ABOUT

Celebrating her 19 th year in business, Jasmin Shokrian is an artist whose primary medium is clothing. She is known for designing strong yet feminine, architectural shapes that play on texture and form. Her love for contemporary art, film, architecture and space continues to inspire collections with a unique perspective.

From an early age, Jasmin Shokrian has been immersed in the pleasures of handcrafted clothing and in the gratification inherent in the philosophy of fashion as art. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she counts her mother as her first and primary influence, who learned couture methods in Tehran and studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

Forgoing an invitation to Rhode Island School of Design for a fashion degree, Shokrian opted instead to expand her conceptual thinking by attending a multi-disciplinary program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She graduated from SAIC with a BFA in film, painting and sculpture in 1998. In 2002, while visiting her hometown of Los Angeles, Shokrian received an accidental voice message, which led her to the question of what to do with information that was not intended for her. This began a foray of the notion of serendipity in her work. This idea led her to explore clothing as a medium. Shokrian’s love for film making felt relevant and became a clear way for her to showcase her collection. Her first film showcased in a Man Ray-esque fashion was projected in a window of an empty architectural gem in downtown LA, serendipitously catching the eye of celebrity stylist Ariane Phillips. In 2003, Vogue editor, Sally Singer, saw the collection in New York in the Vogue offices, interviewing Shokrian for an article featuring an image of China Chow and a fairly unknown actress at the time, Lake Bell that would change and shape Shokrian’s career.  
With peaked interest from world-renowned retailers, Shokrian began designing and producing collections out of her home studio, which she continued to do for the next three years before moving into her West Hollywood Atelier. After winning the 2005 ECCO DOMANI Fashion Foundation Award, she presented her first runway show at NY Fashion Week, about which Cathy Horyn wrote, “A new star emerged.” In 2008, Jasmin Shokrian launched a new experiment that ran alongside her main collection, called Draft No 17, The capsule consists of conceptual variations of classic fashion silhouettes and luxury basics.  
In 2009, Vanity Fair interviewed First Lady Michelle Obama where she listed Jasmin Shokrian as one of her favorite young designers amongst the late Isabel Toledo, Jason Wu, Thakoon, Maria Cornejo and Junya Watanabe. In 2010 Michelle Obama is featured multiple times in the press wearing Jasmin Shokrian.  

In November 2014, she opened a curated shop-in-shop in the MOCA store at MOCA, Los Angeles, her first public retail experience showcasing the Jasmin Shokrian collection and branded graphic styles, as well as a curated range of books, selected objects, jewelry, scents and vintage furniture.  

Jasmin has worked as a creative consultant in the development of new brands as well as in the contemporary Art Sphere.  

In July of 2019 Harpers Bazaar Arabia published an article featuring Shokrian and the multidisciplinary career she has built over the last 20 years.  

Shokrian is currently working on the development of a multi-disciplinary e-commerce platform, which will launch sometime this year. 

“Though my fashion work is sincere, it is born of irony, fundamentally informed by my decision years ago to eschew fashion school for fine arts — as well as my upbringing by a mother trained in fashion design and couture construction methods. In art school I gained  a conceptual understanding through which my collections now come to life, as well as an intuition for shape, line geometry, story and color. I first experimented with fabric as a medium for sculpture, and I love the idea of catching fabric where it falls, draping shapes to life—haphazard elegance. I have typically chosen film as the medium to show my collections over the traditional runway format. My garments are defined by the eye I developed in art school. A penchant for narrative from my background in film, a sense of color learned in painting, and shapes reminiscent of my early sculptural work.”