Word: bijan
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Finally, the perfect knock-'em-dead gift for the man or woman who has everything: something to protect everything with. Not your ordinary cold steel snub nose, mind you. That would never do for kings, sultans and other mega-consumers. At Bijan's exclusive Beverly Hills boutique, where the clientele snaps up such wares as $95,000 chinchilla bedspreads and $1,500 bottles of perfume for men, self-defense means a $10,000 gold designer gun. "You don't want to be at home and have someone try to kill you," explains the Iranian-born proprietor, Bijan...
...head of a European royal family asked me to design a unique gift for a fellow monarch," Bijan adds as he darts excitedly around his store (open by appointment only). "I wanted to make something so American. I wanted to design a gun that people who hate guns would want to have and touch and play with because it's so pretty." So he had a leather handgrip fashioned for a .38-cal. Colt revolver at his workshop in Florence, inlaid the cylinder with 56 grams of 24-karat gold, and placed the gun in a mink pouch...
...still exist, for example, in conspicuous-consumption California. Ross Gilbert, owner of Beverly Hills Mercedes-Benz, has plenty of customers willing to put down $45,000 for a new 450 SLC. In the first four months of the year, Gilbert sold more than 55 new cars, a record. Says Bijan Pakzad, the owner of a prosperous men's boutique on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, where shirts can cost $180: "The stores that will do well will be the very, very expensive and the very, very cheap...
Iranians come and go on Rodeo, lavishing hundreds of thousands of petrodollars. They also see the street as a handsome investment area. Bijan Pakzad opened the store of his dreams on Rodeo Drive, a men's store so exclusive (or merely overpriced) that, says he, "the only proper customer is the man who earns $100,000 a month." He and his partner, another Iranian, Daryoush Mahboubi-Fardi, adorned their store with a $400,000 brass and glass staircase, a $75,000 crystal chandelier and a gaggle of other niceties totaling $ 1 million...