As soon as the outfits of the Iranian olympic athletes were revealed, people started to rant and the media criticized the designer and those in charge of selecting the national attire. Harsh criticisms continued to arise to the point that members of parliament, artists and athletes themselves reacted to the design. Jokes taking over the social media became a warning for the directors of the National Olympics Committee of Iran. Overnight, NOC announced:
We heard and accept criticism. The attires will be changed.
After this official announcement, the new question was “what will the new design look like?” Soon enough, photos from three sets of costumes, designed by Kamran Bakhtiari, a young designer, went viral on social media. It seemed everyone wanted their proposals to replace the previous design.
As a matter of fact, no one was quite positive about the acceptance of Bakhtiari’s design by NOC, since the attires were too chic for the taste of NOC directors. On his Instagram account, Bakhtiari announced:
Mr. Hashemi, the NOC director, openly accepted my proposal and the attires will be sent to Brazil after a couple of slight adjustments.
He also published photos of the adjustment procedure, stating "Do not worry about the design. Hopefully, we will come up with the final design that our honored athletes deserve."
In his new propositions, Bakhtiari has used green, white and red colors of the Iranian flag on two bases of white and black. A verse of a poem by Hafez has also been used to ornate the collars.
In an interview with Etemad, Kioumars Hashemi, the director of NOC of Iran, said:
We admit the lack of taste regarding the previous design. But this led to getting to know a creative young artist who has been capable of designing nice attires for our athletes. Bakhtiari has started working to prepare the costumes so they should be sent to Rio on time. People were genuinely concerned. We are open to criticism and consequently decided to change the design of the costumes, based on people’s tastes.