An Iranian Woman Wearing Short Dress While Cutting Birthday Cake in Tehran, 1971

A photo from the early 1970s shows a woman in Iran wearing short dress while cutting birthday cake. Sima, the woman in the picture, had recently been hired as a flight attendant for Iran Air.

The original source for this photo is a Pinterest board titled “My Mother in Iran” and it has a few other photos of this woman from the 1970s.

Sogol Hariri, the daughter of the woman in the picture, revealed that the photograph was captured in 1971, and that it showed her mother, Sima, who was 18 years old at the time, just after she was hired to be a flight attendant for Iran Air. Sima was cutting the cake in the picture for a colleague’s birthday.

The original photograph print of Sima cutting her colleague’s cake in Tehran, 1971.

By email via Snopes, Hariri said her mother remembers the moment in the photograph “very vividly”:

“Let me start by clarifying that the photo was taken in 1971 in Tehran, Iran and she is in fact Iranian! My mother was born in 1953 in Tehran and this photo was taken when she was exactly 18 years old. Her name is Sima and she lived and worked in Tehran and ultimately got married and had all three of her children there. We all currently reside in Canada.

“She remembers the context of the photo very vividly as she had recently been hired as a flight attendant for Iran Air and has just started her training. One of her new colleagues at the airline invited her to a party celebrating his birthday and she took the honor of cutting his cake for all the guests. It was during her career at Iran Air that one of her colleagues encouraged her to model and she thus began a modeling career in Tehran, where she walked many fashion runways. I have attached a photo of her before one of her flights and a few of her modeling photos wearing different looks. She describes this period of her life as very exciting and glamourous! I have always loved looking at her photos from that time, which led me to casually post them on Pinterest. I had originally commented on Pinterest that her photos were taken in the 1960s but there is only one family photo that was taken then, and all the others were taken in the 1970s.”

Below are some other pictures of her mother Sima during her modeling career in Tehran from the 1970s: