🇲🇺 The sarees of Mauritius
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Dress in Mauritius draws on many traditions at once: Indian, Muslim, Creole, Chinese and European. Western clothes dominate daily life, and the sari is one strand among them, worn by Indo-Mauritian Hindu women and sometimes by Muslim women. The island's clothing industry assembles imported cloth for export, not local weaving.
- The sari is the traditional dress of Indo-Mauritian Hindu women.
- Flip-flops, called savat locally, are worn across all communities.
- Most Mauritian men own only one or two suits, kept for special occasions.
- The export processing zone opened in 1970 with five factories and over 500 staff.
- Sino-Mauritians helped attract the first Hong Kong textile investment.
Sarees in Mauritius
Mauritius has no single dress. The island's population came from India, Africa, China and Europe, and people wear the clothes of those origins side by side, shaped also by whether they live in a town or a village and by religious custom. Bright colour is common, and women in particular wear it widely. Flip-flops, which Mauritians call savat, are worn by everyone and suit the climate. On the coast, resorts accept beachwear and close-fitting clothes; inland, in towns and villages, that is not considered proper. Most people go about daily life in Western dress. The sari sits within this mix as the traditional dress of Indo-Mauritian Hindu women.
Weddings, festivals and daily wear
Everyday wear is mostly Western. Suits come out for special occasions, and most men own only one or two. Among Mauritians of Indian origin, religious life brings out particular dress: the sari for Hindu women, with the churidar worn instead when comfort matters more; the dhoti-kurta for some men, often paired with a Western shirt and trousers. Rural Hindu women may wear a bindi or tika, and unmarried women mehendi on the hands. Married women show their status with vermilion in the hair parting and a wedding chain. Kolhapuri sandals appear at religious gatherings. Muslim women wear Indian dress with an orhni, or a sari, or a hijab; men may wear skullcaps or a fez on religious days.
The weavers and their communities
The people who make Mauritius's clothes are factory workers, not handloom weavers. The export processing zone, set up in 1970 with Sir Edouard Lim Fat credited as its creator, drew investors from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore. Mauritian women took the jobs, preferring eight-hour factory shifts and better pay to twelve-hour days on the sugar plantations. When they later moved into tourism, workers came from Sri Lanka, India and China. Sino-Mauritians helped bring the first Hong Kong investment in.
The saree today
The sector nearly collapsed in 2008, then recovered. Much production moved to Madagascar, where labour cost less, and Hong Kong firms handed their Mauritian plants to local owners. Quality was said to have slipped as a result. Trade deals shape the industry: the Lomé convention gave duty-free access to Europe from 1975, replaced by the Cotonou agreement in 2000, and Mauritius joined the African Growth and Opportunity Act in 2006. Exports to the United States fell sharply between 2004 and 2007. Mauritius also built spinning capacity to rely less on imported Chinese yarn.
The facts in this overview come from the Wikipedia article "Clothing in Mauritius", written by its contributors and used under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. EveryPallu rewrote the text in its own words, with AI assistance, and compares every page with the article to make sure no passage is copied. It may be reused under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 licence with a link back.
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