Overview
The centuries before the Inca belong to the coastal kingdoms, Chimú above all, ruling from Chan Chan — the largest adobe city in the Americas. Their dress is the Andean tunic and mantle carried to a high finish, and their real distinction is what was worked onto and alongside the cloth: feathers and precious metal in quantity.
Key garments and style
The garments are constant — the uncu tunic, a mantle, a loincloth, a headcloth or headdress — woven from coastal cotton and highland camelid fibre. Chimú weaving favours dense repeated small figures in bands, so a tunic reads as pattern at a distance and as hundreds of tiny birds or figures up close.
Featherwork is the coastal speciality. Tropical feathers, traded from the eastern forests, were knotted onto cotton backing in overlapping rows to make tunics and panels of solid colour, and the dry coast has preserved them.
Metal was the other Chimú strength: gold and silver beakers, ear-spools and headdress ornaments made by specialists in a distinct craft quarter of Chan Chan. When the Inca conquered the kingdom around 1470 they moved those metalworkers to Cusco, which is how Chimú technique entered Inca goldwork.
Transition
Under the Inca the tunic became a state garment, issued and standardised, and the coastal traditions were absorbed into an imperial system of cloth.