Sarong

The island of Java has long been a center for the production of intricately hand-drawn batik textiles. Batik is a technique of dyeing cloth in which portions of the textile are covered with wax so that only the uncovered areas absorb the dye. Before the 1800s women produced of this sort of cloth for personal use at home when they were not busy tending to the harvest.

In the early 1800s Indonesian as well as Chinese Indonesian, European Indonesian, and Arab Indonesian entrepreneurs began forming workshops of batik makers along the northern coast of Java. In these workshops the process of producing the textiles was divided into steps. The owner would provide the patterns, which would be drawn onto the fabric using molten wax by women in the workshop; then men would dye the cloth. By the 1850s men began applying wax to the textiles using copper stamps. The textiles produced were worn mainly by women married to non-Javanese persons or women of mixed ethnic parentage-the Asian-born wives, concubines, and daughters of Chinese, Arabian, and European settlers and their descendants. Many of these settlers adopted the fashion of wearing native garments like the sarong, a cloth sewed in a tube and wrapped around the hips.

In Java in the early 1900s designs depicting emblems of colonial power became popular among Europeans and their families. Steamboats, trains and airplanes, vehicles for the expansion of Dutch conquest and, more broadly, symbols of modernization, were among the new motifs depicted on sarongs. The biplanes shown on this cloth may have been modeled from a group of planes bought by the Dutch East Indies Army in the 1930s. The abbreviation "S.A.R." seen on the steamboats is commonly used around the world to identify search-and-rescue vehicles. The patterns of this sarong were produced by two different methods: The large airplanes, boats, and other elements of the main panel were stamped, and the floral motifs in the blue panel were