In the tropical city of Saigon, where the sun is always hazy and most people don’t own a car to shield themselves from the rays, Anh’s driving get-up is a popular choice among sun-exposed motorbike drivers.

In fact, a 2016 survey by W&S, a Southeast Asian market research firm, showed it is the preferred method to avoid the sun in Vietnam, instead of applying sunscreen like their Thai peers or wearing long-sleeves like in Indonesia. Survey respondents said it prevents UV damage - such as skin cancer, sunburn and freckles - and protects their hair and eyes. 

These multiple layers are an indication of the female obsession with pale skin. Like elsewhere in Asia, light skin tones have long been set as an example of beauty and high social status in Vietnam, so many women put up with the excruciating heat just to keep their skin from being touched by the sun.

Nowadays, this preference for being pale is being driven by the effects of foreign cultural waves, from Westernization during the colonial and globalization eras to the recent K-Pop sensation.

One of the biggest winners has been the cosmetics industry. A survey conducted in big cities by Intage Vietnam, a market research company, found that the whitening effect was the priority for the majority of customers, making up 66 percent of their purchasing decisions. 

Profiting second from this frenzy must be the sale of the outfits. Costing from VND70,000 to VND100,000 ($3-4.4), these coats and dresses are sold everywhere in varying patterns, colors and styles.

The "ninja" outfits, as wryly dubbed in Vietnam, worn mostly by female motorists have become so dominant on the street that they are more than just an interesting fashion trend or a manifestation of women’s age-old battle for light skin.

German writer Juli Zeh in her travel diary published recently in Vietnam, titled The Land Where Young Women Ride Motorbikes in Floral Coats, compared the swagger to the abaya worn by Muslim women, and called the dressers the peace-keeping force of the "Clash of Civilizations."

Basically, she wrote that suddenly, the Islamic world lost its unique symbol and the Christian world lost its emblem of enemy.

But when stood side by side with Muslim women, the Vietnamese “ninjas” have more in common than you might expect: they have also found their driving ability being questioned, and in some cases condemned, especially on social media.

Dash-cam footage of colorful motorists causing traffic accidents have been widely circulating on Facebook and Youtube. They were captured “signaling to turn right before turning left”, recklessly cutting in front of other vehicles, or suddenly pulling over without any signal.

“They are depicted as mysterious and full of surprises,” said Bui Dinh Thang, a well-known satirical illustrator and founder of Thang Fly Comics. His comic's Facebook page has over 880,000 followers and features the "female traffic ninja" as one of its main characters.

"Our works are inspired by real-life events." Thang said. "And we illustrate them in satirical cartoons. For the 'ninja' traffic character, we gather material on the internet and draw satirical cartoons of these 'ninjas',” he told VnExpress International.

Screenshots of "Ninja' story by Thang Fly Comics circulated on Facebook.

Explaining why this portrayal of covered female scooter drivers has become so popular on social media, Nguyen Minh, a Vietnamese researcher majoring in semiotics in media studies, believes they have become the scapegoat of growing traffic presure in the big cities.

"While we are not sure how frequently these women break the traffic laws in real life, they have become an easy online scapegoat for people to vent their anger about bad driving in general," he said.

"Their presence is ubiquitous but at the same time they have no identity. Being anonymous makes them the perfect target for reckless jokes on the internet,” Minh added. 

He also noted that this notorious depiction has only emerged in recent years.

"Compared to when the word 'ninja' was first used as a funny way to describe women all wrapped on their scooters in the early-2000s, the current depictions on social media are getting more cruel and sometimes out of line," said the researcher. 

Others believe the portrayal spirals from a so-called confirmation bias.

“When people tell you about a certain type of 'bad driver', you tend to selectively remember whenever you are cut off on the street by women wearing a similar outfit in order to confirm the theory, overlooking men who don’t fit the description,” said Hoang Linh, founder of the Vietnam Organization for Gender Equality. "This has resulted in what I call a mass shaming campaign as we have seen.”

Linh said she herself has witnessed how this happens first hand.

“My Photoshop instructor once produced a series of posters degrading the ‘Ninja Scooter’ and showed them to the class. He explained that after hearing the ‘legends’ of the Ninja Scooter, he finally encountered one on a rainy night in a traffic collision. The instructor concluded that he was 'not discriminating against anyone, but these women really are the brainless creatures we've been told about.'"

“He needed only one experience to prove the point,” Linh said, “and then spent time and effort to discriminate against a whole group of people.”

When asked whether her face mask and coat somehow hinder her view of the road as many suspect, Phi Anh denied it. “If that is the case, why is nobody complaining about full-face motorbike helmets?”

The outfits sometimes serve another purpose other than shielding them from the sun, she added. On days when they wear short skirts, Phi Anh and her friends have to wear them at night to stop men from groping or even slashing them with razors, which is reported once in a while in Ho Chi Minh City.

“I see these bashing threads as something entertaining,” said the young freelancer. “In this country, you can’t expect people to understand how much they discriminate against women.”