Costume in Ancient Mexico
Patricia Rieff Anawalt

The combination of archaeological and ethnohistorical data tell us that only a few garments were worn in Mesoamerica and that each culture had regional variants of these basic items.
Some cultural practices, in addition to climate, have made it impossible for many items of pre-Hispanic clothing to survive. To reconstruct the richness of this attire, which holds a number of keys to understanding the societies in which they were created, it is necessary to turn to representations in archaeological materials, in codices, and to the very heirs of pre-Hispanic traditions. Mesoamerican people left an indelible mark on the region’s basic inventory of dress, including motifs, colors, and even materials of which garments were made, reflecting their vision of the world and their complex social structure.
The clothing of pre-Hispanic Mexico reflected the technology that produced it. Widths of fabric woven on the ancient, ubiquitous and stillextant backstrap loom cannot exceed the working span of a weaver’s arms. However, the relatively narrow textiles that come off that loom have all four edges –the selvages– fully finished. As a result, with no further processing woven cloth could be used immediately as a maxtlatl (loincloth) or wrap-around skirt; wider, unfitted garments could be created by simply seaming together the selvages of two or more finished webs.
In ancient Mesoamerica, plants were the basis for all cloth. The majority of the population wore clothing made of bast, a strong woody fiber sometimes obtained from nettles but chiefly from the phloem of such long-leafed plants as yucca, palm or –most commonly– maguey, source of the common peoples’ ixtle cloth. All of the bast fibers necessitated laborious processing. Easier to prepare was the Mesoamerican status fiber par excellence, cotton, principally the white strain (Gossypium hirsutum L.) although the tawny coyuchi cotton –coyoichcatl (“co-yote colored”) in Nahuatl– also was used.
Because the Mesoamerican climate and burial practices were such that almost no pre-Hispanic clothing has survived, the ancient costume repertory can only be reconstructed from garment depictions found on wall murals, sculptures, ceramic vessels, figurines, or –for the Late Postclassic period (A.D. 1250–1521)– from pictorial codices or eye-witness accounts. This combined archaeological-ethnohistorical record contains evidence than only a limited number of garment types were worn. Each of the pre-Hispanic cultures displayed its own distinctive subset of these forms, basic apparel that was further elaborated to serve as elite attire for rulers and deities.
The following brief overview of three thousand years of Mesoamerican costume examines each of the pre-Hispanic clothing types in turn, attire worn in the arid highlands as well as in the low-lying tropical regions (see accompanying summary charts for period dating and cultural distribution).