occasionally, quietly, a client sample that fits nobody. I carry my grandfather's brass thimble to every set I work. It has never once been needed. It has never once been left at home.