For the tweedicated followers of fashion, famous Hebridean cloth is absolutely bang on trend

Timelessly stylish Harris Tweed enjoys another fashion

For dedicated followers of fashion, it has never been away but, thanks to our lockdown boxset bingeing, Harris Tweed is back with a bang.

The famous brand has combined tradition and heritage with the ability to endure through the ages of ever-changing fashion and has been inspiring the most influential designers for generations.

Now, a new wave of enthusiasm for the Hebridean cloth is being credited to the Netflix royal hit The Crown and scenes of off-duty royals resplendent in tweed at Balmoral.

The drama helped inspire Max Mara’s artistic director Ian Griffiths to create the fashion house’s autumn/ winter collection for 2021, and Google searches for Harris Tweed enjoyed a peak around the time the latest series launched on Netflix.

Mark Hogarth, creative director at Harris Tweed Hebrides, said: “Coming out of the pandemic, we’ve got a few cultural things going on. People who have been trapped in their houses for quite some time want to get out and about and socialise. We’re also entering into the autumn season, which means that people want to invest in some new clothing.

“It’s always great to have cultural references from shows like The Crown, where the authenticity of the wardrobe is of paramount importance to the show. You can’t get any more authentic than Harris Tweed.”

The cloth is handwoven by islanders in the Outer Hebrides, with standards and brand protection enshrined in law.

Cultural touchpoints stretch back decades, with tweed part of the choice uniforms for spies on the big screen, and also featured heavily at Madonna’s 2000 wedding to Guy Ritchie in Dornoch.

In 1967, Dustin Hoffman’s character Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate wore Harris Tweed, and it formed part of the Preppy style emanating from Ivy League universities, where students found they needed extra layers of warmth in old, gothic stone buildings in upstate New York and New England.

It’s that functionality, says Hogarth, that has formed a major part of the brand’s success. In the early 20th Century, workers on the Clyde would wear thick, durable Harris Tweed bunnets to shield them from the wind and rain in exposed shipyards but the brand was equally at home on jackets worn in the aristocratic mansions of Sutherland, Skye, and, of course, Balmoral, before the introduction of central heating.

“We’ve always been in a quite glorious position where the functionality of Harris Tweed generated the fashionability of it,” said Hogarth.

“There’s always been an establishment element of Harris Tweed through the royals, aristocracy. But on the other side there’s this kind of anti-culture element where the students wore it, spies wore it, and that was primarily because it was durable and sustainable in every sense.

“When I first visited Ralph Lauren, his brother Jerry burst into the meeting unannounced and said: ‘I’m flying to Paris tomorrow and the Harris Tweed jacket is the first thing in my case. I roll it up, I throw it in, I take it out, I put it on’ and that sums it up.”

This durability, Hogarth believes, also puts Harris Tweed on the right side of the sustainability debate that’s currently a hot topic in fashion.

Hogarth said: “There’s an old adage in fashion circles: ‘I’m too poor to buy cheap shoes’. If you buy something that isn’t good quality, you have to keep buying it again. We are making a product that’s an investment rather than an expense.

“With the debate now about carbon emissions, in fast fashion in particular, we have a unique story. We’re a vertically integrated industry and communitybased. Not only are we making a sustainable product, but also sustaining a community in the Outer Hebrides.”

The brand continues to look to the future to safeguard its heritage for generations to come.

This includes investing time and energy into courses for new mill workers and weavers.

“We’ve got a really good team at the mill making sure there’s a next generation who are trained up and ready to come into what’s a very skill-intensive environment,” added Hogarth.

“By making Harris Tweed more fashionable, we’ve managed to make it a little bit more endearing for the younger generation to come and work in the industry and see it as a career.

“Culturally it has been a great thing. With the possibility of it being a career on the islands, it stops extensive out-migration.”