Abstract:
The dress in historical times reveals curious, tantalizing cultural phenomena which signify their complex origins. The dance costumes of the Kotte period were well developed artistically with unique fabric folding methods. Every costume comes alive when it is worn on the human body. Skillfully choreographed movements of the human body can be enhanced by the delicate folds and draperies of transparent textiles. However textiles that are two dimensional when worn on the bodies as costumes become three dimensional. This paper investigates delicate fabric folding methods which utilized in fashions of dance costumes during the Kotte period with a view to identifying styled folds that have been identified as uncommon beauty of dancer’s costumes. Data for this research were gathered from many original historical records, texts, and pictorial records from the sculpture, temple murals, museum artifacts, wood and ivory carvings pertaining to the era. A qualitative research method was adopted for the study and a systematic sequence of observational studies was carried out to gather, sort and analyze data in a manner. The study revealed that there was a unique methodology of arranging the long fold to the lower cloth without any single stitching by emphasizing body contours. In addition to a deliberate attempt at design, the form and the structures were changed and organized by internal explicit design units as pleating, knotting, folding, frilling, and tucking. The dancer arranged the folds according to their aesthetic sense. Folds depicted in fashions of dance costumes show how it manipulates the fabric to express creative forms within the fabric. ‘Fold constitutes a move from effective to affective spaces; folding is a description of activity, intended to flow smoothly and continually with no evidence of ambiguity of interruption’.
