DNNLY invites you to listen to the whispers of the ao dai in the park – where memories and present intertwine, and time becomes just a thin breeze passing by.
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The ao dai has long been a symbol of national pride and timeless beauty of Vietnamese women. When I think of ao dai, I imagine the wind. Before my eyes appear green mountains and blue waters, and I expect, as if naturally, that flowing silk fabric, the embodiment of invisible wind, delicate and graceful before me.
“Your white dress is too bright to see. Here, mist and smoke blur human shadows”. |
Reading Han Mac Tu’s poem, that feeling is described in a deeper shade. The ao dai is the scenery, the wind, the river, the moving smoke that moves with the breath and steps of the wearer. In the ao dai, a woman is both hidden as if blending into the scenery, and revealed, like a beautiful scene attracting attention.
Under the morning light, rustling through the ancient trees in Le Van Tam Park, model Khanh Vi wears a shimmering velvet pink ao dai from the DADA brand, strolling leisurely. Walking around the park, lightly sweeping across the brick path, she’s like a glass of wine for passing souls to sip, momentarily intoxicated by the beauty and memories evoked by that red hue, the color of velvet roses both proud and fragile like the spark of life kindling in a young woman’s heart. It reminds us of the color of festivals and red flags in moments of reunion, as well as the color of blood and separation imprinted on history. It’s a color that’s not unambiguous, but always tense between joy and pain, like the shared memory of a nation.
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Perhaps beauty doesn’t lie in clinging to the past, but in the ability to transform it into material for tomorrow. Today’s DADA ao dai is the result of an ongoing creative process, where collective memory is filtered, distilled, and transformed into new forms, suitable for modern life.
Each cut, each seam, each curve resonates from the past, but doesn’t stop at evoking memories. They are a re-enactment of memory to pave the way for the future, a past worn, but in the shape of the present.
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| The ao dai and the park meet like two memory palimpsests. The ao dai, through decades, has always changed its shape, from the simple four-panel, five-panel styles, to Cat Tuong’s innovative Lemur ao dai in the 1930s, to today’s modern cuts. |  |
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Le Van Tam Park is the same, a green heart in District 1, seemingly just a breathing space for Saigon’s rhythm, but beneath the green grass cover was once the land of Mac Dinh Chi cemetery, which buried many historical fates. |
The new layer overlaps the previous one, the new covers the old, but never completely erases it. No matter what shape it takes, they still retain traces of the original, an old layer of text that has never completely disappeared.
Wearing an ao dai, a woman becomes graceful. Wearing Le Van Tam Park, Saigon also takes on a different shape, like a green dress covering the urban body. The ao dai half-conceals, half-reveals; the park also half-covers, half-exposes: Hiding dust, concealing concrete, but revealing the stitches of memory.
The ao dai slows down one’s steps, the park also slows down the city’s breath. People find themselves in the shape of the ao dai; the city rediscovers itself in the memory of the park. The paradox here is: both the ao dai and the park are created to protect, to soothe, but that very protection inadvertently evokes the layers of memory beneath.
Like wrinkles that can’t be hidden on silk, like the green grass that can’t erase Mac Dinh Chi cemetery. And perhaps, the beauty of both the ao dai and the park lies precisely in that: both concealing and reminding, both helping us live in the present and forcing us to face the past.
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I remember a line from the Tao Te Ching, chapter 41:
“The greatest sound is inaudible, the greatest image has no form”
(Great sound is silent, great form is formless).
Perhaps all this time, I’ve been influenced and longing for those great formless things more than what I see before my eyes. In the flowing silk or in the lush green canopy, the visible can only come alive because it’s woven from that invisible.
CREDITS
PHOTOS: CHIRON DUONG (@chironduong)
PROJECT MANAGER: HAI MAN (@carl.thewatermelon)
MODEL: KHANH VI
WRITTEN BY: VIET THANG (@vthanjj)
LAYOUT: THIEN TAI (@thientai_)
