A culture of valleys, five flags
The Alps care nothing for borders. The same arc of mountains is shared between Switzerland, Austria and its Tyrol, Bavaria, Savoy and northern Italy, but from one slope to the next the same gestures hold: driving the herds up to the high pasture in summer, bringing them down in autumn, dressing for the cold and the slope.
So costume tells the valley far more than the country. A trained eye places an outfit to within a few towns, by the cut of the waistcoat, the colour of a piping, the way an apron is tied. The mountain makes the unity, the church tower makes the nuance.
It is a wardrobe of people who work outdoors and last. You mend, you pass on, you bring out the fine pieces for the days that count. Nothing here is thought for a single season.
Loden, a supple armour
Before the cut, there is the cloth, and the Alpine cloth has a name: loden. A wool woven loose, then fulled in hot water until the fibres close, and finally brushed. The result is dense, warm, and repels fine rain without being so waterproof it smothers.
It is the cloth of the hunter, the shepherd, the walker. It takes the drizzle, dries, is darned at the worn spot and goes on for ten years. The Austrians made of it straight-collared coats you recognise from afar, often in that dark green that melts into the firs.
Like English tweed, loden says a simple thing: a good wool, well worked, is worth more than a high-tech lining you throw away at the first snag. That is exactly the idea we stand for.
Dirndl and lederhose
The two pieces the world knows come from here. The lederhose first, the Bavarian and Tyrolean leather breeches, cut from a hide so tough it passes from father to son and takes a patina without ever wearing out. A work garment turned festive dress.
The dirndl next, that women's dress with a laced bodice, blouse and large apron. The version we know owes much to the nineteenth-century town: the Alpine maids' outfits were taken up, coded, then brought back into fashion by the holidaying bourgeoisie.
One convention amuses visitors: the knot of the apron. Tied on the left, the woman is free; on the right, she is taken; at the back, a widow or a waitress. True in several valleys, less so elsewhere, but the idea captures well how dress spoke to whoever knew how to look.
The Appenzell herdsman
The finest work costume of the Alps is perhaps Swiss. To drive the cows to the high pasture, the Appenzell herdsman puts on his festive dress: red waistcoat, yellow leather breeches, white stockings, and a profusion of silver few men's costumes in Europe can match.
He wears a single gold ring in the ear and, slipped behind it, a small silver spoon, the Öhrli, once the mark of the master herdsman. Buttons, chains, plaques: everything is silver, and everything tells of cattle and high pasture.
The whole is no costume in the fancy-dress sense. It is brought out on the days of driving up and down from the alp, moments that still set the rhythm of the year in these valleys. The costume follows the herd, not the calendar of feasts.
Cattle engraved and embroidered
Look closely at the herdsman's leather braces: across a brass plate runs a procession of cows, goats and shepherds, hammered in relief, exactly the scene the costume celebrates. The garment turns in on itself, carrying the image of what it serves.
Cattle are everywhere in Alpine ornament, engraved on metal, embroidered on cloth, painted on milk pails. In an economy that lives off the cow, the animal becomes the central motif, like the reindeer among the Sámi or the sea among the Aran knitters.
Appenzell is also famous for its white embroidery, of extreme fineness, long the work of a whole country. Luxury, here, lies as much in the detail of the thread as in the silver.
The edelweiss, a flower turned emblem
A small white, felted flower grows right at the top, on the difficult rocks: the edelweiss. For a long time, going to pick it as a gift passed for proof of courage, so far and so high does it grow.
From there it became the symbol of the whole Alps. It has been embroidered on collars, struck on buttons, adopted by the Austrian, German and Italian mountain troops, sung all the way to Hollywood. In time, it turned into a cliché.
What remains is the flower itself, real, rare, fitted to a harsh setting, covered in a down that shields it from frost and sun. A lesson in Alpine sobriety: what lasts up there is what knows how to protect itself without overdoing it.
