You have probably seen it without knowing its name. The uniform worn by Singapore Airlines cabin crew — that indigo blouse patterned with batik — caught my eye recently in an Instagram post. It is the “Sarong Kebaya,” designed by the French couturier Pierre Balmain, and it may be the most famous kebaya in the world. But trace its beauty back far enough, and you arrive somewhere long before any national brand: at a single blouse perfected by the women of a mixed-blood culture.
The Nyonya kebaya. The crystallization, one stitch at a time, of Peranakan culture.
The Peranakans: People Who Lived In the Between
The Peranakans emerged from the fifteenth century onward, in Malacca, Penang, and Singapore, from intermarriage between Chinese immigrants — mostly Hokkien — and local Malay society. The men are called Baba, the women Nyonya.
What makes them fascinating is that they assimilated to neither side. The Peranakans kept much of their Chinese ancestral worship and religious identity while absorbing Malay language, food, and ways of living. They spoke a Baba Malay laced with Chinese vocabulary; they ate a Nyonya cuisine where Chinese, Malay, and Indonesian seasonings dissolved into one another. Both, and neither. They lived the in-between itself.
And that in-between found its most visible form in the clothing of women.
From Baju Panjang to Kebaya: A Garment Drawing Closer to the Body
Nyonya dress did not begin as the kebaya we know today.
From the 1900s into the 1930s, the Nyonya wore the baju panjang — the “long dress.” Adopted from the Malay baju kurung, it was loose and wide, falling to the ankles in a straight cut that covered the body, the legs, the arms. It embodied the modest, dignified bearing of a well-bred Nyonya, and it was worn with a wrapped batik sarong from Java. This was formal dress.
The turning point came in the 1910s. Among younger Nyonyas, a shorter top with two front pockets (Hokkien tay-sah) came into fashion. Hemlines rose; lace was added at the edges. In place of buttons, the front was fastened with the kerosang (also kerongsang) — a set of three linked brooches.
These “kerosang thow” — peach-shaped brooches — are lovely. A peach-shaped mother brooch (kerongsang ibu) sits slightly tilted on the left of the body, with two smaller round brooches (kerongsang anak-anak) chained below. Wealthy Nyonyas set all three with rings of diamonds. Mother and children. Three to a set. Even the jewelry carried meanings of family and inheritance, stitched in.
After this came the shorter kebaya renda (1920s–30s), the more sparingly embroidered kebaya biku, and the body-skimming kebaya bandung of the 1950s, worn by the stars of Malay cinema. Step by step, the kebaya drew closer to the body and grew more refined. From an age when clothing held the body at a distance to one that affirmed it — that shift is recorded in the history of a single blouse.
Embroidery, Where Cultures Are Sewn Together
The heart of the Nyonya kebaya lies in the dense hand embroidery worked onto sheer, almost translucent fabric — voile, silk, lace.
Here the Peranakan in-between appears most vividly. The embroidered motifs line up as plainly Chinese emblems of good fortune: peonies, phoenixes, butterflies, mandarin ducks. As Western influence entered, roses and swans joined them, and brilliant colors — royal blue, pink, turquoise — came into favor. Malay batik technique, Chinese symbolism, European lace and palette: three cultures sewn together within each single stitch.
The footwear is the same — the kasut manek, beaded slippers, in which tiny glass beads (once from Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic; today from Japan) are sewn one by one into the cloth. The designs draw on European florals; the colors on Peranakan porcelain and batik. A dizzying accumulation of handwork becomes a single pair of shoes.
The kebaya, in other words, is a wearable mixed-blood culture. No single part of it can be reduced to a single origin.
Not Resistance, but Stitching
What draws me here is that this culture refused the grammar of opposition.
When cultures meet, we reach for words like “clash,” “assimilation,” “resistance.” One erases the other, or one is swallowed by the other. But what the Peranakan women accomplished with the kebaya was neither. They placed Chinese, Malay, and Western elements in no relation of superior and inferior, winner and loser — and with needle and thread, sewed them together into a third thing.
This is not resistance to convention. It is a move that goes beyond convention. To remain Malay, to remain Chinese, and yet to make a new beauty that is the pure form of neither. I know of nothing closer to the stance I have called the 素直な反逆者 (Sunao na Rebel / the Honest Rebel). Rebellion is not negating and destroying; it is affirming and surpassing.
Each stitch is also an invisible design line drawn between two cultures. The design of 間 (ma) — the space between. Not filling the blank, but editing the blank itself into meaning. The kebaya, you might say, is a worked example of “designing the in-between,” laid out across cloth.
Not a Melting Pot, but a Mixing Bowl: A Line Drawn from the Table
There is a phrase that lights up this idea of “stitching” from another angle entirely. Food.
