La Paz

La Paz is a city poured into a canyon, red brick climbing every wall of it, the white peak of Illimani standing over the rim. Aguayo here is not a craft item; it is how things are carried, every day, by everyone, on the back and tied at the chest. The blues of the lake family, Qucha, are the blues you see on those backs, and our mid-blue denim cap is named for the city.

The canyon

The seat of Bolivia's government sits between 3,200 and 4,000 metres depending on which street you are on, in a gorge cut by the Choqueyapu river out of the altiplano. The rich live low, where the air is thicker; the city climbs the walls in brick and ends on the rim at El Alto, a second city of over a million people on the flat plain above. Cable cars, the highest urban network in the world, link the two like ski lifts over rooftops. Illimani, over 6,400 metres, is visible from almost anywhere.

Aguayo as daily cloth

Walk any market in La Paz and the aguayo is on people, not on stalls: tied across the chest of a cholita carrying a child, a sack of oranges, a bundle of tools. The Thursday and Sunday market at El Alto is one of the largest open-air markets on the continent and cloth is a small corner of it, sold by the length, in bales, to people who will use it. It is the most unsentimental place in the Andes to buy aguayo, and one of the best.

The cap named La Paz

The La Paz is a blue denim five-panel with a handwoven aguayo brim and red chakana embroidery, the middle wash of our three denim caps, between the black Potosí and the sky Copacabana. Its family neighbour, the El Alto, takes its name from the city on the rim. See the denim caps.

Other cities

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