Refashioning Civilization: Dress and Bodily Practice in Thai Nation-Building

Roces_05_Ch4.qxd 6/7/07 2:45 pm Page 65 CHAPTER 4 REFASHIONING CIVILIZATION: DRESS AND BODILY PRACTICE IN THAI NATION-BUILDING MAURIZIO PELEGGI Body/nation, dress/civilization In a regional context in which national identities continue to be shaped by postcolonial concerns, Thailand’s claim to have – uniquely among the countries of Southeast Asia – escaped Western colonialism remains central to the Thai state’s discursive self-representation. The central theme in the historical narrative that articulates such self-representation is the Chakri Reformation, a top-down project of state formation and nation building initiated by the ruling dynasty, as a result of which imperialism was avoided – despite the fiscal and juridical limitations imposed by the unequal treaties with Western powers – and Thailand set out on the path to becoming modern or, to use the quintessential nineteenth-century term, “civilized” (as signalled by the Thai transliteration siwilai). In practice, Thailand, known internationally as Siam until 1939, was exposed to Western influences as much as colonial Southeast Asia – if not more, in fact. It is thus no surprise to find today portraits of King Chulalongkorn (1868–1910) in a Western-style suit or field marshal’s uniform acting in the Thai public space as signifiers of Thailand’s status as a modern nation. Becoming a “civilized” nation in the high imperial age, when societies were ranked on a scale of social and technological progress when not singled out as uncivilized or “barbaric”, required not only the demarcation of territorial boundaries, the creation of a civil service and standing army, the construction of infrastructures, and the provision of public education, but also – and perhaps above all – the acceptance of the standards of decorum of the politically and culturally hegemonic West. This is why, while almost entirely overlooked by historians of Thailand, the domain of bodily practice – Roces_05_Ch4.qxd 66  6/7/07 2:45 pm Page 66 THE POLITICS OF DRESS IN ASIA AND THE AMERICAS encompassing personal hygiene, dress, deportment, language and sex – represented a central aspect of the nation-building project initiated by the Bangkok monarchy at the turn of the century and continued, after the change of political system in 1932, by the bureaucratic-military elite.1 From the 1860s the Bangkok royalty selectively adopted Victorian corporeal and sartorial etiquette to fashion modern personas that were publicized domestically and internationally by means of mechanically reproduced images. In the early twentieth century, Western dress and accoutrements became popular with the capital’s embryonic middle class, who increasingly defined what was fashionable or upto-date (samai mai). Under the authoritarian government of the late 1930s the Thai state policed bodily practice through edicts and laws as a way of disciplining the body politic while pursuing modernization. Despite the obvious parallels with the colonial modernity of its neighbours, the absence of direct colonial rule in Thailand imposed a distinct slant on the politics of dress there. The fact that, for once, it was an indigenous rather than a colonial elite that would carry the “civilizing mission” meant that, while the reform of bodily practice made social and geographical distinction within Thailand more marked, selection and hybridization were part of the very process by which Western dress and etiquette were localized. As a result, both the adoption and the occasional rejection of foreign corporeal and vestimentary norms enjoyed local legitimation. This situation was clearly different from that in parts of Asia (such as India) where nationalists rejected Western dress as a symbol of foreign political and cultural domination and fashioned, in opposition to it, neo-traditional dress to express the moral dignity and cultural soul of the oppressed nation. It is thus only an apparent paradox that Thai nationalism, unlike other nationalisms, codified (or actually invented) no official national dress. Instead, the “traditional” costume of noblewomen, which had been shelved at the turn of the century, was revived in the 1960s in the spirit of self-Orientalizing that underpinned Thailand’s new international visibility as an exotic tourist destination. Restyling civilization’s accoutrements, 1870s–1920s The diffusion of the Western bourgeois regime of corporeal propriety by agents of imperialism in Africa, the Pacific and parts of Asia during the course of the nineteenth century determined the standardization of bodily practice on a global scale. Colonial officials and missionaries sought to mould the minds and souls of “savages” by disciplining their bodies. The imposition of discipline included covering native peoples’ bodies, which in tropical locales were naked to various degrees; using dress to emphasize gender distinctions; and stamping out “barbaric” habits, from ritual alterations on the body such as Roces_05_Ch4.qxd 6/7/07 2:45 pm Page 67 R E FA S H I O N I N G C I V I L I Z AT I O N  67 tattooing and scarring to “unnatural” forms of sexual intercourse. But in Siam, where Christian missionaries made only marginal inroads, it was the court that, as in early modern Europe, led the way to civility.2 Indeed, reformation of bodily practice was