Embroidery
100 Years of South East Asian Nonya Embroidery
Jan
I grew up in tropical South East Asia and assumed as a child that everyone was creative. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized the women who most influenced my formative years – my maternal grandmother and mother – were extraordinarily talented.
My family belonged to an unusual fusion cultural population known as the Peranakan (‘descendants’ in the Malay language) or Straits Chinese. We are the descendants of Chinese immigrants who settled in Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula area (now known as West Malaysia and Singapore) probably from about the late 15th to the 19th century. Few women were among them so a number of the men married local women.
The male Peranakan became known as Chinese babas and the women, nonyas or nyonyas. The blending of the founding families led to an extraordinary intermixing of language, customs, cuisines, fashion, architecture, jewellery, and home décor to a harmonized style uniquely their own.
Kebayas & details
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My grandmother always wore the nonya kebaya. The kebaya is traditional wear in many parts of South East Asia. It usually consists of a fitted jacket-like blouse and a batik sarong. A camisole is worn beneath. The nonya kebaya underwent a profound change sometime in the late 1930s. Before then, the nonya wore simply patterned dark brown cotton blouses called baju panjang (long dress) adorned with a set of triple brooches with top knot hairdos to match. But these gave way to starched kebayas made of transparent material, typically voile, of different hues, adorned with intricate machine embroidery. The triple brooches became the ‘buttons’ as the garments had no buttonholes.
Read more in our Fall 2014 issue.
Article by Pearl Blay
