Culture and dress: foreign influenced dress of the king in the Kandyn kingdom of Sri Lanka

Abstract

Culture has been playing a pivotal role in dress from time immemorial. The objective of the research is to analyse the interrelationship between cultural and dress.The selected study setting is the Kandyan Kingdom of Sri Lanka. Kandyan reign of Sri Lanka from 14th Century to 1815 is a well-known historical era for the strong effects of foreign influences on the society. Clothing attitudes of the selective Kings of the era were studied in this research. Plenty of resources such as living evidences, documented information and murals are available in this setting. As a result of different cultural influences the Kandyan dress showed hybrid formation of western and South Indian and Sinhalese traditional sartorial features. The dress became an amazing blend of Eastern and Western dress items. They combined different foreign dress items together and made their own one. Culture and dress have strong interconnection. When contents of culture change, trends of dress are gradually changed.