The Chakana

The chakana is a stepped cross with a hole at its centre, and it is older than the Inca. Its twelve corners have been read as the three worlds, the four directions and the turning of the year. The word means bridge in Quechua. We put one on the front of every cap, in thread, because the cloth it sits on comes from the same world the symbol does.

The shape

Take a square, set a smaller square on each side of it, and open a circle in the middle. That is the chakana: an equal-armed cross whose arms step outward, twelve outer corners in all. It is cut into stone at Tiwanaku and Ollantaytambo, woven into cloth, and drawn on the ground before a ceremony. The hole at the centre is not empty. It is the axis, the place where the levels meet.

The three worlds

The most common reading is vertical. The upper world of the sun and the condor, the middle world of people and the puma, the lower world of the ancestors and the serpent. The steps of the cross are the passage between them. Other readings are horizontal: four arms for the four regions of the Inca state, or the four directions, with the centre at Cusco. Both readings live in the same shape, which is part of why it has lasted.

Older than the Inca

The stepped cross appears on pottery and stone from Tiwanaku, on the shore of Lake Titicaca, centuries before the Inca state existed, and on textiles from the coast earlier still. The Inca took it up the way they took up the loom and the road. It is not one people's symbol. It is the Andes' symbol.

On our caps

Every cap carries a chakana at centre front, embroidered small in a single colour chosen against the cloth: scarlet on black, gold on rainbow, teal on desert stripe. It is the only mark we add. The cloth is the voice; the cross is the signature. See it on the denim caps, where it is the loudest thing on the front, and read how it is embroidered.