Iran’s last empress escaped the country in a Valentino coat. Where is Farah Pahlavi today?

Iran’s last empress, Farah Pahlavi, has found herself back in the public eye amid renewed global attention on Iran and its exiled royal family. Nearly five decades after the monarchy fell, the conflict in Iran has brought her name back into headlines.(FILES) Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, shah of Iran, and his wife Farah Diba are seen 24 January 1979 in Marrakech, during their stay in Morocco. Farah Pahlavi is the widow of Iran’s former shah. (AFP)Who is Farah Pahlavi?Farah Pahlavi née Diba was the last queen and empress of Iran — she was the third wife and widow of the last shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.Born into an upper class family in Tehran, she became the empress of Iran when she married Reza Pahlavi in 1959 at the age of 21. The couple met while she was studying architecture in Paris. The couple had four children together.Farah was driven into exile with her husband, late pro-Western shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in January 1979 during a popular revolution that ousted the monarchy and brought the Islamic republic to power.Escaping in a Valentino coatWhen Farah Pahlavi escaped the country during the 1979 revolution, she was wearing a sable-coloured coat made Valentino. The striking image of the empress fleeing in Valentino would go down in the annals of modern hory.“He has a good heart; he’s generous,” she later said of the designer, according to wmagazine. (Also read: Princess Iman Pahlavi, granddaughter of the last Shah of Iran, gets married in dreamy Paris wedding)In her heyday, Farah Pahlavi was a style icon who brought a sense of cosmopolitan sophication to Iran. She got married in a gown Yves Saint Laurent and was affectionately called one of “Val’s Gals” — women who chose Valentino designs for important occasions.Her legacy, however, goes beyond fashion — Pahlavi was a patron of arts and culture in Iran. She encouraged traditional Iranian arts (such as weaving, singing, and poetry recital) as well as Western theatre.She also founded and supported a network of museums and cultural institutions — including the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, the Carpet Museum, the Reza Abbasi Museum and the Museum of Ancient Ceramics and Glassworks.Where is Farah Pahlavi today?After being forced into exile, the shah and his wife spent more than a year searching for permanent asylum.In the months that followed, the royal couple moved across several countries—including Egypt, Morocco, the Bahamas, Mexico and the United States—while seeking a permanent refuge amid threats from the new regime in Tehran.Today, she divides her time between the United States and Paris. In the US, she owns a home in Potomac, Maryland.Speaking to AFP four days after US-Israeli strikes on Iran killed Khamenei, Pahlavi said: “The passing of a man — however central he may be to the architecture of power — does not automatically mean the end of a system.”Pahlavi, 87, urged the international community to respect Iranian sovereignty and ass the people in following their own “destiny”.”What will be decisive,” she said, was “the ability of the Iranian people to unite around a peaceful, orderly and sovereign transition to a state governed the rule of law”.She added that her son Reza Pahlavi, who has positioned himself as an alternative if the republic falls, “is in the process of preparing” such a transition.(Also read: Who is Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s exiled prince whose call charged anti-Khamenei protest?)(With inputs from AFP)