The Cambodian Sampot
Womanhood, modesty and emancipation
Cambodian civil servant and his family, mixing traditional and European clothing, Siem Reap, Cambodia, Léon Busy, 1921, Albert Kahn Museum, public domain.
In Cambodia, the sampot (សំពត់) is an uncut length of fabric, usually in silk or silk-like material, approximately one metre wide and up to two metres and a half long. There are two main types. The sampot samloy is a narrower piece of cloth worn as a wraparound skirt by women. The sampot chawng kben is a long unisex piece of fabric gathered at the waist, passed between the legs, and tucked into the waistband as wrapped pants like an Indian dhoti. Similarly to the kain sarung in Indonesia and the pha sin in Thailand, the sampot is considered a traditional garment that is widely used in Cambodia, especially by women as a ceremonial item. It is worn for weddings, religious celebrations, and official events, and is associated with Khmer culture. However, more than a simple piece of clothing, historical and contemporary discourses around the sampot materialise continual tension between individual fashion statements and national and political agendas.
Devata sculpture on the wall of Angkor Wat, 21 February 2020, Vann Thara – Wikimedia Commons.
The sampot is a recurring motif in Cambodian history. In the late thirteenth century, Zhou Daguan, a Chinese diplomatic envoy sent to the Angkor court, witnessed that “from the king down, the men and women all wear their hair wound up in a knot, and go naked to the waist, wrapped only in a cloth. When they are out and about, they wind a larger piece of cloth over the small one.”¹ While no archaeological example was found, visual representations of loincloths abound on statuary art. The many devata and apsara, or divinities and nymphs, gracing the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat temple, wear a sheer cloth wrapped around the waist that arrives at calf length and folds in complex pleats on the sides. Centuries later, their attire directly inspired the costume for the Apsara dance developed by Queen Kossamak for the Royal Ballet dancers in the late 1950s. This effort to connect Angkorian clothing styles with royal dance highlights how the sampot directly suggests ceremonial elegance and femininity.
In the precolonial era, both men and women wore the sampot, most often in the chawng kben version as wrapped trousers. At the time, women were already subjected to the chbap srei, an ancestral code of conduct that portrays the ideal Cambodian women and girls as submissive, polite, and bound to the domestic realm. To establish when the sampot started to embody the conflating of womanhood and Khmer national identity, one must go back to the late nineteenth century in the French protectorate period. Historian Penny Edwards links the refashioning of this native garment to the emergence of “the ascendance of intellectual theories and political policies of racial and cultural segregation” in conjunction with “the crystallization of gender-specific norms of dress.”² To account for their indigeneity, colonised bodies were pushed to reform through dress. Women wore the sampot as a skirt, while men were encouraged to wear trousers. These dress practices emphasized the construction of a gendered Khmer national identity, which continued to solidify during the independence period from 1953 until the civil war in 1970. From a sampot arranged towards the front of the body in a simple knot, its shape was streamlined into a skirt with a flat fold on the side called sampot bot or sampot jupe, from the French term “jupe” for skirt. The straightening of the sampot into a more fitted, simplified garment responded to the mass importation of Western-style clothing in Cambodia.
Silk textiles for sampot at O’Russei market in Phnom Penh. Photo by Magali An Berthon, taken in 2018.
Since the post-Khmer Rouge era, Cambodian women, mainly the middle-aged and elderly, have returned to silk sampot for ceremonies in the phamuong (solid-colored taffetas with a decorative band) and hol (ikat) techniques. For cost, accessibility and practical reasons, younger women have often abandoned wrapped skirts to the benefit of industrially produced clothes made of synthetic, viscose and cotton materials. In the past decade, the country has seen a reactionary push for a more modest female dress. The contemporary era revives discourses reaffirming the sampot as a marker of tradition and propriety. The Cambodian government and royal authority have been championing the sampot in reaction to the steady appeal of Westernised fashion styles. In March 2024 a “Sampot bot gala” was organised by the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts. In the event’s press conference, Ministry Secretary of State Lundi Sannara talked about “preserving the traditions and intangible heritage of the Khmer ancestors,” linking individual choices to dress to a form of nationalism. Interviewed by The Phnom Penh Post, Men Sam An, a member of the Supreme Privy Council to the King, added that “preserving, developing and promoting this unique cultural heritage is the duty of every Cambodian.”³ Through this gala, the goal is clear. It is meant to promote conservative cultural values associated with Cambodian national identity with the younger generation in mind.
