Overview
The Tran kept the Sinitic court costume the Ly had established and were, at the same time, conspicuously Southeast Asian in everything the court did not regulate. The dynasty that repelled three Mongol invasions is also the one whose rulers tattooed themselves, and both facts sit in the same chronicles.
Key garments and style
For ceremony, officials wore the cross-collar robe closing to the right — the áo giao lĩnh — with a cap, and rank read from colour and material. Beneath that formal layer the habits were local and are recorded as such: teeth blackened with lacquer, hair worn bound or cut short, and bare feet normal even at court.
Tattooing is the sharpest instance. Tran princes and guardsmen were tattooed, by custom including dragon designs on the thighs, and the chronicles note the practice being abandoned by a later Tran king who declined to be marked — a small, datable moment of a court deciding that a native custom no longer suited it.
Ordinary dress was the delta wardrobe: wrapped skirts, short jackets, a breast cloth, the conical rain hat. Vietnam’s climate did most of the design work, and the court’s Chinese robes were the exception rather than the rule.
Transition
After a brief Ming occupation the Later Le codified dress in detail under a Confucian order, which pushed the local customs the Tran had lived with — the teeth, the tattoos, the bare feet — toward the margins of respectability.