an essential element of the Thai court’s attempt to become a member of the fraternal order of world royalty, the transnational elite of that “Victorian ecumene” (to borrow Carol Breckenridge’s apt definition) in whose geo-cultural space Siam was dragged in the century’s latter half.3 By the 1890s the body of the Thai royalty had become a living – and travelling – advertisement of the modernizing mission through which the dynasty asserted its legitimacy in Southeast’s Asia new colonial order. In fact, reliance on cultural practices and materials as a way of connecting to the dominant civilization of the day was by no means a novelty for Thai royalty. In the Central Thai court of Ayutthaya, which had inherited from the Khmer empire of Angkor the Indic cultural legacy of the region’s classical kingdoms, corporeal techniques of self-presentation – from movements to the special vocabulary – were highly developed. The tropical climatic conditions, however, discouraged elaborate dress, with the partial exception of Brahmans and the sovereign, who wore ceremonial costumes made of gold-brocaded silk, embroidered robes and elaborate headgear. But the habiliment of princes and courtiers did not sensibly differ from that of commoners, as amply documented by temple murals and engraving illustrations in early European travel books, even though the cottons and silks worn at court were manufactured in India using special designs denoting rank (pha laiyang). Ordinary dress for both sexes consisted of a single garment: a length of cotton (phanung) that was wrapped around the waist. At court the phanung was of silk rather than homespun cotton cloth, and was wrapped in the shape of pantaloons (chongkrabaen). In villages and even towns it was common for women to go around bare breasted, but female courtiers wore a loose wrap (sabai) around their torsos and adorned themselves with jewels; noblemen, on the other hand, only donned short jackets or vests of Indian or Middle Eastern provenance on formal occasions. Walking barefoot was the norm, except for royalty, who made use of embroidered Persian slippers. Both men and women cropped their hair, keeping only a tuft on the crown, and their teeth were stained black from chewing betel (areca leaves, a natural stimulant), a habit that was widespread across social strata. Cotton and silk cloths with printed or woven motifs thus acted as markers of social distinction in Siam, as in other pre- and early modern societies, and were regulated by sumptuary laws, as reported by the British envoy John Bowring in 1855.4 The dress of both royalty and commoners still belonged, however, to the regime of wrapped rather than stitched clothing – a distinction in vestimentary habits comparable to that between raw and cooked food in alimentary habits.5 The reform of court dress in the second half of the nineteenth century meant, Roces_05_Ch4.qxd 68  6/7/07 2:45 pm Page 68 THE POLITICS OF DRESS IN ASIA AND THE AMERICAS Figure 4.2 Commoner dress: Woman studio portrait, c. 1900. above all, the transition from the wrapped to the stitched vestimentary regime as befitting a “civilized” nation. In a situation in which the taboo surrounding the royal body had prevented a tradition of court portraiture, the new daguerreotype technology imported into Siam by Catholic missionaries in the 1840s played a crucial role in fashioning, rather than merely projecting, the monarchy’s modern image. King Mongkut (Rama IV, 1851-68), who at the beginning of his reign required those attending audiences to wear shirts, harnessed photography as an instrument of diplomatic relations with an awareness of the need for the sitter to project an image that conformed to Western notions of civility. European envoys to Bangkok publicized military uniform as the official dress of European rulers in the middle of the nineteenth century. Extant portraits of Mongkut – the first Thai sovereign whose actual physical features are known – wearing a fancy admiral’s uniform complete with sash and sabre prove the interaction between photo-portraiture and the reformation of royalty’s corporeal self. Abundant photographic documents illustrate the restyling of royal dress along Western lines during the long reign of King Chulalongkorn (Rama V). In the initial phase (1870s and 1880s), hybrid court attires and ceremonial uniforms were created by matching a high-necked lace blouse (for females) or Western-style jacket (for males) with the unisex lower silk wrap (now often made of European fabric); shoes and stockings complemented the outfit. The partial body exposure characteristic of traditional female court dress was thus eliminated. A formal attire was also fashioned for court officials, consisting of a high-collared white jacket (known as ratcha patten, “royal pattern”) worn over blue silk chongkrabaen. In the 1890s this attire was adapted to become the uniform of the new bureaucratic corps and as such became a symbol of individual status and institutional authority. Both sexes let their hair grow longer than before and men also grew moustaches, in accordance with European Roces_05_Ch4.qxd 6/7/07 2:45 pm Page 69 R E FA S H I O N I N G C I V I L I Z AT I O N  69 fashion. On their trip to Java in 1896 and visit to Europe the following year, Chulalongkorn and the princes who accompanied him wore full Western suit: “The King, judged by his