Overview
Thailand’s national costume is younger than it looks. The chut thai worn at weddings and state occasions was assembled in the 1960s from historical and court dress, and its creation is documented — which makes it one of the clearest cases anywhere of a national dress being designed rather than inherited.
Key garments and style
The immediate background is the Phibun government’s cultural mandates of the early 1940s, which instructed Thais to wear hats, shoes and Western dress in public as a mark of a civilised nation, and discouraged the wrapped chong kraben. Dress was legislated as national policy, and the mandates are remembered with some ambivalence.
The chut thai answered the resulting gap. Preparing for state visits in 1960, Queen Sirikit had a set of formal outfits developed from Ayutthaya and Rattanakosin dress, and the result was eight named styles — differing in whether the top is fitted or draped, whether a sabai is worn, how formal the occasion — made in Thai silk with a wrapped or sewn lower garment.
Thai silk itself had been revived commercially in the postwar years and had an export market by then, so the costume and the industry supported each other.
Transition
Everyday Thai clothing is Western, the chut thai is ceremonial, and a domestic design and garment industry works in both directions.