This ‘baju panjang’ or jacket is fashioned from hand painted, mordant and resist-dyed cotton. It has motifs of two pairs of birds and flower heads amongst sprouting florettes and plumes in red, blue, purple and white against a red ground.The Malay baju panjang is a sort of long, loose coat once popular with both men and women. It relates to the Indo-Arabic banyan worn by Gujarati merchants, which came to be popular with Europeans. Malay popular tradition holds that the baju panjang was introduced with the arrival of Islam in the Malay World which required a more modest form of dress.
