Tapis Sarong with Figures

The Lampung people inhabit the southern part of Sumatra right along the maritime routes connecting Europe to Far East Asia. As such Lampung society had a highly affluent merchant class. Rich traders invested a great deal in garments and jewelry which were status symbols indicating wealth, social standing and clan identity.

Elite Lampung women created a distinctive genre of tubular sarongs such as this example.  They are commonly known as Tapis. Woven in a striped design from silk ,cotton  or a combination of both, they were decorated with  mica, glass, polychrome silk and predominantly metallic threads that were  couched on top with thin cotton thread rather than needled through the ground.  The motifs were usually ancestral, in the case of this tapi eight pointed stars, diamonds and large boats, a common Indonesian design element that signifies life changes such as  birth, adulthood, marriage or death.