La Femme Girafe (French for giraffe woman) portrays a Padaung woman, a sub-group of the Kayan ethnic group originating in Burma (now Myanmar), whose people were forced to emigrate to Thailand for political reasons. These women begin having a continuous brass tube wound around their necks in early childhood & progressively use a longer tube, thus adding more rings. In reality, the rings do not actually stretch the neck, but force the clavicle bones down, making the neck appear longer.