Hats off

9 Jan

District 1, Saigon, 1996

When I first moved to Vietnam in the mid-1990′s, women in towns and cities still wore conical hats regularly. Nowadays, it’s rare to see urban women wearing this traditional Vietnamese headgear, which are ill-suited to Vietnam’s number one mode of transportation: the motorbike.

In the countryside, conical hats remain popular with farm-women. Made of palm fronds woven onto a bamboo frame, these light-weigh hats provide ample shade and allow for good air-circulation. They also offer protection from sudden rain showers.

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