What is a piupiu? The kapa haka flax skirt

What is a piupiu? A piupiu ‘waist-to-knees flax garment’ is the flax skirt worn by kapa haka performers: stiff, rolled strands of harakeke ‘New Zealand flax’, banded black and white, hanging from a waistband so that they swing and sound as the group moves. Men and women both wear one. This guide explains how a piupiu is made, what it sounds like and why, where it came from, and the names of the pieces worn with it, the tīpare ‘headband’, the pari ‘bodice’, the tātua ‘belt’ and the tāniko ‘finger-woven’ patterns, with every word from Te Aka Māori Dictionary and every practice from Te Ara and Te Papa.

Updated 7 November 2026 · 7 min read

Tap 🔊 to hear an example. Māori examples play Papa Reo, the te reo Māori voice made by Te Hiku Media from recordings of native speakers.

What is a piupiu, and what does the word mean?

Te Aka Māori Dictionary defines the garment as a “waist-to-knees garment made of flax”, with “a wide waistband”, “used in modern times for kapa haka performances”. The word is older than the skirt. As a verb, Te Aka gives piupiu as “to wave about, move to and fro, oscillate, swing”, and Te Ara puts it in three words: “‘Piupiu’ means to sway to and fro.” The garment is named for what it does when you move.

Te Ara calls the piupiu “one of the most distinctive parts of kapa haka attire” and says it is worn by both men and women. Te Papa notes it can also be worn across one shoulder rather than round the waist, with the strands hanging free. Te Aka’s own example for the word comes from a newspaper of 1901, reporting that Te Arawa performed the first poi song, fifty strong, in white garments, “he piupiu te paki”, with piupiu as their skirts.

How a piupiu is made

Te Ara describes the method as elaborate, and sets it out in its caption to a piupiu in its story on flax. The steps, in that order:

Choose and cut the leaves. The leaves are harakeke. Different iwi favour different varieties: Te Ara records that Ngāti Porou sought the cultivar ‘Tākirikau’ for piupiu, and Te Aka describes tākirikau ‘a harakeke variety’ as “very good piupiu variety”, long enough to be “particularly good for ladies piupiu”.
Strip it in sections. Each leaf is stripped back to the fibre in regular sections, leaving sections of unstripped leaf in between. The fibre is muka ‘prepared flax fibre’; Te Ara says it was traditionally freed by scraping the green flesh away with a sharp shell.
Twist the fibre. The loose fibres in the stripped sections are twisted together by a spinning action.
Boil and dry. The strands are boiled and dried, so that they whiten and roll into tubes. Those stiff, hollow cylinders are what a piupiu is made of; Te Papa calls them “cylindrical strands of harakeke”.
Dye. The strands are dyed black, and only the exposed fibre takes the dye. That is where the pattern comes from: the twisted muka sections go black and the rolled leaf stays pale, giving the black and white bands, which Te Ara calls a striped black and white effect.
Attach to the waistband. Finally the strands are fixed to a woven waistband.

The black dye

Te Ara’s weaving story gives the traditional black. The bark of a tree such as makomako or hīnau was first steeped in water; the muka was soaked in that liquid, dried, and then rubbed in a special paru ‘mud’ found in swamps. Te Aka’s entry for hīnau says the same of its bark: it is “used for dye for the initial stage of producing the black of muka”. Museum catalogues describe piupiu as “paru dyed” for this reason. Because the dye lands only on the scraped sections, the pattern is planned before anything is dyed, in where the leaf is stripped.

Not every piupiu is the same

Te Papa calls the banded harakeke piupiu “the most common style of piupiu seen today”, but says “piupiu come in many styles and materials”: it holds one made from the inner bark of houhere ‘lacebark’, decorated with white kererū ‘New Zealand pigeon’ and brown kiwi feathers. Waistbands vary too. Te Papa notes that a band of tāniko weaving at the top of a piupiu is not commonly seen, while the photograph Te Ara uses of kapa haka dress in 2014 shows the men wearing tāniko belts above their piupiu. The making of a piupiu even has its own song: Te Ara holds a video about “Mahi piupiu”, which the composer Tihi Puanaki (Ngāti Hine) wrote to describe the process, first performed by her group Te Kotahitanga o Waitaha in 1977 at the festival now called Te Matatini.

