Overview
Thonburi lasted fifteen years and exists because Ayutthaya did not. The Burmese sack of 1767 destroyed the capital, its workshops and much of its written record, and Taksin’s kingdom was an act of reassembly. Its dress is Ayutthayan dress carried through a catastrophe — which makes continuity, rather than change, the thing to explain.
Key garments and style
The basic garments are unchanged: the chong kraben, a long cloth passed between the legs and tucked at the back, worn by both men and women, and for women the sabai, a breast cloth draped over one shoulder. Both are wrapped and folded rather than cut and sewn, and both leave the upper body largely bare in a way nineteenth-century photographs still show.
What was hardest to replace was the cloth itself. Siamese courts had long imported painted and printed cottons from the Coromandel coast of India, made to Thai patterns and reserved by rank — a trade that depended on court agents and craft knowledge, both disrupted by the war. Sumptuary distinction in Siam ran through textiles rather than tailoring, so re-establishing supply was a political matter, not only an economic one.
Very little survives from the reign itself, and much of what is said about Thonburi dress is read backwards from Ayutthayan and early Rattanakosin evidence.
Transition
In 1782 the Chakri dynasty moved the capital across the river to Bangkok and deliberately rebuilt Ayutthayan forms, dress among them, before the nineteenth century brought Western clothing to the Siamese court.