dress, looks like a typical English gentleman,” remarked the trade journal Tailor and Cutter when he landed in Britain.6 At home, full dress uniform replaced both the hybrid ensemble in use since the 1870s and the traditional royal costume at both state and religious ceremonies. The reformed body of the royalty was iconized by the oil portraits commissioned from European artists, such as The Royal Family (1899) by the Italian Odoardo Gelli (in which Chulalongkorn and Queen Saowapha sit in the Westernized interior of the Chakri Throne Hall surrounded by their five sons) and the full-length portrait of Rama V (1907) by the French Carolus-Duran, which hung in the private space of the royal palaces; and, much more importantly for the purpose of public viewing, by the official photographic portraits that, by the early 1900s, were reproduced on picture postcards on sale in Bangkok and often served as models for the illustrators working for European periodicals. With the unveiling in November 1908 of the equestrian monument of Rama V, his uniformed image became a perennial feature of the capital’s cityscape. It is thus clear that the emulation of European models of dress and deportment was concerned with the foreign gaze as much as with self-regard. In his diary entry on the day of his arrival in Java in May 1896, Rama V noted: “It is an advantage for me to wear Western dress because the locals fear the Europeans.”7 Western-style uniform in particular was a prominent symbol of the modernization of the Thai state, even though an advisor to the Siamese Ministry of Justice, the Belgian Emile Jottrand, commented on the loss of royal mystique that its adoption entailed: “There is very limited religious aura the moment the king appears in a European military uniform and a helmet adorned with feathers”.8 While such comments reveal as much about the observer’s Orientalist sensibility as they do about the political dimension of dress reform in turn-of-thecentury Siam, it is worth noting that external expectations about civilized bodily practice were still negotiated with personal taste and inclinations. The best example of such negotiation is the habit of betel chewing, which not even the court discontinued during Chulalongkorn’s reign. The observant Jottrand again commented: “We have come to learn that they only clean their teeth when they want to be photographed, and then we see their admirable white teeth!”9 As for the dressing standard of the common people of Bangkok, a decree issued in 1899 in preparation for the visit of Prince Henri of Prussia, requiring that women cover their breasts and men wear the loincloth at knee length, and dispensing fines for contraventions, suggests widespread indifference to siwilai bodily practice among the lower social strata.10 It is also worth noting that, while attempting to police the dress – or, more precisely, the Roces_05_Ch4.qxd 70  6/7/07 2:45 pm Page 70 THE POLITICS OF DRESS IN ASIA AND THE AMERICAS nakedness – of the capital’s population, the decree was unconcerned with their vestimentary variety, given that in Bangkok at the turn of the century there were “Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Malays, Javanese, Hindus, Klings, Pathans, Afghans, Burmese, Arabs, Cambodians, Annamites, most of whom are rendered conspicuous by their national dress, which they seldom abandon”.11 A significant change during the last quarter of the nineteenth century concerned the function of dress as a marker of social identity. As a result of the opening in Bangkok of tailor workshops and department stores selling European textiles and garments, wealth became the sole necessary condition for appropriating Western clothing and the aura of prestige that emanated from it. A younger brother of Rama V, Prince Wachirayan, who later became the first supreme patriarch of the institutionalized Thai Buddhist monkhood, left in his memoirs an insightful account of the emergence of consumer choice in 1870s Bangkok: “[At Chinese tailors] there was plenty of clothing, but I was ashamed to wear it. Tailoring at European stores cost more, so my first inclination was to go there. . . . The goods they sold were well-made and one could display them with pride”.12 Far from being reserved for princes, the opportunity to buy fashionable clothes was now available to urban professionals such as the attorney and public intellectual Thianwan Wannapho, who prided himself on being the first man in Siam too sport a Western hairstyle, grow a beard and eschew betel chewing. By the early decades of the twentieth century the Westernized patterns of consumption pioneered by the court had spread to Bangkok’s emerging middle class. In a society strictly ordered along hierarchical lines, consumerism promoted the redefinition of social and gender boundaries underpinned by bourgeois values of self-realization and romantic love. Such trends were dealt with contemptuously by King Vajiravudh (Rama VI, 1910–25), the official “father” of Thai nationalism. In a piece he originally published in 1915, “The Cult of Imitation” (latthi aoyang), Rama VI, glossing over his father’s role in initiating such a cult, ridiculed Thais who wore shabby Western clothes to ingratiate themselves with Europeans, and criticized what he saw as the middle class aping of the farang way of life.13 While apparently concerned with the alleged