These elegant trousers were collected in Singapore in 1855. They are made up of two of the most elaborate types of cloth woven in the Malay Peninsula - silk patterned with weft ikat and silk with supplementary weft decoration of gold-wrapped thread (songket). The songket panels are attached to the lower edge of the trousers at approximately knee level, probably to give additional strength to the garment as well as to show off this costly fabric. Although the flamboyant decoration on these trousers may suggest that they were intended for a woman, it was only in certain areas of Muslim South-East Asia that women wore trousers rather than the traditional tubular skirt, and the Malay Peninsular was not one of them. The ikat-patterned fabric here shows the influence of Indian trade cloths, especially the double-ikat patola, on local South-East Asian textile design.