Designers from Myanmar twist local fashion

With Myanmar emerging as a manufacturing hub for mass-produced clothes, a crop of young designers are using homegrown fashion to preserve the country’s sartorial heritage and reshape the sweatshop model.

Inside her boutique in downtown Yangon, Pyone Thet Thet Kyaw crafts her own designs using traditional patterns and fabrics, many from ethnic minority groups, to make A-line skirts, dresses and tops. On another she adds the high-collared neckline of the inngyi –– a tight top usually worn by Myanmar women along with a fitted, sarong-like skirt –– to a flirty pleated dress. “We Burmese care about our traditional clothes. When you modernise the traditional patterned clothes you have to be careful they’re not too flashy –– or too modern,” she says.

Myanmar is fiercely proud of its traditional garb, which was largely protected from the influx of homogenous Western fashion now ubiquitous across Southeast Asia by the former military junta. For 50 years they shut the country off to foreign influences and tightly controlled what was worn in all official media.

Designer Ma Pont said she was not allowed to show even a flash of shoulder or armpit when she used to make clothes for military controlled TV channels in the 1990s. “We were not really free,” she said.

Shopping malls aimed at Yangon’s growing middle class are sprouting up around the city, while on its fringes factories are churning out clothes for international brands. It is a flip-side of the industry which boutique designer Pyone Thet Thet Kyaw has seen first-hand.