erosion of the national culture, King Vajiravudh’s tirade expressed his concern about the loss of the elite’s role of controller of the civilizing process (and, implicitly, of arbiter of taste) and about increasing demands for constitutional reform that looked to Europe for a model. The shabbily dressed imitators of the West were none other than the Bangkok writers and journalists (“the self-constituted leaders of ‘modern thought’”, as Rama VI dismissively called them), who animated the nascent Thai public sphere and, from the pages of newspapers, periodicals and novels, denounced the rampant social inequalities and women’s inferior condition, rooted in the polygamy practised by the upper classes and the lack of education. Roces_05_Ch4.qxd 6/7/07 2:45 pm Page 71 R E FA S H I O N I N G C I V I L I Z AT I O N  71 The 1920s witnessed a veritable publishing boom that was connected to the birth of modern Thai visual culture in magazines, advertising and eventually cinema.14 Upper-class women styled a more conservative version of jazz-age fashion by wearing the tubular sarong of the Lao and northern Thais (phasin) as an ankle-length skirt or undergarment and growing their hair to neck length. In Kukrit Pramoj’s historic novel Four Reigns (Si phaendin, 1953), Ploi, the female protagonist, is persuaded by her husband – a high-ranking official in the court of Rama VI – to grow her hair, polish her betel-stained teeth, and wear the phasin instead of the phanung in public.15 Modern fashion was tied to the appearance of democratic social spaces such as dancing and cinema halls, and the representation of women in films and advertisements as sophisticated consumers of cosmetics and cigarettes. This trend mirrored that in other Asian metropolises such as Calcutta and Shanghai, where the meeting of industrial capitalism with indigenous vestimentary traditions determined distinctive fashion styles. The comparison with colonial Bengal is especially instructive in what it reveals of the interaction between dress, social status and nationalism. Upper middle-class Bengalis who took up Western-style dress were criticized by two groups: the colonial elite, who sought to preserve social distinction in the face of imitation by enforcing more stringent sartorial rules; and the nationalists, who rejected Western dress as a symbol of foreign domination in favour of a newly invented “national” Indian dress.16 While the court’s hybrid costume fashioned in the 1890s shared an aesthetic affinity with the neo-traditional dress of Asian nationalists, it carried none of the political valence of the latter because in Siam there was no need to signify – sartorially or otherwise – autonomy from the West. Conversely, the absence of colonial domination prevented Western dress from being rejected as antithetical to Thai identity or, at best, shelved as a dispensable appendage of modernity. Still, in 1929 the editorial in the inaugural issue of the literary magazine The Gentleman (Suphaburut) questioned the assumption that the socalled “universal suit” (suit sakorn) was absolute proof of the wearer’s civility: “Dress is only an outward symbol. Indeed, one finds gentlemen who are not interested in such symbols, symbols that can be easily copied or imitated. . . . On the surface a man might appear to be a gentleman when in fact he is not”.17 Such comments highlighted the gap in the vision for a progressive Siam between the princely elite and the stratum of educated commoners, to whom the social and gender disparities of the old regime were the cause of much dissatisfaction. Emerging political divisions were, however, belittled by dress. A photograph of the founding members of the People’s Party, taken in Paris in the late 1920s, shows a group of young Thai men in self-assured poses wearing three-piece suits. A few years later this group of gentlemen engineered a bloodless coup d’état that brought the absolute monarchy to an end. Roces_05_Ch4.qxd 72  6/7/07 2:45 pm Page 72 THE POLITICS OF DRESS IN ASIA AND THE AMERICAS Ad-dressing the Thai nation, 1930s–1950s The post-absolutist government that came to power in Thailand in June 1932 did not intervene in the domain of bodily practice; its major concern was to make the constitution, from which it drew its legitimacy, comprehensible to the rural mass of the population. To do so, it launched a series of initiatives centred on the new celebration of Constitution Day on 10 December. In 1934, however, a special event held in conjunction with Constitution Day proclaimed for the first time in Thai political discourse the identity between the physical body of citizens – especially female – and the abstract body politic: the Miss Siam beauty contest (nangsao sayam), whose name was changed in 1939 to Miss Thailand to reflect the official change in the country’s name. The entry requirements for the contest were: Thai nationality, a minimum age of fifteen (raised to sixteen in 1935), social respectability and non-participation in paid employment (a provision that implicitly limited the social background of contestants to the upper classes). Unsophisticated beauty was emphasized by prohibiting the use of facial makeup and enhancing undergarments. The winner received a symbolic prize that included a black velvet crown, a silver bowl and a locket. In the inaugural competition most contestants paraded wearing