Fashion in the Ancient Americas: The History of Clothes and Jewelry Worn by Indigenous Americans

When the Spanish came face to face with indigenous groups in the Americas, they discovered that the natives had solved the oldest human problem, how to clothe the body, in strikingly different ways. The Europeans wore fitted garments of wool and linen, cut and stitched to the shapes of the arms and torso, fastened with buttons and laces. The peoples of the Americas wore something else entirely. They wrapped, draped, and slipped over the head lengths of cloth woven to their final shape on the loom, and they made that cloth from fibers no European had ever worked, spun by hands that had never seen a sheep or a silkworm. Behind that meeting lay thousands of years of separate inventions, and the results were among the great achievements of human craft.

In Mesoamerica, the land of the Maya, Aztecs, and their predecessors, fashion was a brilliant public language of cotton and feathers and cochineal red, policed by some of the strictest clothing laws any society has ever written. In the Andes of South America, the groups who coalesced into the Inca Empire built what many consider the greatest textile tradition the world has ever known, a civilization in which fine cloth outranked gold, in which weaving was the master art, and in which a garment was a statement of the whole order of the cosmos. To the north, across the deserts and woodlands of North America, other peoples wove cotton, feathers, fur, and plant fiber into clothing of their own, less monumentally documented but no less expressive of who they were.

What united these traditions, spread across two continents and thousands of years, was a set of shared conditions unlike anything in the Old World. There were no sheep, no goats, and no silkworms in the Americas, so the animal fibers used throughout Europe and Asia simply didn't exist. There were no large looms driven by the weight of hanging warps in the European fashion, nor were there any draft animals to work them.