Mola Museum

This guide to the Mola Museum in Panama City follows two threads: how Guna women on the San Blas islands turned reverse-appliqué mola panels from everyday clothing into a global export after the 1960s, with Peace Corps-backed cooperatives helping them keep more of the profits, and how one outsider quietly built his own collection on the side. That collector was Jose Felix Llopis, a Spanish-born businessman who spent his career as Christian Dior's representative across Latin America while gathering molas in his spare time until his death in 2011. A single complex mola, the guide notes, can take around sixty hours to stitch. Look closely at the stitching in each case for that labor.