fashionable evening dress, but in subsequent years traditional attire (chongkrabaen, sabai and bare feet) was made mandatory.18 This shift from modern/Western to traditional/Thai clothing can be related to the government’s celebration of the moral and martial virtues of heroines such as Queen Suriyothai of Ayutthaya and Thao Suranari of Nakhon Ratchasima (the latter commemorated by a statue erected in her hometown in 1935, in which she is represented in traditional attire). Figure 4.3 Body politic: Model in western dress, early 1940s. Roces_05_Ch4.qxd 6/7/07 2:45 pm Page 73 R E FA S H I O N I N G C I V I L I Z AT I O N  73 It was, however, under the authoritarian regime of Marshal Phibun Songkhram (1938–44) that the state sought to standardize bodily practice as a way of disciplining the citizens in the name of national progress. The chewing of betel was declared illegal in 1940. In 1939 the government also started to issue state edicts (ratthaniyom) to prescribe, in Phibun’s own words, “the proper type of etiquette to be observed by all civilized people”. The tenth state edict, promulgated on 15 January 1941, mandated that Thais should adopt a dress code “in accordance with civilization”: As the government has observed that the mode of dress of the Thai people in public and populous places is not proper in accordance with the culture of the Thai nation, the Council of Ministers thereby unanimously voted to proclaim the following to be the State Preference: 1. Thais should not appear in public, populous places, or in municipal areas without proper clothing, for instance wearing only underwear (drawers), no shirt or with loose shirt-tails. 2. Clothing considered to be proper for the Thai people are as follows: A. Authorized uniforms worn as the occasion requires; B. Western clothing properly worn; C. Traditional clothing properly worn.19 The subsequent “Royal decree prescribing customs for the Thai people”, promulgated on 18 September 1941, further specified that: The people of Thailand must maintain national prestige . . . by not dressing in improper manners which will damage the prestige of the country, e.g., wearing loose-ended sarongs, wearing only underpants, wearing sleeping garments, wearing loincloths, wearing no blouse or shirt, women wearing only undershirt or wrap-around . . . and must maintain proper etiquette [by refraining from] 1) unnecessary noise or improper language or behaviour which ridicule those who try to promote national customs 2) forceful acquisition of space such as on buses or at ticket windows or at theatre entrances; 3) damage of public properties by writing on improper places; 4) bathing along public roads.20 These prescriptions followed in spirit and content the attempts by the fascist regimes of Italy and Germany, for whose dictators Phibun expressed open admiration, to mould the body politic through mass regimentation and propaganda. But while militarism became a prominent (and persistent) trait of Thai politics, nothing in Thailand compared to the cult of uniformed masculinity that characterized the Italian Black Shirts and the German Brown Shirts (not Roces_05_Ch4.qxd 74  6/7/07 2:45 pm Page 74 THE POLITICS OF DRESS IN ASIA AND THE AMERICAS by accident sartorially defined political movements) as well as paramilitary youth organizations such as the Balilla and the Hitlerjugend. Although Marshal Phibun Songkhram, as the country’s self-appointed leader (phunam), tended to present himself publicly dressed in the army uniform, the emphasis under his regime continued to be on the adoption of Western dress and accoutrements as an index of civilization: “The Thais are a well dressed nation”, “Wear a hat for your country”, and “Hats will lead Thailand to greatness” were prominent slogans of the period. Moreover, state propaganda privileged women over men as physical embodiments of Thai civility. Men were encouraged to kiss their wives before going to work in the morning and to compliment them with the epithet “flowers of the nation”. Phibun himself asserted proudly that “proper dress and correct manner [in Thailand] are no different from other civilized countries . . . in the past, it was seldom that one heard the remark ‘I saw a well-dressed lady’ . . . but now men remark . . . ‘I met a lady who wore a skirt and hat . . . and gorgeous shoes. She was as beautiful as any lady from any other country’.”21 Even the change in the official spelling of the name of the country’s inhabitants from tai to thai, to make use of the homographic word meaning “free”, was couched in terms of the contrast between a fashionable and an ordinary female body: “Thai with an H is like a sophisticated girl with her hair set, her lips touched with lipstick and her brow arched with eyebrow pencil, while Tai without the H is like a girl who is naturally attractive but without any added beautification”.22 Accordingly, the Miss Thailand contest served as a major forum for the promotion of the state policy on dress by switching back to Western dress and accessories (high-heeled shoes, gloves and hats) as mandatory for contestants. In 1941, following the state edict that promoted autarchy, the regulations stipulated that garments worn by contestants should be made of cloth produced in Thailand; and, within the contest, there was a competition for the best Western-style dress designs.23 To convince Thais