Vietnamese traditional ao dai

By Peter Kauffner

Visitors expecting a land of black pajamas are pleasantly surprised to find slender, long-hair women clad in ao dai, Vietnam’s national costume. This dress consists of a split-sided tunic over silk pantaloons. In world fashion, the ao dai stands out in several respects. As the uniform of school girls and shop clerks, it is both a formal dress and daily street wear.  It is far more visible than either China’s qipao (cheongsam) or Korea’s hanbok.

The garment is often made of sheer fabric. Each is individually made and a careful tailor will do 20 measurements to ensure a tight fit. The slits may extend above the waist to expose part of the midriff. “The ao dai covers everything, but hides nothing,” according to one saying. This feature allows the dress to combine sexuality and tradition, although the traditional version of the ao dai was an unrevealing multi-layered gown. “The shape of the female body is accentuated, but hidden as the dress clings tightly to it,” wrote Nhi Lieu, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “This sexualized image, however, is contained with the bounds of respectability and curbed under the sign of the “cultural”.

What makes the ao dai unique in world fashion is the way it has made feminine beauty a focus of national feeling. Nothing says “Vietnam” like an image of school girls in white ao dai and non la (conical leaf hats). Vietnamese beauty contests generally include a segment in which the contestants wear ao dai. Such contests are extremely popular with both sexes in Vietnam (unlike the U.S., where the audience for beauty contests is primarily female). The contests seek queens who can represent the nation and uphold the four traditional virtues of cong (tidy),chaste). Yet at the same time they must entertain audience members who look for physical beauty and sexuality. Cong- dung-ngon-hanh was what a man looked for in a wife back in the days of arranged marriages. Such talk sounds very old fashioned to today’s younger generation. “No one thinks about the four skills anymore,” said Thuy, a university student. “They fall in love – and that’s it.” 

The white ao dai as a high school uniform is also too much culture for many. “When we were in middle school, we looked forward to wearing the ao dai,” said Nhung. “But after we wore it for a while, it just seemed inconvenient.” The ao dai is too hot for classes without air conditioning, Thuy explained. The of solid white silk makes any stain immediately visible. Students must be careful of rain, since this can make the thin fabric transparent. The great fear of a Vietnamese teenage girl is to have a flap of her tunic caught in the spokes of a motorcycle.  In the worst case scenario, the top is pulled off, leaving the girl wearing only a bra and pantaloons.  Although the motorcycle is the main form of transportation in urban Vietnam, an ao dai clad student on a bicycle is still a common sight. These beautiful “butterflies,” as the poets call them, brighten the appearance of the street. Writers who advocate the of the ao dai as a uniform cite its inconvenience as a virtue, a feature that teaches students feminine modesty and caution. There are many tales of tomboys trained in feminine demeanor by a father who requires them to wear ao dai.

The general meaning of “ao dai” in Vietnamese is ‘gown.’ It thus refers to range of garments that an English-speaker would not think of ao dais. For example, a qipao is a “Chinese ao dai”. Vietnamese ao daispecifies the split-sided Vietnamese gown. This usage is not so much becaanyone is likely to confa Vietnamese ao dai with a gown from another country. Like pho (noodle soup), it attaches a nationalistic association to the item. Mislead by the fact that “dai” means “long,” many writers translate “ao dai” as “long gown.”  The ao dai is long, not in the sense of being longer than some other type of gown, but rather in the sense that a gown is longer than a shirt.

Folk legend traces the ao dai back to the Trung sisters, who led a rebellion against Chinese rule in 39AD. The two sisters (Hai Ba Trung) are Vietnam’s most celebrated heroes and are depicted in folk opera as wearing ao dai. Trinh Bach, who led a team that restored royal gowns in Hue, argues that basic design features of the ao dai can be traced back to medieval times and originally reflected a desire by the Hanoicourt to distinguish its fashion from that of Beijing.

Europe got its first glimpse of Vietnam from a short book by Jesuit missionary Cristoforo Borri published in 1631. The outfit for men he describes already sounds a bit like an ao dai: A gown “like those of the order of St. Benedict,” but with several layers of different colors so that “if any wind blows to lift them up, they look like peacocks.”

Vietnamese women, meanwhile, wore multiple layers of “petticoats” and “doublets.” It was “the modestest garb in all India for even in the hottest weather they suffer no part of the body to be uncovered.” They wore transparent veils that “shows all their gaiety with modesty, and makes a beauteous majestic appearance.” Their huge hats nearly covered their faces and their hair was so long that it fell “down to their heels.”

Certainly fashions have changed since the seventeenth century, but we can see from this description that several characteristically Vietnamese ideas about fashion have been preserved in the ao dai: the desire to cover as much of the body as possible and the of bright colors and thin fabrics to allow a woman to express her physical beauty and individuality.

A decree issued by Lord Vu Vuong 

Two panels were sewn together in the front, two were sewn together in the back, and the fifth was a “baby flap” hidden underneath.  Thus the ngu than gave the appearance of having two flaps. Fabric was expensive at this time, so aristocrats would display their wealth by wearing multiple layers of clothing, sacrificing comfort for fashion in Vietnam’s hot climate. The Minh Mang emperor (1820-1841) banned styles associated with regionalism and thus made the ngu than a national dress.

