ESTYLE is bringing Iranian calligraphy to British streetwear

The child of Iranian immigrants, you often teeter between assimilation and separation — between banana sundaes and saffron ice cream. You understand your mother’s Farsi but you cannot speak it — you reply in English, a back-and-forth between two worlds that are always at-odds. This back-and-forth is what makes the work of Lilly Nejatpour and Ava Asaadi, the creators of the British-Iranian brand ESTYLE, especially brilliant. Pronounced ‘es-style’ to play up on their parents’ accents, ESTYLE nods at the bold and bright script of Iranian advertisements while maintaining a graphic tidiness that’s still in-line with British streetwear. With ESTYLE, Lilly and Ava don’t shy away from either half of themselves — they’ll celebrate themselves, even celebrate you, all at once.

Both born and raised in England, Lilly and Ava fittingly met in Iran, where Lily was completing a residency at the 2016 Tehran Digital Arts Festival. “It was the opening night and I heard a British voice in the background,” Lilly remembers, “and I just leapt toward Ava.” Three thousand miles away from home, the two immediately connected. Ava adds, “The first thing Lilly says is, ‘When are they going to play some Grime in here?’… and we’ve been hanging out ever since.”

When they returned to London, Lilly and Ava maintained their relationship and soon began looking for ways to collaborate creatively. Both art students — Lilly studied at Goldsmiths, Ava at Central Saint Martins — they considered art installations and music compositions before settling on a clothing brand. “We had so many ideas, but one thing that always drew us together was our sense of style,” Lilly says. “We decided to translate our energy into a brand that focused on the oddities of being British-Iranian and having to navigate through these heavy historical backgrounds.”

Lilly and Ava then began designing their first graphic tee, drawing heavy inspiration from the flyers and posters plastered across the streets of Tehran. “We wanted to create something fresh that made use of these quintessential Iranian motifs, like what you would see all over Tehran,” Ava says. “We really liked the idea of having subtle references that other Iranians would recognize — something that would feel familiar to them.”

ESTYLE’s first graphic tee was released in 2018. On the tee, the year 1397 — the year according to the Iranian calendar — is written in Farsi. Above it, the word ESTYLE is printed across the chest in a punchy green. The back of the tee is covered in other bits and pieces of Iranian script, like a street corner in Tehran. But the defining detail of the tee, of the brand itself, is the extra E in ESTYLE. To most, it means nothing. But to Iranian-Americans and British-Iranians, the extra E represents the traces of Iran that carry across time and space, that never left the tongues of their parents. To them, kids didn’t go to school — they went to es-school, or to the es-store. ESTYLE embraces this idiosyncrasy and everything that comes with it.

In the past year since launching ESTYLE, Lilly and Ava have exercised patience in building their brand, relying on word-of-mouth around South London rather than pushing shirts on social media. “We aren’t in a rush. We’re happy to take our time to develop our designs, collaborate with each other, and learn how to promote ESTYLE as a team,” Lilly says. “We like the subtlety of being low-key for now — we want the brand to represent equality and enjoyment, not status.”

The time being, Lilly and Ava are content to progress organically, lending shirts to their friends and developing long-lasting relationships with other London-based artists, such as singer-songwriter Nilüfer Yanya. It is through grassroots relationships like these that brands now grow in our copy-culture. For Lily and Ava, it’s necessary but never forced. “I think other artists and the public are important in our progression, but I don’t think it’s about creating personal PR,” Lily says. “The connections that we make are natural — they start with that person’s interest in what we do.”

It can be difficult to balance where you are now and where you might be tomorrow — does overnight success await? As ESTYLE slowly begins to scale, Lilly and Ava always remind themselves of why they even built the brand — themselves. “From the beginning, it’s been about creating something for ourselves,” Ava says, “almost as a vehicle for us to pour all the things we love about our culture into something contemporary. It’s fun, really, like our own secret language.”

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