Simultaneously, the government carefully monitors how women dress. In 2020, Reuters reported that a young woman was forced by the police to publicly apologise on Facebook for wearing "extremely short and sexy clothes" while selling products on live streams.⁴ The same year, the Cambodian Interior Ministry issued a draft policy called the “Law on Public Order” to regulate Cambodians’ behavior in public spaces. This law would directly affect street vendors, homeless populations, and even women wearing clothing considered inappropriate. Spokespeople from the Cambodian women's rights groups, Amnesty International, and the charity Gender and Development for Cambodia all denounced the baselessness of such rule, regretting that more pressing issues for women on gender equity, domestic and sexual violence, and education, were not instead the focus.
“Operating as a material and symbolic interface between an intimate sense of self, self-representation, and the social world, the sampot holds the potential to reassert women’s place in Cambodian society.”
In Cambodia, the recurrent framing of women’s dress as a political and nationalist issue builds up tension around the meaning of traditional fashion. Is the promotion of sampot a way into the active preservation of Cambodian heritage and textile crafts? Can women be free to dress and live the way they aspire to? Beyond the persistence of the chpab srei mentality and pressures on women’s behavior, the sampot—in its shape and use—offers empowering possibilities to regain agency. Based on a simple piece of fabric, this zero-waste garment fits all sizes. It accompanies a woman through life and bodily changes due to motherhood and aging. Drapery offers more freedom with the body than tailoring, a garment construction method more common in the Western fashion system and linked to mass manufacturing, labor-intensive production, and normative sizing. Women skillfully support their bodies by wrapping the fabric around the waist and gathering it with folds. These dress practices are tacitly shared within families and among women of different ages. Finally, the sampot’s materiality allows for creative explorations in the choice of fabric, how to arrange cloth onto the body, deciding what to show, what to hide, the length of the skirt, and the complexity of the pleats. Operating as a material and symbolic interface between an intimate sense of self, self-representation, and the social world, the sampot holds the potential to reassert women’s place in Cambodian society.
Notes
Zhou Daguan, trans. P. Harris, A Record of Cambodia: The Land and Its People (Bangkok: Silkworm Books, 2007), 50.
Penny Edwards, Restyling Colonial Cambodia (1860–1954): French Dressing, Indigenous Custom and National Costume, Fashion Theory, 5:4 (2001), 391.
Van Socheata, “‘Sampot bot’ gala showcases Khmer dress,” The Phnom Penh Post, 28 February 2024, https://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/-sampot-bot-gala-showcases-khmer-dress
Matt Blomberg, “Cover up or be censored: Cambodia orders women not look sexy on Facebook,” Reuters, 19 February 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/world/cover-up-or-be-censored-cambodia-orders-women-not-look-sexy-on-facebook-idUSKBN20D277/
Sources
Blomberg, Matt. “Cover up or be censored: Cambodia orders women not look sexy on Facebook,” Reuters, 19 February 2020.
Edwards, Penny. (2001) Restyling Colonial Cambodia (1860–1954): French Dressing, Indigenous Custom and National Costume, Fashion Theory, 5:4, 389-416.
Jacobsen, T. (2012), Lost Goddesses: The Denial of Female Power in Cambodian History, Copenhagen: NIAS Press.
Muan, I., and al. (2003), Seams of Change: Clothing and the Care of the Self in late 19th and 20th century Cambodia, Phnom Penh: Reyum Publishing.
Van Socheata. “‘Sampot bot’ gala showcases Khmer dress,” The Phnom Penh Post, 28 February 2024.
Zhou Daguan. (2007), A Record of Cambodia: The Land and Its People. Harris, P., trans. Bangkok: Silkworm Books.
About the writer
Magali An Berthon is a textile and fashion historian focusing on 19th to 20th century and contemporary Southeast Asian textiles and dress, particularly in Cambodia. She is Assistant Professor at the American University of Paris.