[ThanhPhero]

A decade ago one of the girls in my parish asked me what I thought about what she should wear to her senior prom. She was a tall (for a Vietnamese then) delicate and very pretty girl and very thin and didn't want bare shoulders. I immediately got a picture in my head of her in one of those huge bare shoulder getups that girls wore to the prom back in my day in the Jurassic Era and almost choked.
I said, "Wear an ao dai." That is the Vietnamese traditional dress. She said that would look odd and terribly old fashioned, thinking of women back "home" that had been wearing those things for centuries.
I told her that if she wore one all the other girls would be mad at her because their dates would be looking only at her and lining up to dance with her. Well, she wore a double ao dai, two layers of silk, one of blue and one of red. The ao dai is floor length and split to the waist over loose silk pants. In a draft the fore and aft panels swirl and the colors shift through red, blue and purple over the white pants. One of her classmates months later told me that Hanh got venomous commentary from a number of the other girls back in school the days after the prom.
I didn't find about how it all went until midsummer when a neighbor who is a teacher at that school mentioned to my wife that there had been a strange bit of disturbance at the prom, that some of the "popular girls" had left early in snits and more than one had slapped their boyfriends and also left.
I asked from across the yard if one of the girls was dressed differently. Wife's friend said "yes, how did you know?"

[Albion Wilde]

I said, "Wear an ao dai." That is the Vietnamese traditional dress.

Awesome story! Thanks!

[5th MEB]

Brilliant idea, and makes for a beautiful formal gown at any time (of course I could be prejudiced).

[Rodamala]

I enjoyed your ao dai story as well... what a lovely garment.