Tourism poster showing three women in Vietnamese women's national dress

Tourism poster showing three women in Vietnamese women's national dress

This tourism promotion poster includes a diagonally set image of three young women wearing a formal version of Vietnamese national dress. Vietnamese national women's dress includes a long, high-necked silk tunic that is slit at the sides to the waist. Here the solid-color, pastel tunics are worn over matching full-length skirts, common to northern Vietnam, but they also are worn over white or black silk pants in the central and southern regions. Other graphic images on the poster include line drawings of a bird, and a man riding a buffalo-drawn cart.

Here the solid-color, pastel tunics (pink, light blue, and pale orange) are worn over matching full-length skirts, common to northern Vietnam, but they also are worn over white or black silk pants in the central and southern regions. The costume is called áo dài (pronounced "ow zai").

This costume actually was created in the 1920s, during the period of French rule, when Vietnamese nationalists envisioned a pan-Vietnam costume that would contrast with both European clothes and the varied ethnic and status-differentiated clothing that existed throughout the regions of precolonial Vietnam.