Tibetan Costume
( 2005-10-27 )

3. Jewelry

Both men and women wear necklaces as well as bracelets and fingers rings. Metal coins and gems hang on the back of ladies, while men like to wear broadswords, pipes, neck articles, silver coins, and other ornaments.

Tibetan costumes are both practical and colorful, serving as a means for Tibetans to show off their wealth.

** Artistic features of Tibetan costume

The artistic features of Tibetan costume are demonstrated in many aspects.

One prominent feature is accumulative parallelism in colors and designs, which is shown in many cases in Tibetan costume making. Take the fur-lined robe in the pastoral areas for example. It is edged with small upright oblong pieces of green, purple, black, orange, yellow, and red cloth, increasing accumulatively to form colored bands. These colors, arranged in a colored band, gives people a vivid sense of leaping forward.

The shoulders, lower hems, and cuffs of the fur-lined robes of women in pastoral areas are often decorated with black, green, red, purple, and other colored stripes arranged in a row to form staid and bold designs, which produces striking and exciting effects.

Parallelism also finds expression in the hairstyles of the Tibetans. Women in northern Tibet mostly wear their hair in rows of braids. With some women, the rows of braids start from the center of the forehead, go round the head, and then end again in the center of the forehead. Other women interweave their tiny plaits into a row of thick braids, which are then collected and tied in the back with ornaments. Even the ornaments are arranged in rows or strings.

Another prominent feature concerning Tibetan costume and ornaments is that the colors used are in sharp contrast yet at the same time harmonious. The bold use of such contrasting colors as red and green, black and white, crimson and blue, and yellow and purple plus the ingenious employment of compound colors and gold and silver thread have produced the most lucid and harmonious artistic effects.

Many Tibetan robes of white pulu (a kind of plant-based fiber) have broad black cuffs, a collar, and a lower hem; to make the black edges more conspicuous, people wear white trousers. Red pulu and green pulu exist side by side on colored Tibetan boots. When women braid their hair, they use a woolen string of such contrasting colors as bright red and emerald, vermilion, and ultramarine, or pink and azure. Even the embroidery on songba (a kind of multi-colored Tibetan boots) is done with sharply contrasting colors. Contrastive colors are also applied to matching the robe with the girdle.