Tourism poster showing three women in Vietnamese women's national dress
About this photograph
- Creator
- Margery H. Freeman
- Date created
- May 1997
- Location
- Vietnam
- License
- This photograph copyright ©1997. Terms of use
See this photograph in context
- French colonization and Vietnam wars: Photographs and text tell the story of Vietnam under French colonial rule, its experience during twentieth-century wars with France and the United States, and its recent liberalization. (Page 5)
Related media
Learn more
- Search LEARN NC for clothing, graphic arts, national costumes, nationalism, silk, tourism, Vietnam, and women's clothing.
In the classroom
- See our collection of articles on visual literacy for ideas on using photographs meaningfully in the classroom.
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 (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.
Other graphic images on the poster include line drawings of a bird, and a man riding a buffalo-drawn cart.