of the importance of “proper” dress in order to be a civilized nation, the regime propaganda did not hesitate to appropriate the most sullen racist commonplaces in the radio program ‘Dialogues of Mr Man and Mr Khong’ (names whose combination, mankhong, means “stability”), broadcast during 1941–42: Mr Khong: Mr Man: To wear proper dress would show that we do not have barbaric minds as those wild people of Central Africa. That is right. If we go to central Africa we will see that those barbarians do not dress themselves orderly and beautifully. Their barbaric minds are indicated by their dresses. On the contrary, if we go to London, we will Roces_05_Ch4.qxd 6/7/07 2:45 pm Page 75 R E FA S H I O N I N G C I V I L I Z AT I O N  75 see beautiful people wearing beautiful and orderly dress. And we will see that the British are people who are cultured and are good in every respect. Whether the mind is civilized or not is expressed through dress. Very few of those who are badly dressed are civilized. And furthermore: Mr Man: Mr Khong: Mr Man: I have heard the PM say that he would like our ladies to wear skirts. Why so? Because ladies of the civilized world wear skirts. Even black people who are well educated wear skirts. Our ladies are following our leader in order to become civilized ladies. (. . .) If the colour is white or light, it would be even more appropriate. If we wear those dresses when we go abroad, we would not be accused of being provincial.24 Predictably, the state policy on dress heightened the socio-economic disparities between Bangkok and the provinces. While well-to-do city women were able to acquire clothes and hats in the latest style, those in the countryside had to resort to bamboo and palm leaves to fashion hats for themselves. In fact, district officials found it impossible to enforce the rules among the rural population, who resisted the state policing of dress and mocked any woman who tried to comply as a “smelly ma’am” (mam kapi).25 Yet, this tirade against “provincial” (that is, rural) taste, far from being an expression of snobbery, must be seen in the context of Phibun’s nation-building policy, which sought to standardize social and cultural practices across the country as well as across classes. Mobile units of the National Institute of Culture were sent to the provinces in order to familiarize villagers with not only the vestimentary but also the linguistic reforms introduced by the central government. One notable measure was the creation of the expressions sawaddi for greeting and khopkhun for thanking, in lieu of the traditional gesture with conjoined hands (wai), whose performance denotes the relative status of the individuals involved (the person who is lower in status must raise the hands and lower the head more markedly than the one of higher status, who keeps the hands at chest height and nods in reply). In a similar vein, a pronominal system with three singular and three plural cases patterned after European languages was introduced in lieu of the Thai system of pronominal forms denoting the speaker’s and addressee’s relative status in terms of rank or seniority. Roces_05_Ch4.qxd 76  6/7/07 2:45 pm Page 76 THE POLITICS OF DRESS IN ASIA AND THE AMERICAS Thus, along with authoritarianism, the Phibun regime tried to institute – like all self-proclaimed revolutionary regimes – uniform patterns of self-presentation and verbal communication that challenged the established social hierarchies. The fall of the regime in 1944 and the tumultuous three-year period that followed (during which a peace settlement was reached with Britain, the young King Anantha mysteriously killed, and a liberal turn in government aborted) relegated such designs to the margins of politics. In 1948 Phibun again assumed the position of prime minister, which he held for a decade. One of his earliest actions was to re-establish the National Institute of Culture (upgraded to a ministry in 1952), which again endeavoured to forge a uniform national culture. However, the divide between city and village grew deeper as Thailand was brought into the postwar “Free World” ecumene by its close strategic alliance with the USA, the rejection of communism for being un-Thai as much as it was said to be un-American, and the welcoming of American popular culture. Reinventing sartorial traditions, 1960s–1970s The popularity of American film and music stars and the Thai music and film celebrities who imitated them helped to strengthen the appeal of the Westernized body in the postwar era. During the 1950s Thai actresses and models wearing the latest fashions and sporting the latest hairstyles winked at readers from the covers of Thai women’s magazines. Yet, by the next decade, unease about the American military presence in the country, which was behind the proliferation of bars and massage parlours, found one viable outlet in the condemnation of farang disrespect for local customs, which often involved offensive manners and behaviour. Another indirect way of criticizing the US intrusion into Thailand’s foreign and domestic policy was the censure of the Westernization – equated with moral degeneration – of Thai youth. An acerbic note on the diffusion of Western fashion from Bangkok to the provinces is found in a short story of 1967, in which a teacher living in the capital is confronted, on a visit back to his home