Kilty pleasures: tartan’s miraculous journey from humble highland craft to global superbrand

Picking your tartan is no easy task. Should you favour tradition and wear your clan colours, with a kilt passed down through the family, or choose a punk styling by Vivienne Westwood? Is it the dress of revolt, worn by Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Jacobite rebels, or the uniform of repression, taken up by the British army and once even used to clothe enslaved people? Is it a cringe on shortbread tins or the unifying weave of Scots nationhood?

Tartan is, above all, a cloth of contradiction. And that is the refrain that runs through a new exhibition at the V&A Dundee charting this instantly, globally recognisable textile’s journey from simple highland craft to massproduced superbrand. “Tartan is linked to a hugely diverse range of identities,” says gallery director Leonie Bell. “It is the cloth of the establishment, of political power, regal power, military power. Yet at the same time, it’s a symbol of subcultures and new identities, whether that’s 1970s punks or Japanese fashion influencers today.”

This notion of contradiction is one that Jonathan Faiers – who wrote Tartan, a celebrated cultural history that helped inspire the exhibition – returns to again and again. Faiers, professor of fashion thinking at the University of Southampton and a consultant on the show, writes: “It has been employed as a textile that can honour and repress its wearer, and is simultaneously regarded as quintessentially traditional and rebellious. Apparently simple in construction, tartan is also capable of staggering complexity.”

The earliest documented tartan in Britain dates from the third century AD, and was discovered in Falkirk, near the ruins of the Antonine Wall, stuffed into the mouth of a pot containing Roman coins. The fragment, now held at the National Museum of Scotland, reveals a simple check design of light and dark wool. And it is this grid structure or “sett” (the sequence of coloured threads woven to produce crisscrossing vertical and horizontal stripes) that renders each tartan unique.

As a reflection of the constant and often subversive ways tartan has been reinvented, the exhibition is deliberately non-chronological. “How we understand tartan in the 21st century is very much shaped by myths,” says curator Kirsty Hassard. But often these fictions are entwined with moments of very real historical significance, and that is what the exhibition seeks to disentangle.

Bonnie Prince Charlie himself understood the visual impact of the material: his tartan coat, reproduced in portraits on snuff boxes and crockery, was a signal to his Scots supporters – desperate to restore the Catholic Stuarts to the British throne – that, despite an exiled childhood in Rome, he