What Do You Call that Long Vietnamese Dress? And by the way, isn’t it sexy as all get-out?
Ai dia. Pronounced “Ow (like the scream) yai (like eye with the y sound).”
Whoops. Ao dia.
And it sorta depends. It’s based off the Qing dynasty mandarin dresses, but there’re a lot of variations on it. Much more so than the Chinese version it seems. Some can look pretty sexay on the right women, yeah.
But they can range from “farmer girl with baggy pants” to “look at me it’s Halloween and I’m Vampirella!”
I personally like the more subtle and standard Chinese version. I just had one custom-made for my girlfriend. The custom part? Extra-short. 
Thank you very much.
It’s spelled ao dai. It always looks absolutely lovely.
Related question:
How Long is a Chinaman’s name?
It coitanly is.
The pronunciation given above is correct for the southern dialect of Vietnamese. For the northern dialect, it’s pronounced as “ow (like the scream) zai (like eye but with a z in front).”
In Vietnam, a pure white ao dai is a traditional school uniform. The amazing thing is that you can see hordes of girls riding their bicycles to school wearing these things, and the roads are dusty, the bike chain uncovered and greasy, clouds of black diesel smoke belch out from passing 1950s De Soto buses, yet the girls never get a mark on the white fabric, and they look like something out of a laudry detergent advertisement.
The Vietnamese government occasionally makes noises about banning the ao dai as school uniform, in favour of Western dress, because the things are too sexy. They reveal nothing, yet everything. This is always resisted though. Thankfully.
I never knew what you called those dresses, but I find them incredibly sexy as well, especially when you see women in those shiny silk and satin ones with slits up the sides! I always think of the red ao dai Kirsten Dunst wore in the first Spider-Man movie as a perfect example.
Some ao dai history.
I saw a documentary about Vietnam some months ago and there were several shots of the girls in the white dresses bicycling down the road in groups. It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.
I think, while this dicussion has so far been about ao dai, that you may be thinking of a cheongsam .
Recently, some of the high school girls who are required to wear the ao dai (it’s their school uniform) have begun complaining about them. Reasons for the complaints: it’s made of synthetic material and thus, in the hot and humid climate of Vietnam, it’s quite uncomfortable.