Paracas

Paracas is where the cloth story starts. On this desert peninsula south of Lima, two thousand years before the Inca, people were buried wrapped in embroidered mantles so fine that nothing woven since in the Americas has matched them. The dry sand kept the colour. Our Paracas cap is the white one, twill body and a handwoven brim, the plainest cap we make named for the place where Andean weaving was already at its height.

The peninsula

Paracas is a hook of red and ochre desert pushing into the Pacific about 250 kilometres south of Lima, most of it a national reserve: cliffs, a red-sand beach, and cold water full of fish that feeds the sea lions and birds of the Ballestas islands offshore. The wind that gives the place its name blows every afternoon. It is the driest coast on earth, which is why what was buried here survived.

The oldest cloth

In 1925 archaeologists opened a cemetery on the peninsula and found hundreds of mummy bundles, each body wrapped in layer on layer of cloth: mantles, tunics, turbans, embroidered with flying figures, cats, birds and plants in dozens of colours, some with more than two hundred threads to the inch. They are the Paracas textiles, now in museums in Lima and around the world, and they are the proof behind everything we say about cloth over gold: in the Andes, the richest thing you could be buried with was weaving.

The cap named Paracas

The Paracas is a five-panel camp cap in white twill with a handwoven Andean stripe brim, in adult and kids sizes, part of the rainbow family, K'uychi. The plain body is a nod to the desert; the brim is the colour. With the kids size it makes the Paracas matching set. Its coastal neighbours in the range are the Callao and the Nazca.

Other cities

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