Four years after the death of Mahsa Amini — the 22-year-old Kurdish woman who died in the custody of Iran's morality police in September 2022, sparking nationwide protests — women across Iran are increasingly appearing in public without the hijab, with streets in Tehran now largely free of the black chadors once ubiquitous under the Islamic Republic. The shift accelerated significantly during and after Israel's June 2025 military campaign against Iran (a 12-day conflict that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei), which diverted state attention away from enforcing dress codes and also led to the suspected disabling of the facial-recognition surveillance network used to issue warnings to unveiled women by SMS. Despite this de facto relaxation, Iran's laws have not changed: religious hardliners are pushing back, with dozens of cafés and businesses shuttered again since late June for flouting veiling rules, though even some conservatives concede, as one ultraconservative journalist wrote on X, that "the fight to force the hijab back onto women is over."