Where the Pattern Comes From

Our pattern is inspired by aguayo, the striped cloth of the Quechua and Aymara communities in the highlands of Peru and Bolivia, where it is still made for daily use rather than for tourists. It carries babies, hauls potatoes, becomes a market stall. Our own cloth is not aguayo. It is woven by machine in 100% acrylic, and our caps are made in Peru. This page is about the tradition we take our cue from, and why we name 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.

What we take from it

Colour, and the way it is arranged: narrow stripes, figured bands, a field that reads as one loud colour from across a street and splits into many up close. Our cloth borrows that look, not the work behind it. Traditional aguayo is slow household cloth; ours is woven by machine, and we say so. That is why we call it an aguayo-inspired pattern, not aguayo.

Why we name the tradition

Every product page names the weave family the pattern belongs to, and the caps themselves are named after towns and cities of the same highlands: Cusco, Písac, Potosí, La Paz. The pattern's roots are not ours. Naming where they come from is the least we owe them. Read more on ayni, the Andean idea of reciprocity.

What we do not do

Our cloth does not come from Andean weaving households, and we will not suggest that it does. We do not put faces on this page that are not real. The image above is an illustration of the kind of valley this tradition comes from, not a portrait of anyone and not the place our cloth is made.

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