The Inca Emperor’s New Clothes 

A Masterpiece of Logo Wear  

Fashion is a relatively modern concept, most often associated with Euro-American histories of dress. However, well before the European invasions of the Americas, Indigenous American societies developed sophisticated approaches to garment making and cultural attention to dress every bit as nuanced as those of societies from the other side of the Atlantic. Perhaps the greatest material legacy of this rich costume history survives in the Andes region of South America. The deserts of the Pacific coastline preserve one of the longest and most complete archaeological textile records in the world, made up of hundreds of thousands of surprisingly well-preserved garments woven over many millennia. 

But the crowning achievement of this textile tradition—at least as I argue in my new book, The Royal Inca Tunic: The Biography of an Andean Masterpiece (Princeton University Press, 2024)—is an extremely fine vestment created by weavers of the Inca Empire (fig. 1). The Incas came to power around 1400 and, from their capital of Cusco in what is now southern Peru, eventually conquered neighboring societies from the border of Colombia and Ecuador to central Chile and Argentina.  

Figure 1: The front and back of the Dumbarton Oaks tunic

However, the Incas’ rise was cut short when, in the early 1530s, Spanish forces launched an armed invasion of their lands. This particular tunic is of immense historic importance because it may be the only surviving royal Inca object of any medium known anywhere in the world. It is also an object that has deep connections to Harvard University because it is carefully stewarded by the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Museum in Washington, DC. Indeed, the garment is so much associated with this Harvard research institute that specialists simply call it “the Dumbarton Oaks tunic.”   

The tunic was acquired by the diplomat, art collector and founder of Dumbarton Oaks, Robert Woods Bliss, by June of 1949. Over the past 75 years, the object has risen to great fame—becoming one of the most published Andean artifacts in scholarship—due to unsupported theories that its complex motifs, called tocapus, were actually a long-lost Inca writing system (fig. 2). My own studies of the royal vestment have resulted in a different interpretation much more aligned with issues of fashion. I first became interested in the tunic when I was fortunate enough to receive a Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Columbian Studies Junior Fellowship in 2011, while I was a graduate student at Harvard—and I have been working on it ever since.  

Figure 2: Tocapu motifs on the Dumbarton Oaks tunic

As I mentioned, the Andes region boasted a vast textile tradition dating back thousands of years with many forms of recurring iconography, including renditions of animals, plants and people. Somewhat surprisingly, the Inca tocapus that appear on the tunic look nothing like these earlier designs. Instead, the small, rectangular motifs feature complex, multicolored, compositions of lines, triangles, Xs, stepped designs and spirals, among other shapes, that often are bilaterally symmetrical or quadripartitioned. The Inca state appears to have invented these motifs to be deliberately distinct from those of other Andean cultures.  

What is more, the Inca state strictly regulated the production and use of tocapus. Only weavers working for the Inca government were reportedly permitted to create them. Finished tocapu garments had to be relinquished to the emperor’s administrators, so they could redistribute them to the nobility, military leaders who showed valor in combat, and conquered lords as a sign of the Inca emperor’s favor. Most men’s tunics only had a few rows of tocapus repeating in small quantities at the waist (fig. 3). Both archaeological and historical sources suggest that the more types and quantities of tocapus that a garment had, the more prestigious it was perceived to be within Inca society. This highly governed system of dress basically created a network of tocapu-clad VIPs throughout the Inca Empire that less-well-connected and less influential bystanders might oogle or admire. To my way of thinking, tocapus became a state-controlled fashion statement that vaunted the empire and emperor. They were an essential imperial strategy and, in essence, a form of Inca logo wear.   

Within this sartorial landscape, what made the Dumbarton Oaks tunic special is that it is completely covered by tocapus—the greatest quantity of any surviving Inca artifact. Moreover, in the late 1500s and early 1600s under Spanish colonial rule, two authors and a number of artists produced three, closely related, illustrated manuscripts depicting hundreds of Inca men wearing tunics with different designs. In spite of this great variety, the manuscripts only show Inca emperors wearing this particular style of all-tocapu tunic (fig. 4). The images suggest that this kind of vestment was reserved exclusively for Inca rulers. Moreover, they portray it as a form of regalia that was only worn on special occasions such as coronations, royal weddings and political summits. The illustrations indicate that the Dumbarton Oaks tunic was the very highest form of royal Inca vestment. 

Even more interestingly, the earliest manuscript of the three—written by Spanish friar Martín de Murua—provided inspiration for the second one. Specifically, one of the illustrators of the first, an Indigenous man named Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, became the author and illustrator of the second. At two different points in his manuscript, Guaman Poma chose to recreate drawings he was responsible for in the earlier manuscript, but upgraded the rulers’ more basic vestments to all-tocapu tunics. This matters because both of the illustrations in the second manuscript portrayed scenes in which the very future of the Inca Empire was at stake (fig. 5). That is, he was deliberately using tunics like the one at Dumbarton Oaks as a visual assertion of the power and legitimacy of the Inca sovereign, making them an early pictorial articulation of Indigenous sovereignty in the face of colonialism.   

