For today's cross-culture post, I want to talk about clothes. All about clothes. What sort of clothes are social acceptable for doing work around your house? What sort of clothes are acceptable if you're doing sport? What should you wear to church? What are the gender differences? What is seen as formal or informal wear? Basically--how are clothes different in America and Vanuatu?
When I first got to Vanuatu, one of my biggest complaints had to do with the clothing that I had to wear. Vanuatu is a very conservative country, and one of the ways that it's conservative is that shorts and even long trousers are not really seen as appropriate wear for women. While a woman can wear a t shirt or a tank top (and even breastfeed in church), thighs are verboten. In the capital city, Vila, this means : you'll see young women in the Vila uniform of tshirt/tank top, hair slicked back in a bun, earrings, and knee length (or longer) shorts. Think the type of shorts men in America wear. In more remote settings (like where I was on Tongariki), even those long shorts are considered inappropriate for most settings. Women wear shorts while playing sport, doing work around the house, and sometimes while going to the garden. It is, however, inappropriate for women to wear shorts to the nakamal (chief's house / communal meeting house), to church, or inside school bounds. Many villages have a trousers fine. Mine did not have a trousers fine in public places, although my school by-laws specified a 500 vatu fine (around 5.50$) for any woman who wore shorts inside the school boundaries, except during sports hour. I never heard of anyone being charged the trousers fine, but it was considered disrespectful.
And to us, in America, it's like -- what??? As I'm home on home leave, I've been looking around at street style throughout Alexandria and Richmond. There's one thing you can say for sure about women's fashion in America, and that is that during the fall and winter, trousers reign supreme. I don't actually think I've seen a woman walking around in a skirt and a dress yet. You see leggings, jeans, trousers, even occasionally shorts -- but that's because for us, wearing trousers is not suggestive. I think Americans are the opposite of Ni-Vanuatu in that we think showing legs is A-OK, but we explode over whether or not breastfeeding in public is OK, or whether a woman can sunbathe topless. I heard about a professor at American University who was thrown through the ringer in the media for breastfeeding in class. To make the point that this is cultural, my head teacher at Coconak School, Elsie Daniel, breastfed her baby at school multiple times a day, every day. Once I told some friends on the island that, in America, sometimes women have to breastfeed in the toilets at work, and they thought it was just the most disgusting and bizarre thing imaginable. From wanem ol woman i mas kivim titi insaed lo wan toilet? It's American culture that says legs are good but breasts are bad; it's Ni-Van culture that says breasts are good but legs are bad, on a woman.
So, given that modesty in Vanuatu is mostly related to the bottom half of the body, what do women wear?
I already described the Vila uniform for young women -- long shorts, tank/tee, maybe a hoodie. When it comes to professional wear for women of all ages, you'll usually see something along the lines of a calf-length black skirt with an island printed, modest short sleeve shirt. Many businesses in Vila have uniforms for their female workers, which might mean different colors and fabrics, but will be along the same lines. The female staff of the Peace Corps office are super, super fancy, and they usually dress up even more nicely -- usually longer skirts (but sometimes trousers), really nice tops, and of course, earrings, nice hair. (The women who work in the Peace Corps office are seriously very, very stylish. When I'm trying to figure out the lines of what is appropriate yet fashionable, I usually look at what they're wearing for ideas. It has definitely convinced me that I need to spend more time on my hair!) You will, of course, also see TONS of island dresses. They're very versatile -- most of the women who work in the market wear them; many store clerks wear them; many office workers wear them -- and extremely common.
What about in the villages? On Tongariki, most women wear calf length skirts with t shirts or tank tops. Unlike in Vila, clothes tend to be worn until they got pretty crummy. (I include myself here -- I would wear shirts that had rat holes in them, because it was the shirt I had.) It's like clothes downgrade from something you could wear to a nice occasion, to normal clothes, to something that you only wear if you're going to the garden and nowhere else. On Tongariki it is especially common for women to wear island dresses. I can't remember my Auntie Ruth not wearing an island dress. On casual occasions, like around the house, or for young women who had been wearing trousers but needed to go to the nakamal, it is really common to wrap a sarong around your waist. These are not super stylish sarongs like they wear in Burma or Samoa -- it's usually just tying a knot around a hip rather than folding it over.
I did get very used to wearing long skirts, which I didn't expect. In America, you couldn't have caught me dead in one -- but they have their advantages. In day-to-day life, my island uniform is a tank top, a long skirt, flip flops, knock off Raybans, and a woven basket. In Vila, I usually dress like a tourist, and when I run into friends and family from Tongariki, I just hope I'm not wearing shorts that are too short. Vila is pretty free, because the Australian cruise ship tourists wear microscopic mini shorts. This means, as a foreign looking woman, I don't feel weird dressing 'western' in the main part of town. Caveat: this only applies to people who do not live in Vila. If you're a woman who works in Vila, you have to be a lot more careful about the clothes you wear, since it's such a small town. For me, I can dress like everyday is Fleet Week if I want to. (I don't.) But it's important to remember.
Coming up tomorrow : men's clothes! Or, the revenge of the island shirt.
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