The Perks of Peruvian Pima Cotton

Joey — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:16:00 GMT

We place a lot of emphasis on the quality of the REDD knit, both in regards to its craft and material, but if you were to ask us to single out the element that most distinguishes our polos, we’d say it all comes down to a single ingredient: Pima cotton, harvested by hand along Peru’s northern coastline.

Pima cotton, or Gossypium barbadense, is a luxury long-fiber cotton with a history of cultivation in Peru that spans centuries, if not millennia, and known to Peruvians as “gamuza,” which is Spanish for “suede.” The plant is most commonly named for the Pima Indians, who were the first to harvest the crop in the United States, but archeologists have traced Pima cotton’s genesis to South America, having found samples that date back to 3100 B.C.

The Incas were especially well known for their practice of cultivating and weaving Pima cotton for both practical and artistic purposes. Like them, contemporary harvesters cultivate the crop by hand, which prevents the contamination of the cotton with the impurities that result from an industrial process, and leave a scratchy texture and yellowish cast. Hand-harvested Pima cotton, by contrast, results in a smooth, lustrously white finish—making it a perfect medium for REDD to mix a variety of vibrant colors.

So what separates Pima cotton from the rest? Stephen Yafa’s book Cotton: The Biography of a Revolutionary Fiber identifies the distinguishing factor in the length of the cotton fiber, of which luxury cotton’s are longer—akin, in Yafa’s words, to “the difference between perfectly drinkable table wine and a celestial Chateau Lafite-Rothschild”.

Sources:

Robert Redd, LLC Blog RSS Feed

The Perks of Peruvian Pima Cotton