Focus to the National costume in Sri Lanka

Sri Lankan costumes spanning from around the 6th Century B.C. with the first available records of the island's dress forms, to the post-independence era in the mid-20th Century. This broad time span begins with the hints of a pre-Vijayan culture of costumes and textiles and ends in the striven post-1948 independence politics and its relationship to dress both in prescription and practice. Dictated dress forms at different periods in Sri Lanka's history, the mutual adaptation of dress styles among ethnic communities, as well as between east and west. It looks at the impact of the colonial dress forms in transforming Lankan identities and at the politics of such adaptation.