In 2015, at a forum on cultural heritage among the ASEAN+3 nations held in Tokyo, the Filipino cultural official Milan Ted Torralba likened his country’s identity to a single dessert. Halo-halo: shaved ice mixed with beans, jelly, fruit, custard, purple yam, in all its colors. In Tagalog, halo means to mix, to merge, to harmonize. The Filipino, he said, is a “halo-halo” of more than eighty ethnolinguistic cultures.
What he stressed was a single point: that it is not a melting pot. A melting pot dissolves what is thrown in, turning it into one uniform alloy. Halo-halo is different. The beans stay beans, the yam stays yam — each keeping its shape and color and taste, coexisting in one bowl. Within diversity there is unity, and within unity, identity. That was his formulation.
This has exactly the same structure as the kebaya’s embroidery. Needle and thread do not melt the Chinese phoenix and the Malay batik and the European lace into one. They fasten each — still distinguishable — onto a single cloth. Not melting, but stitching. Not melting but stitching. Two bodily acts, dress and the table, speak — unintentionally — the same philosophy of the in-between.
A Stitched-Together City: The Architecture of Singapore
And this thinking of the stitch is inscribed not only on cloth or in a bowl, but at the scale of the city itself.
At the same forum, Jean Mei-Yin Wee of Singapore’s National Heritage Board told the story of a temple. The Hindu Sri Mariamman temple, in Chinatown, was built by a Chinese businessman for Indian laborers. And every year, the street before that temple is lit for the Chinese Lunar New Year. It belongs to everyone, and to no one alone. Here too, religion and ethnicity are not melted together but woven, side by side.
Wee herself once served as curator of the “Baba House,” a house-museum recreating Peranakan domestic life. When she said that to respect and integrate ASEAN+3 means “to know and understand that within the region there are differences, and also things that resemble one another,” she was only restating, in the language of cities and regions, what the kebaya’s every stitch has long embodied. Architecture repeats the “design of the in-between” — laid out on cloth — in stone and brick.
Balmain’s Uniform, Once More
Seen this way, the Singapore Airlines uniform of the opening looks entirely different.
In 1968, when Pierre Balmain translated the indigenous sarong kebaya into the international icon of the “Singapore Girl,” he was refining and stylizing the lineage of Peranakan and Malay women’s dress into a national brand. This too is a kind of stitching. A local mixed-blood culture, sewn anew into the uniform of a global airline industry. Read critically, it is the commodification of culture; read another way, the very “power to live in the between” that the kebaya always held was being staged again, at the scale of a nation.
In 2023, the kebaya was inscribed on UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage — through a joint nomination by Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, and Brunei. Precisely because it is a garment that cannot be assigned to any one country, the only path was for several countries to join hands and nominate it together. There could be no more kebaya-like way to be inscribed.
What is striking is that the idea of this joint nomination had already taken root in the field of Southeast Asian cultural administration eight years before the inscription. At the forum mentioned above, the speakers spoke of Peranakan jewelry as something “found in common across Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore,” sharing a vision in which heritage is not fenced off within one nation but held in common across a region. The UNESCO inscription of the kebaya was, you might say, a flower that bloomed on ground already prepared.
A garment born in the in-between refuses, to the very end, to be shut inside any single in-between.
Principal References
The historical accounts in this essay draw chiefly on the following works and resources, recorded here as a point of entry for anyone who wishes to study the kebaya and Peranakan dress in earnest.
- Datin Seri Endon Mahmood, The Nyonya Kebaya: A Century of Straits Chinese Costume (Singapore: Periplus Editions (HK), 2004; ISBN 0794602738). — The landmark study of a century of Straits Chinese costume by Endon Mahmood, the late wife of Malaysia’s former prime minister.
- Peter Wee, A Peranakan Legacy: The Heritage of the Straits Chinese (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2009).
- Christine Ong Kiat Neo, Nyonya Kebaya: Intricacies of the Peranakan Heritage (Singapore: Christine Ong Kiat Neo, 2011).
- Tan Sooi Beng (ed.), Eclectic Cultures for All: The Development of the Peranakan Performing, Visual and Material Arts in Penang (Universiti Sains Malaysia). — The source for the account of the shift from baju panjang to kebaya.
- “Nonya kebaya,” Singapore National Library Infopedia (NLB eResources). — Used for verifying the works above and for general background.
- Japan Consortium for International Cooperation in Cultural Heritage (ed.), ASEAN+3 Cultural Heritage Forum 2015: Walking Together with the Nations of Southeast Asia — Inheriting and Utilizing Diverse Cultural Heritage (2016). — The source for the latter half of this essay: the halo-halo argument (Torralba), the Sri Mariamman temple and multicultural architecture (Wee), and the regional sharing of Peranakan jewelry.
On the 2023 UNESCO intangible cultural heritage inscription (joint nomination by Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, and Brunei), reporting from the respective countries and inscription-related materials were consulted. For finer points of fact, the primary sources above are recommended.