Micronesian Skirts

I lived in the Pacific Island nation of the Republic of the Marshall Islands for many years.  In this country and the neighboring Federated States of Micronesia, women still make many of their clothes.  They are especially well known for their skirts.

In the Micronesian cultures, women never wear pants or shorts.  It's considered very immodest to show any part of the thigh, considered the sexiest part of the female body.  Skirts must be long enough to keep the knees covered, but not so long as to get wet and dirty in an environment where there's plenty of water (salt and fresh), sand, and mud.  They also have to be something that you can work in.  Micronesian women do a lot of physical labor in addition to child care, like washing clothes by hand.  They are also traditionally the gender that works in the fields, while the men fish and gather food by the shore.  The skirts also have to be tough enough to survive a lot of wearing and trips through the laundry -- these are very poor countries and people don't have a lot of clothes.

The Micronesian skirts are all hand made and all different from each other.  They are made using simple sewing machines and polyester-cotton fabrics, although the purple skirt shown above does include some polyester satin.  The decoration is with reverse applique and creative use of a handful of built in decorative stitches.  Check out the detail on the hem of the purple skirt from the island of Pohnpei.

The skirts are designed to be very efficient in the use of fabric.  The top section is 22", half of a 45" piece of cloth.  The flounce is 11", one quarter of the 45" cloth.  There's absolutely no wasted fabric here!  Since Micronesians tend to be quite short, a skirt constructed in this way is about mid-calf length on adult women.
On the neighboring island of Korsae, they have a slightly different twist on skirt design.

Instead of a flounce at the bottom, this skirt has a slit in the side seam.  I was told this is called lava-lava style, after the wrap that men wear in Fiji.

This skirt also has extensive reverse applique at them hem.  There are many layers of fabric in the bottom 6" of the skirt, which makes it hand differently than if only a sew small pieces of fabric had been used in traditional applique.

This green skirt, also from Kosrae, steps away from the strictly floral motifs to include an image of the island itself -- the sleeping lady ridgeline that gives the island it's name "Island of the Sleeping lady".  As with the other Kosraean skirt, the side seam slit isn't hidden, it's emphasized by running the floral motifs up the side of the slit.

The edge of the skirt itself at the slit is uneven.  The many layers of fabric used for the reverse applique make it stiff enough for this technique to work.

Of course, with this skirt style taking the islands by storm, there are some copy cats.

This blue skirt is from Yap, in the western most part of the Federated States of Micronesia.  It features sections from a printed fabric appliqued to the main section of the skirt and a flounce probably from the same printed fabric.  I suspect that this skirt was made not by a Yapese, but by a Filipino worker on the island.

The Chinese are active in the islands, and they created this skirt, most likely as a factory in China.  It's not hand made, but the embroidery and applique are done by machine.  The fabrics used here are nearly 100% polyester, which cuts the cost a lot.  The Micronesians do sometimes wear the Chinese made skirts, but greatly prefer the home made ones, which have cultural significance for them.

Come back next week and see how Micronesian skirt design influenced some of my projects.