When you happen to make a visit to a temple festival anywhere in Bali, you assuredly see the Hindu devotees attend the festival in uniformed-looking Balinese costumes. Men wear kamben or a large skirt, safari jacket or shirts, smaller sash and headdress, while woman wear long-sleeved lacey kebaya, cummerbund (stagen), and a hair bun, while walking steadily and balancing ritual paraphernalia on their head like gebogan (fruits, flowers, cake arragements and canang sari).
Since around the 1990s, there has been great change in men’s costumes, where they (excluding temple priests that indeed always do) tend to wear white or bright-colored shirts or safari jackets even through there was never any religious institution or instruction to do so. Similarly, lady’s costumes have undergone a similar trend. If previous kebayas were mostly made of brocade in simple designs, now they are being made out of other fabrics adorned with embroidered sies and so forth.
Light costumes that usually consist of a casual shirt and completed with a skirt and sash are worn when attending a socio-religious activity like for mutual assistance in preparing religious rites or meetings of costumary villages. Costumes for those that undergo rites of passage (manusa yajna) like for weddings and tooth-filing ceremonies are usually completed with some gold leaf ornament and glamorous accessories.
An interesting point that is worth noting in this trend is on men’s sashes. In line with the wide use of cellular phones, designers of Balinese costumes have made note of this fact, and now almost all designs have an added pocket for the phone. However, this only applied to sashes used in the light costume.
Bali has no less than, three distinctive traditional textile forms. Firstly, woven songket brocade of which motif resembles a cubical form composed of various colors of yarn. Most of them are used for skirts, sashes and men’s headdresses or destar. Secondly, prada or gold leaf cloth namely special motif printed on cotton fabric. This motif actually indicates the accumulation of various foreign influences of Balinese ornaments like that from China, Egypt and Holland. Textiles of this kind are widely used for Balinese dance costumes and traditional Balinese bridal attire. In addition, this prada cloth is also used to adorn various shrines and other sacred buildings at temples and pavilions for holding rituals. The last one is called woven ikat or endek. The most famous ikat cloth is that of Tenganan village is famous for its unique traditional compound setting. This village is located in Karangasem Regency Eastern Bali.
The Balinese also make use of the distinctive checkered square pattern (black and white) cloth that is considered to have magical power. It is usually used for sashes of pecalang (traditional security of costomary villages), servants to royalty in traditional dramas, kulkul split drums, penunggun karang (shrines of guardians), guardian effigies on entrance gates and big trees that are considered to be sacred.
In fact, balinese do not only need cloth for themselves but also for holy shrines, sacred objects and others that have brought life to them.

News by International Bali Post

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