The mood was relaxed when Her Imperial Majesty Empress Farah Pahlavi sat down in her Paris salon along with her eldest granddaughter, Her Highness Princess Noor. The two ladies had just wrapped the Vogue Arabia March 2019 issue photo shoot, and one could feel a sense of happy relief among both the queen, the princess, and the crew. Regardless of having spent several hours in front of the lens, the ladies delighted us to sit down for an exclusive video interview, featured above.
As the queen’s Cavalier King Charles Mowgli (a gift from Princess Noor) snuggled beside them and surrounded by photos of the Pahlavi family, Empress Farah leafed through her autobiography An Enduring Love: My Life with the Shah, sharing anecdotes from the time before the revolution. Her Majesty remembers details of her Dior wedding dress, designed by Yves Saint Laurent, and the unlikely items she took with her the day she and the late Shah left Iran for the last time, at the height of the revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, on January 16, 1979.
“We knew that we would leave in a few days,” starts Her Majesty. “The only thing I was thinking about […] was to have my albums with the pictures of the family. I remember one of the persons at the court telling me, ‘Why don’t you take these paintings or miniatures?’ I said, All I have is for Iran and for Iranians. Not for me.”
Read Next: Empress Farah Pahlavi of Iran and Princess Noor on Life Beyond the Peacock Throne
