Title
Lady's blouse
Year/Period
First half of the 20th century
Region
Java, Indonesia
Object Type
Material
Technique
Dimension
Object size: 84.0 x 136.0 cm
Accession No.
2018-00987
Collection of
Credit Line
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Bienfait. Presented to the ACM by the City of Delft, Netherlands.
This white cotton blouse trimmed with handmade lace is known as a 'kebaya'. Such garments were thought to have originated in Java and were initially popular with mixed Dutch-Indoneisan ladies in the cosmopolitan centres of Java. The term kebaya is thought to be derived from the Arab word ‘kaba’ which means clothing. By the 1920s and 30s kebaya came to be worn by women of many communities in both the Dutch East Indies and British Straits Settlements. Kebaya were traditionally worn together with a kain jarit or kain panjang, an unstitched length of cloth, typically batik, wrapped around the lower half of the body, sometimes referred to as a ‘sarong’.
