Overview
These are the decades in which Vietnam, newly independent after a thousand years of Chinese rule, had to decide what an independent Vietnamese court looked like — and largely decided it looked Sinitic. Adopting Tang and Song court costume was not submission but the opposite: it was how a ruler declared himself an emperor of equal standing rather than a provincial governor.
Key garments and style
Court dress means the cross-collar robe closing to the right, worn with a belt and a form of headwear, with colour marking rank; the Dinh and Early Le courts are recorded organising officials into ranks and dressing them accordingly. The dynasties were short and the arrangements provisional, so the codes were repeatedly restated rather than settled.
Below the court, dress was the practical clothing of the delta — short garments, wrapped lower cloths, bare feet, and the conical rain hat — and it was barely touched by any of this. Buddhism carried great prestige in the period, with senior monks acting as advisers to rulers, so monastic robes were among the most respected garments in the country.
Almost nothing survives directly. There are no garments and very little contemporary imagery, so the period is read from later chronicles compiled centuries afterwards and from temple sculpture, which is a caution worth carrying.
Transition
The Ly, stable and long-lived, turned these provisional arrangements into a settled system of court costume that later dynasties inherited and elaborated.