In December 1927, the Iranian Majles (parliament) issued a dress code for Iranian male citizens. The new male attire was to include a Western suit and the Pahlavi hat, shaped like the French Kepi. The dress law's implementation was to take place by March 1929, and offenders were to be fined or even jailed. The dress law demonstrates the conflation of state power with elite hegemony during Reza Shah's period. My paper analyzes how the dress law and its implementation assisted in buttressing the hegemony of Western-educated elite men's model of masculinity. Simultaneously, the administrative and coercive measures taken to implement the dress law consolidated power relations between state and citizen. The assertion of state power also bolstered the power of Western-educated elite men, many of whom were members of the state bureaucracy. These men shared in the state's power as well as benefited from their position as bearers of the state-condoned model of masculinity: the dress law was to nationalize, modernize and westernize Iranian male citizens, making them more like men of the Western-educated elite. The dress law fixed the position of Western-educated elite men as a standard against which other men were measured. Patriotism, hygiene and informed westernization were all employed to promote the change of dress and to introduce new notions of appearance and the body into hegemonic masculinity. Westernized appearance was not merely enforced by law, it became a prerequisite of proper manliness. The cultural hegemony of Western-educated elite men was accentuated by the dress law, as they had earlier on appropriated Western practices and norms as part of their cultural capital. Many of these men were used to wearing European clothes and familiar with the manners and practices dictated by such garments, most notably by European hats. Thus, while sartorial changes undoubtedly confused and were resisted by men of the traditionalist strata of society, men of the Western-educated elite had much less to adapt to, and could slip more comfortably into the new masculine identity promoted by the regime. My paper employs newspaper articles and literary texts to demonstrate how the dress law positioned westernized elite masculinity as hegemonic, thus maintaining the political, social and cultural hegemony of western-educated elite men.