Around the World in 80 Dresses

  As to see beautiful sarong-kebaya combinations you will have to travel to Bali. This island so distinctly different from other parts of Indonesia is imbued with Buddhist traditions. I had the chance to attend a royal funeral in Ubud and to witness this important event where a gamelan orchestra played, ladies wore their finest and a sarong seller offered her ware stored in a bundle on her head.   In Malaysia the sarongs are called songkets .  The main techniques are batik (see also post  A New Take on Batik, March 18 ) and ikat . Ikat is the name of a long process of binding the yarn to resist colour and dying it several times to obtain the pattern. Sarongs are now mainly confined to dancing performances and museums.  I bought the batik cloth with the blue flowers from Tiga Serangkai Design in Eastern Malaysia and the black and brown one in Malaysian Borneo from Sarawak Design. In the olden days my red sarong with the golden threads would ha...

The classic white linen dress seems to hint at lazy days on a promenade at the Mediterranean coast sipping a fruit sorbet and admiring the yachts in the harbour. Instead orang-utangs climbing the trees of the rainforest are coming to my mind. I bought the dress at Mango ’s in Kota Kinabalu on Malaysian Borneo of all places.                                                                                                          Shopping may be globalized  but my memories are not. I can still feel the sticky heat on my arms, smell the scent of the spices wafting from the stalls at the road side and see the passing Malaysian women in their elegant sarongs. Happily, we still have to go places to experience the wo...

In Borneo extremely heavy earrings made from brass were in fashion. I don’t know how the Dayak people could wear them without tearing their earlobes to pieces. My Bambara lady from Mali made a detour to Afghanistan and put on a richly decorated belt with deep blue glass beads.                                                                                                                                                                       In Guatemala I chased a silver brooch with image of a Mayan god, but I could not find one I liked. In...