Word: bazaar
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...that had seasons," he notes. In the hot summer months, white clothing kept New York fashion editors cool. But facing, say, heavy fall rain, they might not have been inclined to risk sullying white ensembles with mud - and that sensibility was reflected in the glossy pages of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, which set the tone for the country...
...support of Ahmadinejad's closest rival in the election, Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Others, however, wore black to mourn another four years under Ahmadinejad. Many yelled, "Death to the dictators." Because the area around the pyramidal parliament building was so tightly cordoned off, many protesters moved to the nearby Grand Bazaar, where they chanted "Allahu Akbar...
Mousavi's supporters are trying to get the bazaar on his side. One of the marches in the weeks after Iran's June election went from Imam Khomeini Square past Tehran's main bazaar. According to a witness, thousands of bazaaris closed their shops so they could stand outside and watch hundreds of thousands of green-clad protesters silently walk by. In fact, the route had been designed to draw Iran's merchants and workers into the growing opposition coalition to make it seem as if it had the support of Iran's commercial sector...
While Ahmadinejad had his tax run-in with the bazaar, Mousavi does not have a positive record with many bazaaris either. Older bazaaris can still remember Mousavi the firebrand leftist, who as Prime Minister in the 1980s was associated with price controls and food cooperatives during the Iran-Iraq war. But younger managers and workers generally express support for Mousavi, even though, as one pointed out, "Mousavi never visited the bazaar before the election." Bazaaris felt slighted by the snub, and since the bazaar's merchants are still a main conduit to Iran's smaller towns and rural areas, this...
Some observers, however, believe the power of the bazaaris as a whole has been slipping. As Iran's economy slowly re-entered the global economy over the past 20 years, certain bazaar members made out well as long as they could maintain special relationships with the government, which handed out licenses to import and export goods and gave more favorable exchange rates to certain traders. But ironically, as postrevolutionary Iran's economy diversified, with malls sprouting up in Tehran neighborhoods that catered to the tastes of an expanded middle class, the bazaar may be slowly losing its central place...