Potosí

Potosí paid for an empire. The silver from Cerro Rico, the red mountain that stands over the city, built cathedrals on two continents and made the name a byword for wealth in Spanish for three hundred years. The city is cold, high and dark early, and the cloth woven around it is dark too: black ground, pattern that flashes when the light hits. That family is Tuta, the night, and our black denim cap is named for the city.

The mountain

Cerro Rico rises to nearly 4,800 metres directly behind the town, a near-perfect cone the colour of rust, and it has been mined continuously since the 1540s. The city at its foot is one of the highest in the world, around 4,000 metres, and in the seventeenth century it was among the largest anywhere, larger than London or Madrid. The colonial centre of churches, mint and mansions is a World Heritage site. The mine is still worked, by hand, by cooperatives.

Cloth over silver

The Inca had valued cloth above metal, and the Spanish reversed it: silver out, everything else in. The weaving did not stop. In the cold altiplano around Potosí the aguayo is thicker and darker than in the valleys, dense wool on a black or near-black ground with narrow bands of colour, made for weather rather than for show. It is the cloth the night family is built on.

The cap named Potosí

The Potosí is a black denim five-panel with a handwoven Andean stripe brim and green chakana embroidery. The body is plain so the brim can do the talking, which is the Tuta idea exactly: darkness first, colour breaking out of it. Its neighbour in the family is the Tacna, black twill with an indigo stripe. See all three denim caps.

Other cities

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