Cusco

Cusco was the centre of the Inca world and it still feels like it: streets built on Inca stone, walls of blocks fitted so tightly without mortar that a blade will not pass between them, and a covered market at San Pedro where aguayo is stacked to the ceiling. Our first cap carries the city's name, and it is cut from the rainbow weave, the cloth you see more of here than anywhere.

The city

Cusco sits at 3,400 metres in a bowl of hills in the southern Peruvian Andes. The Inca called it the navel of the world and laid their roads out from its main square. The Spanish built churches on the Inca foundations, so the lower half of many walls is still five-hundred-year-old stonework, the upper half colonial. The twelve-angled stone on Hatun Rumiyoc is the famous one; there are thousands like it.

The cloth market

The Mercado San Pedro, a few blocks from the Plaza de Armas, sells everything, and in the textile aisles the aguayo comes folded in bales: rainbow stripe, black ground, lake blue, hung and stacked by weight. It is where most travellers first touch the cloth. Outside the city, weaving centres in the Sacred Valley keep the finer traditions alive, and the rainbow weave, what we call K'uychi, is the cloth Cusco is known for.

The cap named Cusco

The Cusco is our full-weave five-panel camp cap in the rainbow aguayo: every panel cut from the cloth, flat brim, a small chakana at the front. It was the first piece we made and it is still the one that explains the rest. Cut from the same family: the Písac fine stripe and the Urubamba diamond weave, both named for the valley beyond the city.

Other cities

All twenty on the cities. Písac · Urubamba · Maras · Puno · Huaraz · Arequipa · Nazca · Paracas · Callao · Iquitos · Cajamarca · Tacna · La Paz · El Alto · Copacabana · Oruro · Potosí · Sucre · Cochabamba. See all the pieces named for Andean towns on headwear, and the cloth families on the weaves.