CURRENT TRADITIONAL CLOTHING OF LENKA WOMEN

Abstract

This paper will review the traditional clothing of Lenka women as part of their identity and folklore. Their characteristic brightly colored dresses represent their connection to nature and symbolize strength and a link to their roots, preserving their history and traditions and reaffirming their identity in a globalized world. Through empirical observation and the recording of images of Lenka women engaged in various daily activities, from religious practices and fieldwork to their time at home, this paper seeks to describe the current state of Lenka women in different communities.

Using a qualitative approach, we sought to ensure that the observed characteristics were natural and relevant to our research. Taking into account various theories of folklore proposed by scholars in different countries, we conducted an analysis to define typicality, incorporating contributions from fashion design, in order to comprehensively examine the uses of this clothing in different aspects of the daily lives of women in the various communities we visited.

One of the main objectives of this research is to demonstrate the different variations in the uses of clothing by women, taking into account the different roles they play daily, thus expressing part of the construction of the cultural identity of the Lenka people, and at the same time, to break the idea in the imagination of the Honduran people, that, when talking about a typical dress, it must be anklelength, wide enough to perform movements and decorative figures, and to remember that clothing is interwoven in the daily lives of women, uniting them through the strong links between clothing and identity.