The aesthetics are compelling. Black and white photos of a Tehran University lecture hall with men and women seated side by side wearing the best of 1950s European fashions. Young girls—unveiled and in public—cheering to welcome the French president. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, in a crisp suit, alongside his third wife, Empress Farah Pahlavi, who sparkles with beauty and grace.

With the latest U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, talk of regime change has gone from discredited to imaginable within the Western public sphere. Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the deposed king, wants to lead the transition, confidently issuing plans for his first 100 days after the fall of the regime. Some prominent publications are even asking whether he may indeed be the solution to Iran’s ills.

The aesthetics are compelling. Black and white photos of a Tehran University lecture hall with men and women seated side by side wearing the best of 1950s European fashions. Young girls—unveiled and in public—cheering to welcome the French president. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, in a crisp suit, alongside his third wife, Empress Farah Pahlavi, who sparkles with beauty and grace.

With the latest U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, talk of regime change has gone from discredited to imaginable within the Western public sphere. Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the deposed king, wants to lead the transition, confidently issuing plans for his first 100 days after the fall of the regime. Some prominent publications are even asking whether he may indeed be the solution to Iran’s ills.

Farah with her husband, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, photographed in New York in 1962.Bettmann Archive/via Getty Images

Following the disastrous U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the well-known consequences of Iran’s 1953 coup, how is the possibility of bringing back another Pahlavi to the throne even up for discussion? The cruelty and corruption of the current Iranian government are certainly a big part of the answer. But carefully cultivated Pahlavi nostalgia also plays a key part. Images of unveiled, stylish women in 1970s Tehran have been crucial to painting an idealized portrait of a modern, peaceful, and prosperous Iran supposedly stolen away by the mullahs.

Critics, of course, have been quick to point out that social media celebrations of pre-revolution Iran hide the realities of a dictatorial regime that tortured dissidents while its monarchs cavorted with European elites and feasted on Maxim’s desserts. For every photo of Farah posing with Andy Warhol, the thinking goes, there is a hidden image of death, pain, and squalor.

Criticism of the shah’s authoritarianism is eminently fair. Ironically, though, it often accepts the same assumption put forward by the shah’s apologists: that the Pahlavis were straightforward Westernizers, secularists who forcefully tried to drag Iran into full alignment with the West. The real story was much messier. As scholars like Ali Mirsepassi and Zhand Shakibi have shown, the Pahlavi’s self-presentation was never straightforwardly pro-Western or secular.

Increasingly during the 1970s, the Pahlavis relied on traditionalism, Islam, and mystical claims to legitimacy—forces that would later feed the revolution that toppled them. Farah herself was a leading sponsor of traditionalist thinkers who criticized Western materialism and sought to promote Iran as the shining example of Islamic spirituality. The full story of her reign shows her to be not merely a feminist icon or Persian Marie Antoinette, but rather a more complicated and cautionary figure entirely.

Farah speaks with journalists, in her white Christian Dior wedding gown, on the day........

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