Overview
Sukhothai is remembered as the first Thai kingdom and as a Theravada Buddhist one, and its dress is correspondingly plain. The wrapped clothing it inherited from the Mon and Khmer states was kept without elaboration, and what the period is really known for is the sculpture that depicts it.
Key garments and style
Men wore the chong kraben: a long cloth wound at the waist, drawn between the legs and tucked at the back, leaving the legs free and needing no fastening. Women wore a wrapped skirt, the pha nung, with the sabai — a length of cloth passed across the chest and over one shoulder. The upper body was otherwise commonly uncovered, and both sexes went barefoot.
Ornament was modest by later Thai standards: gold, shell and glass beads, with the elaborate jewelled dress that appears on divine images belonging to iconography rather than to the street.
The Sukhothai Buddha images are the period’s real contribution and its main visual source. Their smooth flowing robes and the walking Buddha’s swinging drapery are a distinctive Thai treatment of cloth in bronze — an idealisation, but one that tells us how drapery was understood.
Cotton was the everyday fibre, and the north-eastern weaving traditions that fed the kingdom were already old.
Transition
Ayutthaya, richer and connected to a world of maritime trade, took the same garments and made them splendid in imported silk and gold-brocaded cloth.