This engraving, titled “How the Emperor of Guaiana Tends to Prepare His Noblemen When He Has Them as Guests,” depicts part of a ceremony in which a cacique (ruler) is covered in a layer of gold dust. The passage reads:
 

Legends about a city of gold located in northern South America date to the sixteenth century. However, in some of the earliest stories, “El Dorado” refers not to a place but to a person: “the gilded one.” While a golden city remains a fantasy, there is real evidence for ceremonies involving a gilded man. A 1599 engraving in this case, for example, illustrates a ceremony in which a cacique (ruler) is covered in gold dust. 
  

Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita was born and raised in Santa Fe de Bogotá, and his Historia General is an all-encompassing narrative of the Spanish invasion of the region that came to be known as the New Kingdom of Granada (present-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama). The engraved medallions decorating the title page show fictitious portraits of Muisca leaders, copied from representations of the Inca in Peru, as well as imagined battle scenes of their conquest.

Colonial-era dictionaries of Indigenous languages of Colombia are rare, and the few that survive show how they contributed to the erasure of Indigenous diversity. At the time of the conquest, there were more than a dozen languages in use in the Muisca region alone, a fact that was misrepresented by European chroniclers. The Spanish crown’s language policy implemented from 1574 onward relied on the idea of Muisca (spelled here as “Mosca”) as a “general language” that was widespread enough to communicate with large numbers of people, as with Nahuatl in Central Mexico and Quechua in Peru.

Ezuama are sacred spaces for exchange and communication. José de los Santos Sauna, governor of the Kogui-Malayo-Arahuaco Indigenous reservation and the Gonawindúa Tayrona Organization (GTO), sees here a dance organized in an ezuama for the purpose of healing different aspects of the community’s relationship with nature. 
  

The coca plant is at the center of daily life and ritual practice for Indigenous people throughout South America. When Arhuaco men meet, for example, they exchange handfuls of coca leaves instead of shaking hands. Chewed with lime powder (calcium carbonate, which acts as a catalyst) created from burned seashells, it has a mild stimulating effect that aids focus and thinking, but not the highly intoxicating effects of chemically refined cocaine. As ethnographer Wade Davis has noted, “comparing coca to cocaine is like comparing potatoes to vodka.” 
  

Works from all over ancient Colombia show male and female figures seated in pensive poses, some chewing coca leaves and some with eyes half-closed, as if deep in thought. Known as pensadores (thinkers), they are responsible for conceiving (understanding) and maintaining balance in the world. “To sit is an invitation to the synchrony of energies,” observes Jaison Pérez Villafaña, an Arhuaco elder. “The banquito (bench) supports you while you think. It helps you ground what you have not understood. You are inviting yourself to solve a problem that worries you.”

McQueen—who once stated that “the basis for anything I do is craftsmanship”—consistently looked to his formative years apprenticing on Savile Row when tailoring each of his collections. Two dresses from the Untitled (Golden Showers) (Spring/Summer 1998-99) collection and one dress from Dante (Fall/Winter 1996-97) utilize traditional wool suiting, adapted with net cutouts and piecing to reveal, conceal, and highlight parts of the body.

References to the early twentieth century and the Edwardian fashions in the film Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) are evident in two McQueen looks from It’s Only a Game (Spring/Summer 2005). The high, fitted collars and vertical pintucks of silk net and lace of dresses from the early 1900s inspired McQueen’s jackets, with the grosgrain ribbon typically found inside historic boned bodices acting here as an exposed waist closure.