Color Fashion - Birthday Suits

For many Thai people, the color of their Birthday Suits holds great significance which has set a color fashion that in recent times has become conspicuous for the wrong reasons.

For Thais, the day of the week on which they were born has great importance and will affect many of the decisions they make throughout their life. In Thailand, each day of the week is traditionally associated with a different color so, depending on which day of the week they were born, Thai people will try to wear an article of clothing in the color of that day. It could be any item, not just t-shirts that have become so fashionable of late. Thai people believe they will receive good luck by wearing the right color of birthday suit and will even wear something of that color on the important occasions in their life. Interestingly, the colors of each day of the week are the same colors used by followers of Color Feng Shui, now so popular in the West.

Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
Red	Yellow	Pink	Green	Orange	Blue	Purple

One of the few benefits to come out of the current sad and seriously damaging political conflict between the People’s Alliance for Democracy who have adopted the color

Yellow for their war games, and the National United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship who wear the color Red in battle, is that I no longer have to dread going to supermarkets, Malls or other crowded places on a Monday. Being at an age where both my eyesight and memory are not what they used to be, the fashion for nearly all Thais to wear a yellow colored t-shirt on Mondays (Yellow being Monday’s color) to show their love and respect for His Majesty the King, who was born on a Monday, caused a few embarrassing moments for me and several near misses, giving added meaning to the old colonial phrase “I can’t tell them apart, they all look the same”. One other ‘benefit’ is that if I now see a group of people wearing yellow (or red) standing together then I simply turn around and go another way to avoid any trouble. Although I wasn’t born on a Monday perhaps I should wear yellow as in many parts of the Western World, Yellow is the color of cowardice!

This article was contributed by a Guest.