Why a piupiu makes a sound

Because the strands are dried flax, rolled hard. Te Ara says the piupiu “is generally made from dried flax, which makes a distinctive noise as its strands move with the vigorous rhythm of the performance”. When the wearer moves, the strands sway to and fro, which is the meaning of the word, and in a haka, where a group stamps and turns together, the whole line of piupiu swings with it. That sound is part of the performance, along with the beat of the poi in the poi item; see kapa haka explained for the items a group performs.

Before the piupiu: rāpaki and pākē kārure

The piupiu as performers wear it is not the oldest Māori waist garment. Te Ara’s weaving story says Māori traditionally wore a skirt-like garment called a rāpaki ‘kilt worn from the waist to the knees’ or pākē kārure round the waist, and that this was superseded by the piupiu, which evolved after European contact; women may sometimes have worn a maro ‘short kilt, apron’ over the front. Te Papa, describing a pākē kārure of black and gold dyed rolled cords in its collection, says garments of that type are thought to pre-date contact, became a more specialised form in the mid to later nineteenth century, and continue today as the standardised modern piupiu. Cloaks, the garments worn over the shoulders, are a separate story: see korowai and Māori cloaks.

The rest of the kapa haka outfit

Te Ara says the growing popularity of kapa haka in the 20th century encouraged distinctive outfits that combined traditional Māori garments, by then rare in everyday use, with modern or reinvented clothing. The pieces have te reo names, and these are the ones a performer, a parent or a tutor will use:

Te reo	What Te Aka says it is	In kapa haka
piupiu	a waist-to-knees garment made of flax, with a wide waistband	Worn by men and women (Te Ara).
tīpare	a band worn around the head, a headband; as a verb, to adorn (with a feather, etc.)	Te Ara lists headbands among the tāniko pieces worn by cultural groups since the early 20th century.
pari	bodice, bra	In Te Ara’s 2014 photograph the women wear piupiu and tāniko bodices.
tātua	belt	The men in that photograph wear tāniko tātua above their piupiu; Te Ara says tāniko belts were fashionable for men from the 1950s.
tāniko	to finger weave; finger woven	The woven geometric bands on bodices, belts, headbands and armbands.
korowai	a cloak ornamented with black twisted tags	In the 2014 photograph, worn by the group’s leader.
kākahu	garment, clothes, cloak	The general word for what is worn.

One sense of pari is “bodice”, but Te Aka lists it under separate headwords from pari ‘cliff’, the cliff, and the tide that “comes in”, so the context tells you which is meant.

Tāniko: the patterns on the bodice and belt

Tāniko is a way of weaving, not a single pattern. Te Ara explains that the weaver carries the threads not needed for the pattern behind the work and brings each colour to the front when it is wanted, wrapping it round the others. It says no other Polynesian group uses the technique, and that because it cannot make curves, its designs are triangles, diamonds, diagonal bars and steps, usually in black, red and white. Te Ara names the commonest designs:

nihotaniwha, “dragon’s teeth”, a large triangle;
nihoniho, “little teeth”, a series of small triangles;
waharua, “double mouth”, a diamond-shaped outline;
kaokao, “armpits”, shaped like a W or M.

Tāniko was traditionally used for the borders of fine cloaks, and from the early 20th century, Te Ara says, for the bodices, armbands, headbands and bandoliers worn by members of Māori cultural groups. A group’s tāniko can carry its own history. Te Ara’s 2014 photograph is of Tamatea Arikinui, a Ngāti Kahungunu group, whose tāniko includes a wave design for the waters the Tākitimu canoe crossed to New Zealand, and whose bodices show four female sperm whales that went with the canoe on its voyage. Te Ara also says the meanings of some tāniko patterns have been lost, so a pattern’s meaning is the group’s to tell, not a dictionary’s. The wider set of Māori patterns, from kōwhaiwhai to tukutuku, is in Māori symbols and their meanings.

Going further

Te Matatini, the national kapa haka festival, gives a separate prize for costume; the festival and the items are in kapa haka explained, and the 1980s hit sung with poi is in Poi E. Everyday clothes are in clothes in Māori. Our free te reo Māori course teaches words like harakeke, kākahu and poi from the first lessons, with every example recorded by Papa Reo.