Honoring both her background as partner in an award-winning architectural firm and her heritage as an Iranian-American woman, designer Azin Valy imprints aerial-view cityscapes onto the wearable art of her globally chic collection of silks she calls Cityzen by Azin.
Her creations feature topography of cities from around the world, visually stamping stylish, otherworldly-looking maps that wend their way around the body and offer double duty, “leveraging fashion for social impact.” Many of her pieces help raise awareness for, as well as philanthropic aid to, citizens of those respective cities, including victims of political abuse and violence hailing from her homeland of Iran.
During the recent NextTribe-hosted NYC Insiders Tour fashion luncheon this past April, she filled NextTribe founder Jeannie Ralston’s East Village apartment in a bazaar-worthy setup of her wares; she displayed her soft, flowy silk dresses, kaftans, opera coats, and more, hanging them around the perimeter, displayed like museum paintings. The attending NextTribers—hungry for an in-depth creative discussion and a private, personalized trunk show—ate up Azin’s creations, printed with bird’s-eye views of Washington, D.C., Paris, or her current upstate hipster hometown of White Lake in the Catskills area, which mapped out her passion and her profession.
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The Foundation of Fashion
Azin displaying one of her scarves at NextTribe’s NYC fashion luncheon; fitting NextTriber Peggy Miller in a tailored silk coat that features the map of Tehran on the back; other creations set out at the fashion luncheon. (Top image is an umbrella made from a map of New York City.)
An urban planner by nature and a partner in an architecture firm by design, Azin returned to her first passion of fashion, focusing on it as a “landscape draper.” Co-founder of the award winning multi-disciplinary Architecture firm I-Beam Design, Azin has said that her two loves merged while doing research for an urban planning exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibit combined with her love of travel, design, cultural curiosity, and concern with global issues “reignited her childhood love of fashion” and led her to the creation of Cityzen by Azin.
‘I moved here from Iran when I was 14, and . . . I loved fashion, interiors, and architecture.’
“The Cityzen bespoke apparel superimposes and maps the body according to each city, connecting the heart and soul of a person to a place. Form follows topography with mountains defining necklines, rivers meandering around the curves of the body, and roads marking transitions in a garment, retaining a sense of bespoke individuality that transports the wearer to another part of the world,” says the creator of these ethereal and unique pieces.
“I moved here from Iran when I was 14, and we ended up staying in the States. I loved fashion, interiors, and architecture. I took the pragmatic road of study, moving into architecture school. I love it, and I aligned that with the Bauhaus school of design, knowing I could apply that love within multiple fields.”
She started that architecture firm, I-Beam Design, with a classmate more than 20 years ago, working on brand-new construction, warehouses, refugee housing. “Then, during the housing crash of 2010, I was looking at maps and studying urban planning and I thought, ‘These maps look so beautiful,'” she says. “It was an aha! moment—to go back to what I loved.”
Wearing Your City
Azin’s design showing the topography of Paris; NextTribe founder Jeannie Ralston in a kaftan made with the map of Los Angeles; Azin’s Tokyo design.
Designed for men and women alike, the scarves use the prominent colors of each city. New York is black and grey with fuchsia lines; Paris aqua and red with black for the Seine River; Kabul deep blue lapis lazuli, for the rare stone indigenous to Afghanistan. Specific city’s scarves, made in China, available for purchase online, support women activists in Saudi Arabia, breast cancer awareness in New York, disadvantaged young women in Iran, educational outreach to promote Rock the Vote, the Malala Fund, and more. Her goal is to use the proceeds from each scarf to “connect women from around the world for causes in support of their sisters across the world.”
Her creations have raised awareness, money, and support for causes, most recently the female victims in Iran.
Most recently, her creations have raised awareness, money, and support for the recent female victims in Iran, building upon women’s “strong buying power and donations, empowering fashion charity, internationally and locally.” In honor of three of the more than 550 victims of the recent uprisings in Iran, Azin dedicates scarves in their memory, donating 100 percent of the proceeds to vetted charities in support of the movement.
Cityzen, as Azin explains on her website, “promotes a global dialogue and diplomacy through fashion by transcending physical and mental borders believing that the arts bridge differences, technology reveals beauty, interconnectivity leads to new discoveries, and taking the long view brings our commonalities into focus.”
The work she does for her beautiful scarves, priced from $45 to $215, is augmented by her custom-made dresses and coats, which cost between $2,000 to $4,000, relying on artisanal handiwork, like stitching that replicates roadways and infrastructures. The result is a stunning rendition of a place in time, supported by real people for real causes.
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