Children wear exact scaled down versions of adult clothing. The men pictured are part of a road works gang upgrading the road to Dien Bien Phu. The collar is the only area of decoration worn by men every day. It sits discretely at the back of the neck on the long, polished hemp waistcoat. The older collars tend to be finer in the work and more subdued in colour, whereas some of the new collars are extremely bright with vivid green thread and may be coarser in the embroidery.
Women wear layers of hemp clothing tied at the waist with a belt.
They have a simple headdress made of woven plant material wound with a long strip of Indigo hemp. Some women wear no headdress but have their hair neatly wound in a roll around their head, held in place with combs. Everyone wears the same style of practical, brown plastic sandals. On my last trip to Sapa, a women I had previously met, asked me to visit her house at Lao Chai village, about four hours walk from the town. A Russian jeep part way along the track helped shorten the journey , then a steep descent on pure mud slopes to the river and a short walk across fields to the settlement.