Lower garment (kain panjang)

The advancing soldiers depicted on this garment may represent the conquering forces of the Lombok expedition, an 1864 battle that secured the island of Lombok as a Dutch colony. In Java in the early 1900s designs depicting emblems of colonial power became popular among Europeans and their families. Some scholars believe that textiles such as these, referred to as kain kompeni or cloths of the “company” (the Dutch East Indies trading company), were worn primarily by Dutch colonial families and their associates. But in this photo from the early 1900s, a young Indonesian tea plantation worker wears a garment nearly identical to the one on display. This photographic evidence shows that many of the assumptions made about who might wear certain garments are not always true; the trade of batik spread textiles across the archipelago.