village, by his old girlfriend: “The girls in Bangkok wear such gorgeous stretch pants! … Didn’t you bring any clothes from Bangkok, Thian? Why are you wearing your father’s old things? Aren’t you afraid the villagers will say how out of it you are, even though you’ve come from Bangkok?”26 But while stretch pants and especially blue jeans became as popular in Bangkok as in the rest of the “Free World” during the 1960s as sartorial expressions of rebellion, the bolder items of contemporary youth fashion – such as miniskirts, high-heeled boots and long hair – were rejected by both the guardians of public morality in the bureaucracy and local intellectuals as a manifestation of the decadence of the West only befitting social outcasts. Roces_05_Ch4.qxd 6/7/07 2:45 pm Page 77 R E FA S H I O N I N G C I V I L I Z AT I O N  77 The 1960s were marked, rather than by youth counterculture, whose appearance in Thailand was delayed until the early 1970s, by a monarchical revival that rejuvenated the symbols and rituals that had been discarded after the change in government in 1932. After the departure of King Prajadhipok and his wife for England in 1933 and his abdication two years later, Thailand had no resident monarch until 1951, when Bhumibol (a nephew of Prajadhipok), who had been raised in Switzerland with his older brother, Anantha, returned permanently to his country. The kingdom thus once again had a resident king and queen, the beautiful Sirikit, whom Bhumibol had married in 1950. However, Phibun, who after a temporary eclipse had returned to power in 1948 with US support, manoeuvred to limit the visibility of the royal couple. This situation was reversed by the overthrow of Phibun in 1957 and the ascendancy of Marshal Sarit Thanarat, who rehabilitated the monarchical institution to overcome his lack of legitimacy. In 1960, with Sarit’s encouragement, the Thai royals undertook a tour of Europe and the USA, during which Queen Sirikit wore fashionable two-piece dresses to match King Phumiphon’s suits (which he alternated with dress uniforms). As a result, an image of Thailand’s royals as modern and cosmopolitan, emphasized by their encounters not only with monarchs and heads of state but also with pop idols such as Benny Goodman and Elvis Presley, was projected on the international stage. At home, however, while the king favoured full uniform for his public appearances, on official occasions Queen Sirikit took to wearing attire that was styled, with some modifications (such as the ankle-length phasin in lieu of the chongkrabaen), after the court costume that had been rejected in the 1870s as uncivilized because it exposed too many body parts. Although the attempt had been made in the mid-1930s by the Miss Siam beauty contest to make this court costume into a national dress, its royal revival in the 1960s suggests a connection with the ongoing reconstitution of the monarchy’s mystical-religious aura, based on the Buddhist ideal of paternal ruler. Yet, the costume’s revival followed also in the wake of the international success of the film version of the Broadway musical The King and I (1959), based on Margaret Landon’s fictionalization of the memoirs of Anna Leonowens (played on screen by Deborah Kerr), who had been the tutor of the children of King Mongkut (played by Yul Brynner). The film, which was released in an intriguing coincidence shortly before the launch of Thai Airways International in 1960, was banned in Thailand (as was a more recent version in 1999) for its allegedly offensive representation of Mongkut. However, the costumes for The King and I had been produced by the Thai Silk Company of Jim Thompson, a US intelligence officer who at the end of the war had settled in Thailand and started reviving the local silk industry before vanishing in Malaysia in 1967. Roces_05_Ch4.qxd 78  6/7/07 2:45 pm Page 78 THE POLITICS OF DRESS IN ASIA AND THE AMERICAS Figure 4.4 Inventing sartorial traditions: King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit, late 1950s. The modern origins of Thai “traditional” costume in pop Orientalism are fully congruent with the fact that the costume is worn today only by performers in so-called “cultural shows”, such as the Loi Krathong festival in the Sukhothai Historical Park. In the 1970s, in order to market silk cloth homespun by villagers under the patronage of a queen’s charity that had taken the lead from Jim Thompson, a new female outfit was designed, with five different versions, but all consisting of a phasin and a high-collared blouse. The outfit, popularized by Queen Sirikit, the royal princesses and noblewomen, was adopted by upper- and middle-class women as formal and evening wear in lieu of Western-style dress, even though it was complemented by accessories such as shoes and leather bags. The outfit’s public meaning as a signifier of “Thainess” (khwampenthai) accorded well with the bureaucratic promotion of Roces_05_Ch4.qxd 6/7/07 2:45 pm Page 79 R E FA S H I O N I N G C I V I L I Z AT I O N  79 national culture and identity for both ideological and commercial purposes. However, as a composite ensemble (a tailored Lao sarong matched by a blouse) whose “Thainess” was evoked not by the pre-modern wrapped vestimentary regime but by the semiotic referencing of fabrics and design, this outfit in fact represented a neo-traditional invention that filled