It’s bananas. Bunches of bananas, yellow, loud, bright. Pineapples. Red cherries. Watermelons. For the elegant, tropical flowers on black.

Matching outfits are de rigueur for tourists in Central Vietnam. Friends, old and young, do it. Families do it. Couples definitely do it. Let’s all do it. Let’s wear matching banana outfits.

2018, Central Vietnam. Tourists crowd the ancient UNESCO town of Hoi An and the modern seaside city of Da Nang. I spend the summer and the autumn in Da Nang with my friend who lives here. We like to people-watch, it is fun. Tourists walk along the beaches, sit in cafes, stroll under the lanterns of Hoi An in the warm breeze. They pose for selfies and shop in the markets. Most are Vietnamese and Korean, Chinese and Japanese.

Holidays have their own rituals. Life is different, on holiday. We travel away from our everyday life, unusual routines and unfamiliar surroundings make it easier for us to inhabit a new self. Tourists in Central Vietnam collectively take part in a peculiar holiday ritual that can’t be missed: couples, families, groups of friends wear matching outfits printed in large, bold patterns of fruit and flowers. I like to call them banana outfits.

Tourists buy banana outfits in market stalls and tourist shops. Cheap clothes printed in primary colours. Shirts, dresses, hats, and shorts covered in bananas, watermelons, pineapples. Cheerful, silly, cartoon-like. The South-East Asian equivalent of Hawaiian Aloha shirts.

On holiday we inhabit a new geography, new habits, and a new identity. Banana outfits are the visual shortcut to a new holiday persona. They signal that you are here to enjoy yourself, to be light and fun and goofy. The shared experience of wearing matching banana outfits signifies the shared experience of the holiday. Matching outfits are a statement of whom you belong to. They make the holiday-makers, they make the holiday.

Fruit

Flowers

I want to know more about banana dresses. My Vietnamese friends think the concept comes from South Korea. South Korea is cool in Vietnam. It is the main cultural leader in Vietnamese pop and youth culture. So I write to my South Korean friend, a dress historian in Seoul. She believes that the trend is linked to retro styles coming back in fashion. In particular, the re-release of old films where gangsters wear Hawaiian shirts with tropical motifs like palm trees and flowers.

My academic friend has noticed the patterns morphing into new designs, but bananas and fruit are not easily seen in South Korea. They are becoming popular amongst tourists coming back from South East Asia. She suggests that these designs are inspired by the Korean wave, copied and reinvented in South East Asia into new patterns.

And about wearing matching outfits? It’s become fashionable for South Korean families to wear matching clothes when going on a trip together. It’s seen as cute. It’s a very specific trend reserved for holidays. She tells me: ‘People in Asia think that relationships are very important, you know.”

With Thanks To…

A big THANK YOU to my friends Sun Jung Ko, Keina Nguyen, and Greg Ball