Stories and Comments from Our Members

Former TAC Board Chair, Gretchen Turner, recently went on the latest trip organized by TAC to Myanmar (Burma). She shares some of her adventures with us here.

Men in Skirts — Impressions of Myanmar

By Gretchen Turner, 2005

Just before the border closed at sunset, two Toyota sedans, conspicuously worse for long years of wear, started northwards from Thailand into the Myanmar countryside. Each contained a driver and three rather nervous passengers. Some of us American tenderfeet were wondering what this twilight foray from the border to our first stop in the Union of Myanmar would entail. Prevented from entering Myanmar until our visas were issued, we began to understand how different Myanmar would be from the very westernized Thailand we were leaving. That fact had become clear when we arrived at the border town of Mae Sai in an air-conditioned bus and watched as our luggage was loaded onto a number of hand drawn carts. All the local workers were wearing the longyi—a skirt worn by both men and women. Men in skirts can work comfortably, looking very graceful and sexy indeed. Pants were being left behind, and we textile lovers couldn’t have been more pleased. The quest to find and purchase superior examples of each distinctive local patterning on the longyis became one of the goals of the trip.

This being a textile-focused tour, we were eager to see many cultural groups wearing their traditional clothing, and to purchase new pieces from local weavers. The young lady pictured here is a Palaung and had just come from her home in the mountains to visit relatives in the lowlands of the Shan State and to look for a husband. She wears her best to show her charms to advantage, as girls everywhere are wont to do. Her longyi is topped with lacquered bamboo rings. Wealthier families can provide their daughters with silver rings. Other ethnic groups, living on steeper ground, are much poorer. But they still wear their traditional garb proudly, and the young girls looked radiant, even with blackened teeth. But not all young girls and women are learning to weave and embroider, as did their foremothers. This distinctive and culturally powerful dress is fading fast, and may survive only another generation or two at most. We looked like real outsiders in our visually undistinguished Western clothes.

The above is an excerpt—click here to download the full version. (PDF)

Photo credit: Gretchen Turner