the vacuum for a Thai “national” dress.27 Epilogue During the decade of economic boom from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Thai urbanites fell under the spell of globalization, which, like “civilization” a century earlier, was domesticated through lexical translation as lokhapiwat. Like the civilizational trends that had preceded it, globalization carried with it a characteristic sartorial dimension – the “executive look” that became much sought after by urban professionals and high-ranking public servants who pursued a consumerist lifestyle. In Bangkok, next to the older local and Japanese department stores, there appeared new up-market malls housing the boutiques of major international fashion labels, while near-perfect copies manufactured locally were sold at a fraction of the price on the pavements outside the air-conditioned malls. At the same time, fashion and lifestyle magazines propagated a transnational ideal of beauty that had its physical embodiment in the racially mixed (luk krung) models and TV personalities who acquired great popularity in the 1990s: a luk krung, the blue-eyed, ThaiAmerican Siriya Winsiri (alias Cindy Burbridge), was the winner of the 1996 Miss Thailand quest. Still, for all its sociological relevance, the globalization of bodily practice, and indeed bodily appearance, was a phenomenon still limited to the urban upper strata – a limitation that highlighted the persistent cultural as well as socio-economic disparities between Bangkok and the rural provinces. Yet, villagers too have learned how to make public statements through dress: in their frequent mass protests in front of Bangkok’s sites of power, provincial farmers, tanned from exposure to the sun, proudly don the indigo cotton tunic (mor hom) as a mark of their enduring social identity. Notes 1 For an initial exploration, summarized in the first section of this essay, see my Lords of Things: The Fashioning of the Siamese Monarchy’s Modern Image (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), ch. 2. For an illustrated survey of dressing styles since 1782, see Anake Nawigamune, Kantaengkai samai rattanakosin (Costume in the Bangkok period) (Bangkok: Muangboran, 1990). 2 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (1939; Oxford: Blackwell, rev. ed. 2000). Roces_05_Ch4.qxd 80  6/7/07 2:45 pm Page 80 THE POLITICS OF DRESS IN ASIA AND THE AMERICAS 3 C. A. Breckenridge, “The Aesthetics and Politics of Colonial Collecting: India at World Fairs”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, no. 2 (1989): 195-216. 4 John Bowring, The Kingdom and People of Siam (1857; rpt. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1969), vol. 1, p. 238. 5 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper and Row, 1969). 6 Quoted in the Bangkok Times, 11 September 1897. 7 King Chulalongkorn, Rayathang thiao chawa kwa song duan (Narrative of a two-month journey to Java) (Bangkok, cremation volume, 1925), p. 30. 8 Émile Jottrand, In Siam, trans. E.J. Tips (1905; Bangkok: White Lotus, 1996), p. 226. 9 Jottrand, In Siam, p. 2. 10 Jottrand, In Siam, p. 96. 11 C.A. Carter, The Kingdom of Siam (1904; rpt. Bangkok: The Siam Society, 1988), p. 111. 12 Craig J. Reynolds (ed and trans), Autobiography: The Life of Prince-Patriarch Vajirañana of Siam, 1860–1921 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979). 13 Craig J. Reynolds, Seditious Histories: Contesting Thai and Southeast Asian Pasts (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), pp. 293–4. 14 See A Century of Thai Graphic Design, comp. Anake Nawigamune, trans. David Smyth (Bangkok: River Books, 2000); and Dome Sukwong and Suwannapak Sawasdi, A Century of Thai Cinema (Bangkok: River Books, 2001). 15 Kukrit Pramoj, Four Reigns, trans. Thulachandra (Bangkok: Duang Kamol, 1987), pp. 99–105. 16 Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in Modern India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), ch. 3. 17 Quoted in Scot Barmé, Woman, Man, Bangkok: Love, Sex, and Popular Culture in Thailand (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), p. 182. 18 Barmé, Woman, Man, Bangkok, pp. 234–5. 19 Translation in Thak Chaloemtiarana (ed), Thai Politics: Extracts and Documents, 1932–1957 (Bangkok: Social Sciences Association of Thailand, 1978), pp. 252–3. 20 Thak, Thai Politics, pp. 257–8. 21 Quoted in Thak Chaloemtiarana, Thailand: The Politics of Despotic Paternalism (Bangkok: Social Sciences Association of Thailand and Thai Khadi Institute, Thammasat University, 1979), p. 143. 22 Thamsook Numnonda, “When Thailand followed the Leader”, Social Sciences Review 4 (1977): 202. 23 Barmé, Woman, Man, Bangkok, p. 235. 24 Thak, Thai Politics, p. 272 (broadcast of 14 September 1941); p. 308 (broadcast of 5 June 1942). 25 Mattani Rutnin, Modern Thai Literature: The Process of Modernization and the Transformation of Values (Bangkok: Thammasat University Press, 1988), p. 6. 26 Sujit Wongthet, “Second Nature” (“Kamonlasandan”, 1967), translation published in In the Mirror: Literature and Politics in Siam in the American Era, ed. and trans. Benedict R.O’G. Anderson and Ruchira Mendiones (Bangkok: Duang Kamol, 1985), pp. 98–9. 27 For an elaboration of the concept of neo-traditional in relation to art practice, see John Clark, Modern Asian Art (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1998), p. 73.