Fashioning Parliament: The Politics of Dress in Myanmar’s Postcolonial Legislatures

This article discusses the significance of dress codes and clothing in postcolonial Myanmar’s successive legislatures. Burmese representatives have since the 1950s been strongly encouraged to wear dignified garb and non-Western dress when carrying out their duties in parliament. What does it tell us? The contribution of this study based on field interviews and the analysis of newspaper reports and parliamentary procedures, is threefold. It first sheds light on Myanmar’s understudied parliamentary history and some of its startling institutional continuities despite decades of military rule. It then shows how the fashioning and reinvention of traditional attires by Burmese parliamentarians has accelerated the pace of decolonisation, while serving as an effective tool of representation. Lastly, it argues that the ritual of dress in parliament has contributed to a persistent reification of identities, thereby reinforcing the politicisation of ethnicity in an already fragmented Myanmar society.