My paper looks at the dialectical relationship between clothing reform and modernist architecture projects as they were imagined and embarked on in 20th century Pahlavi era Iran. Looking at the relationship between clothing and architecture allows to us identify several important dialectical movements that inform spatial and sartorial politics, at once bringing them together under a discourse that marks them as distinct. Broadly conceived, the first and most important relationship is between the ephemeral and superfluous as opposed to the timeless and universal. Modernist architectural discourse was one of universality. But how was such universality construed? What was overcome by the universal? How where modernist aesthetics translated into the Iranian context? One hesitates to ask this question because it requires trapping a nationalist discourse in a forward leaning ideology: an ideology that held the hope for the future as its inspiration. I will explore the reasons that lead reformers adopt modern dress – including unveiling. In this way I hope to read clothing as a social text that speaks to how Pahlavi-era reforms envisioned and conditioned the ideal citizen. This will bring us into a conversation about gender. Much has been said about how the veil/unveil has to do with the social status of women. Sartorial reforms, however, effected women and men. Clothing is often understood through the lens of material culture. I will use this general category to draw out the political significance of sartorial changes. I will draw parallels between architecture and clothing as they both reflect an aesthetics that can be read as speaking to the ideal man, and ideal women – and ideal nation. Furthermore, the language of architecture is of imagined masculinity while that of dress is of imagined femininity. This reading places gender within the dialectic of modernist aesthetics. Much of what inflected modernist theories of architecture was in direct contrast to what it saw as women’s fashion. This furthers my point that the discourse of modernist architecture cannot be read but with the accompanying discourse of clothing reform. To ignore this would to ignore the dichotomizing and indexing of modern gender norms.