The Weavers

The cloth comes from Quechua and Aymara weaving households in the highlands of Peru and Bolivia, where aguayo is still made for daily use rather than for tourists. It carries babies, hauls potatoes, becomes a market stall. We buy finished lengths directly from weavers and cooperatives at fair prices, in the quantities they can make, and we say where a weave comes from when its origin is known. That is the whole arrangement, and this page explains it.

The highlands

Aguayo belongs to the altiplano and the valleys around it, the high country between three and four thousand metres where the Inca road once ran. Weaving there is household work, learned young, done between planting and harvest. A stripe order can name a community the way an accent names a town. The same backstrap loom that wove for the Inca is still leaning against the same kind of adobe wall.

How we buy

We do not commission patterns. We buy what has been woven, at the price the weaver or cooperative sets, and we do not ask for it faster than it can be made. This is why our drops are small and why a colourway can sell out and not come back. It is slower than sourcing from a mill. It is also the only way the cloth stays what it is.

Why we name the weave

Every product page names the weave family the cloth belongs to, and the place it was bought when we know it. The caps themselves are named after towns and cities of the same highlands: Cusco, Písac, Potosí, La Paz. The pattern is not ours. Naming where it comes from is the least we owe it. Read more on ayni, the Andean idea of reciprocity that we try to work by.

What we do not do

We do not photograph weavers for marketing without asking, and we do not put faces on this page that are not real. The image above is an illustration of the kind of valley the cloth comes from, not a portrait of a person who made it. When we have photographs the weavers are happy to share, they will be here, credited by name.

See how a cap is made, what the cloth is made of, and the pieces cut from it: full weave.