Boys' Fashion
Buy and sell boys’ clothes, shoes and accessories in Panama.
For the Fiestas Patrias parades, plenty of Panamanian boys march in the traditional men’s folk outfit, a white camisilla or a bright cotona, and it goes back into a drawer until he has grown out of it. Most of what boys wear goes the same way: worn hard for a season or two and outgrown long before it wears out, from toddler sizes into the early teens. Folk outfits change hands new and pre-owned alongside everyday clothes, and so does the red Marea Roja shirt young fans wear to every match. For anything with hand embroidery, ask for a close photo of the stitching first.
Polos, school shoes and caps, outgrown at three different speeds:
boys’ clothing turns over quickest, so a used polo or pair of shorts often has most of its wear still in it. Boys’ shoes go almost as fast and are sized on a system of their own. Boys’ accessories such as belts, caps and the woven shoulder bag of a folk outfit keep fitting for years and change hands in better shape. A sister’s clothes are under girls’ fashion.
Camisilla or cotona for the Fiestas Patrias:
both are the traditional men’s folk outfit, but a school act or a dance group will ask for one in particular. The camisilla is the gala outfit worn all over the country: a white shirt with embroidered panels front and back, a few buttons of gold, tiny coins, mother-of-pearl or bone, black trousers and a woven bag slung across the body. The cotona belongs to the central provinces, Herrera and Veraguas above all. It is cut from unbleached cream cotton, with bright embroidery worked separately on the collar, shoulders, chest and cuffs, and it goes with short trousers that stop at the knee or mid-calf, a white hat from Ocú with a black cord and leather sandals. A T-shirt printed with a folk-outfit design is a souvenir, not a parade outfit.
The pintao hat and its rings of braid:
the hat is the expensive part of a gala outfit. A pintao is woven by hand from braided plant fibre, much of it around La Pintada in Coclé, and graded by the rings of braid you count from above: fifteen or fewer make a plain hat, sixteen and up a fine one. A plain hand-woven pintao starts around $80 new and one with about a dozen rings reaches $250, while the white work hat worn with a cotona costs a fraction of that. Because the money is in the weaving, a used pintao is priced on its braid, and a sound one passes from brother to brother instead of being bought for a single parade. On a used one, count the rings in daylight, run a finger round the brim for cracked braid, check the crown for the grey spots of a damp cupboard and ask the size before you travel.
Embroidery, gourd buttons and the waist cord on a used cotona:
turn the shirt inside out. Hand embroidery shows its stitching on the reverse, while machine embroidery looks flat and identical on every panel. Count the buttons, small gourds covered in the same thread as the embroidery, because a missing one is hard to match. The short trousers have no fly and tie at the waist with a cord of manila or bark fibre, so check it is there and not frayed.
The red Marea Roja shirt, official or copy:
Reebok makes the national team kit. Copies are common, so a shirt sold as new for a small part of the official price is almost always one. An official shirt carries a sewn inside label with a product code, and its crest and maker’s logo have clean edges; a copy tends to show a blurred crest, loose threads round the badges and labels that disagree. A star’s name and number on the back help a resale, a child’s own name rarely does.
A folk outfit listed before the parades, with every piece named:
they move in the weeks before the Fiestas Patrias and hardly at all afterwards. Name each piece included, from shirt and trousers to hat, shoulder bag and sandals, give the trouser length from waist to hem, and photograph the embroidery front and reverse and the pintao from above. Most cotonas did one parade and then spent the year folded, so a father coming in from Soná or Las Minas mostly wants to see the embroidery in daylight and know the trousers will still reach his son’s knee.