Traditional Yalalag garment huipil, hand embroidered from Yalalag Hildago, Oaxaca

This traditional Yalalag garment was recently purchased in Oaxaca. This is a true original. The fabric is cotton and has weight to it.  It’s just amazing.  I only have one.

See this wonderful description in Vogue from August 22, written b Fernanda Perez Sanchez.

https://www.vogue.com/contributor/fernanda-perez-sanchez

‘Villa Hidalgo Yalalag, Sierra Norte

“This huipil is of an extraordinary quality," says Remigio Mestas about a traditional Yalalag garment. Mestas is originally from Villa Hidalgo Yalalag, in the Sierra Norte, and he has dedicated himself to textile art for more than three decades, preserving materials, traveling all over the world to spread the work of indigenous artisans, and then, in turn, creating works that are the results of remarkable cultural fusions, using items from other communities.

The garment shown in the images here has been made with threads of Egyptian cotton in Mestas’s workshop, though Yalalag huipils are commonly woven from wool and cotton using backstrap looms. It can take up to six months to finish one, depending on the fineness of the threads used. The formal Yalalag huipil is worn on special occasions, including the Guelaguetza, of course, where couples dance jarabes serranos. The garment has mythology woven into its strands. When a woman wears it, she embodies the legend of the goddess of 13 Serpents, a deity that was said to have been born when the Spanish conquistadors felled a copal tree as they passed through Yalalag to build the church of San Juan Bautista. In Zapotec culture, the goddess is associated with the fertility of plants and the production of food for humans and animals.’

28 inches wide x 36 inches long 

100% cotton, cotton embroidery and tassels are rayon

Dry clean only