IRAN:The young woman dressed to dazzle. In a bright violet coat framing an ornately embroidered top, she cut an elegant figure as she walked through columns of sunshine in the capital's Mirdamad metro station.
But in addition to admiring glances, she caught the attention of government morality enforcers, who hurried after her.
"Madam!" one bearded young man in a police uniform called out. "While you were passing by, I could see your body."
The young woman appeared stunned.
"It's your problem if you can see something underneath my clothes," she replied sarcastically. "It seems you have X-ray vision."
The young man, unimpressed, led the woman to the security office of the subway station, where she was detained for questioning.
Iran's nationwide crackdown on fashions deemed unIslamic has resumed in full force this week, at least throughout the capital, having slowed in the late spring.
Vice police have established checkpoints and are stopping women in cars or walking along the streets with too much hair spilling out of their mandatory head coverings, or wearing open-toed sandals without socks or overcoats deemed too revealing.
Men wearing tight T-shirts or boasting racy haircuts have also been targeted in a campaign to stamp out perceived Western cultural influences.
Col Mahdi Ahmadi, a spokesman for the Tehran police, said the crackdown officially got under way on Monday.
Since assuming power in a revolution 28 years ago, Iran's Shia Muslim clerical leaders have demanded that Iranians abide by strict dress codes that adhere to what they consider Islamic principles.
In recent years, many young Iranians have begun to flout those rules. Iranians have become used to the periodic government-sponsored fashion crackdowns on the streets and other public spaces. Authorities generally give warning, spelling out exactly who will be targeted.
Recently issued leaflets cautioned that young men in tight blue jeans, especially those with foreign designer labels, or sporting spiky haircuts, would be targeted.
So, too, would young women wearing contour-fitting jackets or "provocative colours", or those with locks of hair or pigtails peeking out of their headscarves and brushing up against their shoulders.
The list also included exposed forearms or ankles and flashy make-up.
"We will ask those arrested where they bought their clothes and where they had their hair cut so those outlets can be closed down," Ahmad Reza Radan, the head of Tehran's police force, said on Iranian television this week, according to the Associated Press. Those who vocally or physically resist authorities are typically hauled away, tried in court, fined or sentenced to a few weeks in jail.
Minibuses to cart off detainees accompany the morality enforcers as they establish checkpoints in busy squares throughout the city. Typically, offenders sign a document vowing to dress more modestly and abide by Islamic norms.
The enforcers are roughly the same age as those they arrest, and many view the periodic crackdowns as a part of a culture war between social and economic classes.
Traditional-minded and pious Iranians of humble means form the main pillar of support for the culturally conservative rules of the Islamic Republic.
They resent the more affluent and worldly upper-class Iranians, who reigned over the country before Iran's 1979 revolution.
Such crackdowns have always dissipated in the past.
"The irony is that as long as a crackdown or enforcement of the code-of-dress law is seriously under way, we can see obedience," said Ali Kadkhodazadeh, a social scientist who writes for Iranian newspapers. "But as soon as they let up, the coiled spring jumps back even harder."