The lambahoany is Madagascar's everyday printed cloth: a cotton rectangle about 50 × 65 inches, worn as a wrap, tied as a baby sling, hung as a curtain. Its structure never varies — a repeating motif border frames the field, a medallion or pastoral vignette sits at the centre, and a Malagasy proverb runs in a text band just above the lower border.

That band is the point. The type is ornament inside the print, not a caption beneath it, and buying a cloth means choosing the sentence you will wear. This system borrows the whole grammar — one saturated ground, two or three equally saturated print colours, hard flat edges, and a frame you are never allowed to drop.