In October, Angeline Kong was conducting a tour of the Katong Antique House, a small museum in a local shop house, when she drew attention to three open-toed mules with flowers, animals and geometric patterns worked in colored beads on their wide fabric vamps.

“These are beautiful glass beads,” she said, lifting one shoe off the table. “See how they shimmer in the light.”

Ms. Kong, 57, beads slippers herself, a skill she said took her nearly three decades to master but had made her feel more connected to the women of her family, who wore such footwear.

And the craft also has given her, a sixth-generation Peranakan, some sense of the role of the nyonya, a traditional honorific for Peranakan women. (The Malay term Peranakan generally is used for descendants of Chinese traders who came to the region starting in the 15th century and married local women. The term “means locally born,” Ms. Kong said, but cautioned that there also are many self-identified Peranakans whose ancestors came from elsewhere, mainly countries bordering the Indian Ocean.)

Peter Lee, a cultural historian and the author of the 2015 book “Sarong Kebaya: Peranakan Fashion in an Interconnected World, 1500 to 1950,” said the nyonya role and its trappings were largely sidelined in Singapore’s headlong rush toward modernity after it became independent in 1965. “The golden age for the Peranakans was before the Second World War,” he said. “After, there could be a sense like in Tennessee Williams plays of these fallen Southern families.”