Men in Skirts

I don’t remember the first time I noticed the men in skirts. I call them skirts for lack of a better word to group the variety of traditional garments covering Indian men below the waist. I probably saw them for the first time in the form of dusty checkered lungis outside the airport in Chennai, but I would have been too overwhelmed to notice them there.

I would have seen more of the workman’s lungi, along with the more formal white or cream of a vaetti when we took our first visit to the West Tambaram market across the street from MCC. Once again, the more pressing sights of brilliant sarees and stunted beggars’ limbs blocked this omnipresent detail from my perception.    

My first vivid memory of the menswear that sometimes drags the ground like a formal gown whisking around the motion of the wearer’s footsteps probably came when Ryan showed us his tied above his knees in a bizarre combination somewhere between miniskirt and loincloth. He had purchased the 200x130 cm rectangle of burnt orange cloth on our trip to a different market that day. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, so the gold-embroidered border stood out where it doubled over at his waist from folding the shorter side of fabric up to expose his lower legs.

The skirtlike family of garments is common in a variety of South Asian countries from Somolia in the horn of Africa to Indonesia above Australia. They are hard to definitively describe because they encompass a variety of names and styles. The fashion that Ryan wore is packaged as a dhoti. Suresh informed us that men in Tamil Nadu call them vaettis when the long end is just wrapped around the waist and tucked exactly like a man would wear a bath towel. The same garment worn the same way is called a mundu in Kerala and a pancha in Anhdra Pradesh, both states that border Tamil Nadu.

The double dhoti is twice as long and can be worn like a single dhoti with two layers, or passed through the legs in a pantlike configuration, but no one in Kerala or Tamil Nadu does that for daily use. The lungi is probably the most popular skirt in either state. It’s like a dhoti with the short ends joined into a tunnel you just step into and then tuck into place. Unlike the solid color dhotis, lungis come in a variety of patterns from checkered to floral. Though I don’t see them much in shops, they are ubiquitous in lower class men from construction workers to street peddlers.

Wearing a dhoti, I have quickly learned, takes much more thought than simple shorts or pants. The obvious issue is the lack of any snaps, belts, buttons, or zippers to keep the thing on your body. A simple wrap stays surprisingly secure, though, when placed at the natural waist to avoid most of the stress of a normal walking stride. Additionally, you must overlap the end enough to keep crosswinds from opening a full length slit in the very front.

Of course, excessive overlap restricts free movement, which causes you to kick and fight the garment with every abbreviated step. Finer silk models likely avoid this problem, but even jumping from the $2.50 to the $4.50 cotton models makes a noticeable difference.

            Full length dhotis and lungis are fairly light and breezy, but Indian midday heat prompts most men to double them up into a knee length version. This is definitely the most advanced style. For starters, it’s a skirt. I, and even some Indian men, have trouble managing that. Additionally, the second wrap to keep it up is much harder than the first one to keep it on, mostly due to the several layers of fabric now between it and your skin. As you raise the ends higher they become easier to secure, but this also shortens your skirt. I still have plenty of trouble with the short version, but as of this writing I have three weeks left to figure it out.