Overview
A thousand years of Chinese rule changed what the administration wore and left the village largely alone. That split — a sinicised official class above a Southeast Asian working population — is the whole story of dress in this period, and it set the pattern that every later Vietnamese dynasty inherited.
Key garments and style
Officials and the families who served in the commanderies wore the Chinese cross-collar robe closing to the right, with a cap and a sash, and rank expressed through colour and material exactly as it was in the metropole. Silk-weaving technique and sericulture spread with the administration.
Ordinary dress was adapted to a hot, wet, rice-growing delta and stayed that way: a wrapped lower cloth or loincloth for men, a wrapped skirt for women, a cloth across the breast, and bare feet. Chinese writers recorded the local population as short-haired, tattooed and barefoot, and recorded it as barbarity — which is a fact about the observers, though it does confirm the practices.
Dress was also a site of resistance. Sinicising governors are credited in the histories with instructing the population in caps and sandals, and the recurring revolts, from the Trưng sisters in AD 40 onward, were led by an elite that had adopted Chinese forms and used them against Chinese rule.
Transition
Independence in 938 did not undo the arrangement. The new Vietnamese dynasties kept Sinitic court costume — as a claim to equal standing rather than as submission — while village dress continued untouched.