Much more could be said about the tunic’s intricate designs, but another key finding of my research is that this elaborate garment is unfinished. After the months or years spent weaving the tunic, it should have been finished with a multicolor, zigzag line embroidered along its lower edge. Needle holes in the supremely fine cloth show that someone started embroidering this detail, but abruptly stopped. There is really only one moment in Inca history when it is conceivable that work on such an important royal vestment would have suddenly ceased: the Spanish invasion of the Inca Empire in the early 1530s. It seems likely that the tunic was being made as the new clothes for the last Inca emperor, Atahualpa, but was left unfinished upon his assassination. If so, it would have been an eyewitness to one of the most pivotal events in world history: the Spanish takeover of South America.  

This missing detail also likely explains why the sumptuous textile survives to the present day. Because the bodies of Inca emperors were sacred, any objects they touched—including all their garments—were no longer fit for consumption and were placed in storehouses. They were either ritually burned in an annual ceremony or burned at the end of an emperor’s life in a funerary rite called the Purucaya. It is unlikely, however, that an emperor would ever have worn an unfinished vestment of this stature. After Atahualpa was murdered by the Spanish in 1533, and before the Spanish elevated a puppet emperor to quell dissent and legitimize their rule, it seems possible that the unfinished tunic was claimed or seized by a royal relative, nobleman or other powerful figure in colonial Inca society.   

Indeed, many physical details indicate that the unfinished tunic was worn extensively in the colonial period. What this means is that—in contrast to those hundreds of thousands of ancient Andean textiles found buried in the deserts—the tunic is probably not an archaeological artifact that survived passively waiting in the ground, but rather is a historical object that was passed down from generation to generation over five hundred years. Early in the tunic’s life, while the fabric was still in fairly good condition, it was torn and mended so that someone could continue to wear it. The repair stitches were diligent but unskilled, even crude, likely suggesting that the generation of skilled Inca weavers who were alive at the time of the Spanish invasion had already passed on. Someone only would have repaired it in this manner if it were a last resort.  

During this period of use, the precious heirloom might have been donned in festivals, rites and other formal occasions—as many colonial paintings suggest. At these events, the tunic both would have harkened back to a glorious Inca past and would also have exerted influence over Inca fashions in that historical moment. In the colonial period, the sumptuary laws surrounding tocapus and tocapu garments quickly fell away. Inspired by styles like that of the Dumbarton Oaks tunic, these motifs proliferated within colonial-period Inca garments. Tocapus came to dot the backgrounds of the cloth that were simply solid in earlier, everyday garments of the Inca period (fig. 6). At the same time, colonial Inca weavers wove tocapus at larger scales, with threads that were much thicker, and with less intricate designs so that they would not be so labor intensive to create. 

Figure 6: Colonial-era Inca tunics with increased numbers of tocapus

But as the Dumbarton Oaks tunic was worn, its fibers gradually continued to weaken and abrade. Eventually, it was torn a second time, and the damage was too much to repair. After this catastrophe, the precious heirloom could no longer be worn, but it continued to be saved and cared for. Perhaps with this shift in utility, its owner came to perceive its value differently. It is also possible that someone else may have formed a new sense of its worth. Colonial documents record multiple instances of royal Inca garments being sold, bequeathed and stolen. The specific history of the chain of ownership of the Dumbarton Oaks is still unknown. But a document that came to light in 2017 may provide a tantalizing clue: An inventory of the objects that Martín de Murua ultimately shipped back to Spain in 1615 shows that the author of the first manuscript—the document that most attests to what the Dumbarton Oaks tunic is—actually owned a royal Inca tunic. What became of Murua’s tunic is unclear; could it be the one now stewarded by Dumbarton Oaks? It may be that Murua’s portraits of Inca rulers were more accurately portraits of this specific, rare, royal textile.  

Although the Dumbarton Oaks tunic may have been originally created as one of many all-tocapu vestments being woven for the Inca emperor, its life history seemingly changed with the advent of the Spanish invasion. Its unprecedented survival to the present day made it a highly influential over five centuries. Not only did it likely spur new fashion trends in the colonial period, but scholarly attention to the object in recent decades has also brought it back into fashion among contemporary Andean weavers.  

In the Cusco region, tapestry weavers now reproduce its motifs on Spanish-style floor looms. Working at a much larger scale, they transform the tunic into wall hangings to sell to tourists visiting Machu Picchu. Instead of recognizing that the source of their inspiration was a tunic, they refer to their weavings as calendarios incas, or Inca calendars, because of the gridded arrangement of the designs (fig. 7). These creations ensure that the 500-year-old vestment will remain a part of Andean visual culture for years to come—and I hope that my book might connect this modern visual awareness of the designs to the surviving artifact (fig. 8). 

Andrew James Hamilton is associate curator of Arts of the Americas at the Art Institute of Chicago. He is also a lecturer in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. He is also the author of Scale & the Incas (Princeton University Press, 2018).