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The legong folk dance in Indonesia is a special ritual performed at public festivals and celebrations. In the past, it was an entertainment for the royals. It is a unique show and it can seem rather weird for outlanders, but Indonesians consider it a spiritual and meaningful performance. Though, we’re interested mostly in the traditional costume of legong dancers rather than movements and music. So, let’s look at this attire a bit closer.
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- Category: Indonesia
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Jewelry pieces have been the favorite human accessories for millennia. At first, people made jewels from bones, shells, teeth, stones, wood, and other natural materials that surrounded them. Later, they learned how to make adornments from metal and glass. Jewelry techniques changed, human tastes changed, the value of precious metals and stones changed with time, but we still love and wear beautiful jewels in the 21st century. So, do you know how the first jewelry items looked like? And how they altered throughout millennia? We’ve prepared a few photos for you.
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- Category: Nationalclothing
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In the 19th-20th century in Ukraine, there used to be a specific wedding tradition – the couple’s family presented the most honorable guests with little embroidered kerchiefs. These kerchiefs were than kept in the most prominent place at home and collected through the years because the number of such gifts showed the status of the family in the local society and the attitude of their neighbors to them. Some of these cute embroidered kerchiefs today are kept in folk museums and private collections, like these ones.
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- Category: Ukraine
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We would like to thank our readers for your attention to Nationalclothing.org website. The 2019 was great for us. We published many nice articles and original photos, followed your discussions in the comments to them, had interesting conversations with you in social media, and got wonderful feedback from you. Thanks guys! Next year, we’ll gather even more useful info and share it all with you. See you in 2020!
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- Category: Nationalclothing
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The jalabiya is definitely one of the most beautiful and impressive Emirati pieces of clothing, if not the prettiest garment ever. These female robes are traditional and, at the same time, look contemporary. Thanks to these garments, the women in the UAE are able to wear something bright and ornate, because, as you know, their daily apparel usually includes the abaya, a thin black robe, which is very modest and has a few embellishments. But the festive jalabiya totally compensates for that.
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- Category: United Arab Emirates
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It’s Christmas time now, the ideal time to remember your traditions and folk culture. This winter is not very harsh and cold, but in the past, winters often were severe and freezing, especially in the northern hemisphere. Also, you must understand that there were no or very few synthetic fabrics 100-150 years ago, so winter outerwear was mostly made from fur, sheepskin, and wool. Here you are a selection of photos that depict Ukrainian vintage winter clothes.
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- Category: Ukraine
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A parka is one of the few truly and originally Canadian traditional garments. It was invented by the Inuit Native American tribes and was used by the local people on the territory of Canada throughout several centuries. Even today, parka is extremely popular among Canadians and thousands of people around our planet. And the changes that occurred to the cut, design, materials, and decorations of a parka are tremendous. Let’s see how a parka looked like in the 1800s and in the 21st century. Let’s compare these pieces of clothing.
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- Category: Canada
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Barong Tagalog is the official national garment in the Philippines. This male shirt (or rather garment for the upper body, as it’s not really a shirt) was originally made from pineapple fabric called “piña” (pineapple fibers are woven into cloth). This menswear has a centuries-old history and originates from the local aboriginal attire. Unlike many folk garments around the world, Barong Tagalog is still worn by the Filipino men in the 21st century. And the outlanders still fall in love with it because it’s not only pretty but also very comfy in the tropical climate.
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- Category: Philippines
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Ruthenia or Kyivan Rus was a rather wealthy and expanded state in Europe in the 9th-13th century. Its rulers could afford the most expensive jewelry, the finest fabrics, and the most elaborate embellishments. Still, at the time, people used only natural materials, but they knew well how to handle these materials and make really exceptional clothing pieces and jewels out of them. Unfortunately, there are very few jewelry pieces (we can find in museums and private collections) and no outfits at all that survived to this day, but here are lovely and accurate modern replicas of costumes used by Ruthenian royals and other citizens.
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- Category: Ukraine
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These days, there are so few movies that use period-accurate costumes of the past eras. So, we’re trying to analyze most of them, especially those illustrating the 17th-19th centuries. And the series Penny Dreadful is one of the great examples of such films. The outfits of its lead character Vanessa Ives are truly magnificent. And also, they’re rather accurate 19th-century costumes. For you to understand how hard it can be for costume designers to work on a series like this, we’ll say that there were at least 300-400 original costumes created for this movie.
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- Category: Nationalclothing
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In the Arab world, men often use a specific garment – flowing cloak adorned with beautiful and costly gold or silver embroidery. This piece of clothes can be very expensive – up to $5,000. Some people think that it is winter outerwear but that’s not true. In any case, the bisht – it’s how this traditional cloak is called – is too thin to give any real warmth. But why do Arab men use it then? What function does bisht have? Let’s find out.
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- Category: Nationalclothing
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We’ve already published a number of articles about Gentleman Jack series and the stage costumes used in it, but the topic of film fashion is immense and it is much more interesting to analyze the period-accurate garments used in the movies than in portraits or books. So, here you are another material dedicated to the mid-19th-century clothing in Gentleman Jack, a recent and very popular historical drama TV series. Let’s look at the costumes from the POV of a fashion historian.
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- Category: Nationalclothing
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There is a whole discussion in comments to our article “Traditional dress of Canada. History and examples” about the existence of Canadian national costume. So, we decided to investigate this topic a little deeper. One of the garments considered traditionally Canadian is the buffalo plaid lumberjack. But can we really consider it a part of Canadian national costume? Where did it come from? And what it actually is, this mysterious lumberjack?
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- Category: Canada
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A lot of countries and ethnic groups around the world work hard to preserve their clothing traditions. In the latest years, it has become fashionable to make modern replicas of authentic garments, very close to the original look. But Koreans chose another path – they modify their traditions to the modern fashion, add contemporary accents and features to the authentic garments. So, Korean folk dress didn’t freeze in time but continued to develop and change year after year. It helped Korean national costume to remain in use, while many other ethnic garments are left only in museum collections.
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- Category: Korea
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