In 1917, the Dong Khanh Girl’s High School (now Hai Ba Trung High School) opened in Hue. The school uniform was a ngu than with a violet tunic and white pantaloons. Hue was the capital of Annam, asVietnam was then called. Although Annam’s king was a puppet of France, he was permitted to promote nationalistic clothing.

Hue is still Vietnam’s most elegant and best-dressed city. In Hue, the violet ao dai is a symbol of faithfulness. But the color rarely worn in elsewhere as it brings to mind the image of a girl pining for a missing boyfriend or husband. “Nobody likes purple,” said Thuy, who is from Nha Trang. “It looks sad.”Vietnam is a happy country. The school’s beautiful uniform has inspired poetry such as “Dong Khanh high school girl” by Mai Van Hoan:

A big sound from the drum of Dong Khanh School has just echoes to inform that school is over:

On Le Loi Street, there are many flying flocks of butterfly

The wind makes the white ao dai flaps to rise up

Dong Khanh high school girl smiles innocently

In the 1920s, artists associated with the French Indochina College of Fine Arts 

Meanwhile, Tran Kim of Thiet Lap Tailors and Dung of Dung Tailors in Saigon’s Dakao ward added raglan sleeves and bias-cut pantaloons to create the ao dai in the form it is commonly worn today. Raglan sleeves are attached directly to the collar to avoid wrinkling. Bias-cut garments are cut diagonally to so that the garment can follow the body’s shape more closely. The bra, which came into widespread in the 1960s, allowed for tighter fitting outerwear.

The years 1960-75 were the heyday of the ao dai in the South. The ao dai for men, or ao gam, never recovered after Diem left office. But the female version remained the dominant form of dress in the cities. Even peasant women wore them on their weekly market day. The ao dai was effectively banned for some years after 1975. In 1983, the it began its return when Ho Thi Ky High School in Mekong Delta city of Ca Mau adopted it as a uniform. But this breakthrough was only a first step in a slow revival. With the annual cloth ration at only two meters a year, fashions of the 1980s remained drab and Spartan. The doi moipolitical reforms that began in 1986 resulted in an opening up to the non-communist world, a revival of economy and eventually of the ao dai.

The 1992 films Indochine and The Lover inspired worldwide interest in Vietnamese fashion, with several international fashion houses offering ao dai collections. In 1995, an ao dai worn by Truong Quynh Mai was chosen "Best National Costume" at the Miss International Pageant in Tokyo, triggering an “ao dai craze” that lasted for several years.

While the ao dai is no longer as common a sight as it was at that time, interest is again picking up. There was a doubling in the number of Internet searches for “ao dai” between 2007 and 2009. The Vietnamese film The White Silk Dress

Viet Hung has been designing ao dai for the past nine years. He is self-taught and markets his designs by sponsoring seven or eight beauty contests a year. He does all his design work himself. His best customers are brides and teachers, he said. Viet Hung already has shops in Ho Chi Minh (as Saigon was renamed in 1975) and Bien Hoa and plans to expand his business in the countryside.

Le Si Hoang is Vietnam’s celebrity ao dai designer with a shop near the gate of Doc Lap Palace, the former presidential residence in Ho Chi Minh. His trademark is to treat the ao dai as a canvas and paint floral and other designs using acrylic paints. Si Hoang’s shop caters to visiting VIPs and his most successful marketing technique is to participate in the Vietnam cultural day celebrations held in various countries, he said.

He considers himself an artist rather than a businessman and does not plan any business expansion. As a national treasure, the government subsidies Si Hoang’s business and provides his shop a unique location on the palace grounds, underlining Vietnam’s commitment to the ao dai. Si Hoang has three assistants to create designs. He estimates that he has designed 435 dresses in his career. When he creates a design, he uses his mother as a model becastrangers will never criticize anything designs, he said. Si Hoang has been designing ao dais since 1989, when he created dresses for several contestants in the Miss Ao Dai pageant that year, one of Vietnam’s first post-1975 beauty contests.  The contest was a sensation and a turning point in the revival of the ao dai. Soon Si Hoang was painting ao dais for tailors all over Ho Chi Minh.

What does the future hold for the ao dai? Si Hoang insists his modifications are purely decorative, such as painting and buttons. The tailoring of the dress has already reached perfection, he said. He refuses produce an ao dai modified to resemble a qipao or a Western dress, becahe would not consider it Vietnamese. In contrast, Viet Hung has designed ao dais with bare shoulders and other radical modifications.

Ao dai Si Hoang

36-38 Ly Tu Trong, Dist.1, HCMC – Tel: 08 3829 9156

Ao dai Viet Hung

455 Hai Ba Trung, Dist.3, HCMC - Tel: 08 3848 0215

Thu Ha Tailor

29 Nguyen Huy Tu, Dist.1, HCMC - Tel: 3820 3981

Luong Van Can St., Hanoi - A center of the ao dai trade.