How tartan was woven into the fabric of our lives
From clan chief to catwalk, Balmoral to the Bay City Rollers...
THROUGH the warp and weft of Scottish history, tartan has spun a colourful yarn. Its deceptively simple criss-cross of stripes has come to reflect the conflicting emotions of our complex national psyche – equally able to express individuality and a sense of belonging.
For some, it spells tradition and conformity, the uniform of clan loyalists, Highland regiments and an army of football fans. For others, it is the emblem of dissent, worn by rebellious Jacobites and punks alike.
A cloth built on a pattern of clashes, tartan’s history is a turbulent one, marked by periods of revulsion and reverence.
Indeed, no other pattern has come close to matching tartan’s power to unify and divide – outlawed by royal proclamation, then embraced by royal patronage.
Yet, held within its tightly patterned grid is the potential to endlessly reinvent itself by inspiring artists, architects and contemporary fashion. This once-humble weaver’s craft has transcended boundaries to become a globally recognised textile and a perennial favourite of the international catwalk.
It has also shaped the way others see us, from Balmoral to the Bay City Rollers, Brigadoon to Braveheart. Love it or loathe it, as a major exhibition celebrating this design classic makes clear, tartan is ineluctably woven into the very fabric of our lives.
Tartan at V&A Dundee, which runs until January, is the first serious retrospective of tartan in 30 years.
It brings together a dazzling array of hundreds of objects from more than 80 lenders worldwide, telling the story of how tartan clothed Scotland – then took on the world.
Showcasing items from Chanel, Dior, Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen as well as the Tate art galleries and Highland Folk Museum, it aims to illustrate tartan’s universal appeal through iconic and everyday examples of fashion, product design, photography, film and art.
It also includes rare pieces, such as a tartan fragment worn by Bonnie Prince Charlie and a MacBean tartan taken on Apollo 12 in November 1969 by American astronaut Alan Bean. Its global reach is also shown by a display of contemporary streetwear from Japan. But one of the main draws is likely to be The People’s Tartan section, an eclectic mix of locally sourced items donated by the public, such as a home-made Bay City Rollers outfit and a tartan-covered guitar.
CONSULTANT curator Professor Jonathan Faiers, whose book Tartan formed the basis of the show, said: ‘Tartan has become a global pattern which has inspired designers of all sorts, fine artists, architects, graphic designers, everyone you can think of.’
Tartan’s appeal, according to the professor of fashion thinking at the University of Southampton, lies in its visual attraction and its simple, matrix-like structure.
He said: ‘Tartans are so stunning visually, whether bright and loud or muted with lots of subtle colour shades. The basic structure is a weave of verticals and horizontals and that grid pattern is so adaptable to all sorts of areas of design.
‘Why it seems to communicate to so many cultures is something to do with its fundamental structure.’ That basic form and how it has been bent to serve contradictory purposes is a central part of the exhibition. ‘I have called it a cloth of duality,’ said Professor Faiers. ‘It can be conservative and radical, traditional and subversive.
‘The obvious contemporary one is punks but you can trace that back to it being worn by Jacobites and the resistance to British rule.
‘So it has that anti-establishment history, whereas the current Royal Family and generations before them often wear tartan and it has this very traditional, establishment appearance, which is what gives it its power. It can be all things to all people, really.’
Fashion long ago seized on this powerful duality of meaning, making it a staple of the catwalk. Professor Faiers said: ‘If you are a conservative, classic designer you can turn to tartan, or if you are more extreme and outrageous, you also look to tartan. People can pick the aspect of its history they want and wear it accordingly.’
Modern tartan usually refers to coloured patterns while, originally, it did not have to be made up of a pattern at all, and almost certainly resulted from an impoverished people picking up whatever stray fibres might come to hand.
Their ‘plaide’ would have been a ‘blanket’ first used for warmth – and possibly as camouflage – while out hunting and fighting.
The clan tartans we know today are a largely invented tradition dating to the early 19th century.
Coloured tartans went back further, but the pattern worn may have depended on something as random as personal taste.
Indeed, David Morier’s painting of the Highland charge at Culloden in 1746 features eight clansmen wearing a mix of more than 20 tartans. During the battle, the way to identify friend from foe was not through tartan but the colour of ribbon worn on the bonnet.
Not that this stopped the Hanoverian government banning tartan in the 1746 Dress Act as part of measures to speed the decline of Jacobitism in the wake of their defeat.
When the Act was repealed in 1782, tartan was adopted for Highland regiments in the British Army, which poor Highlanders joined in large numbers until the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815.
BY then, however, tartan had largely been abandoned by ordinary Scots. Its power as a galvanising national force seemed spent – until the Romantic revival of the 1820s, spurred on by Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, popularised an idealised Highlands and sparked an international tartan craze.
Scott stage-managed the Royal visit of King George IV in 1822, the first by a reigning monarch to Scotland in 171 years, and the king’s wearing of tartan.
Scotland’s textile industry was soon struggling to meet the surge in demand for kilts and tartans.
It received further royal endorsement from Queen Victoria and Prince Albert who, Professor Faiers says, created ‘a tartan-saturated “nevernever” land’ at Balmoral where they played out their ‘Highland fantasies in a succession of tartan outfits and accessories’.
By then, manufacturers had commercialised this outpouring of sentiment, sparking an explosion of new patterns, for clans, corporations and individuals.
Professor Faiers said: ‘If you name a thing, rather than it being pattern number 352, you can sell it a lot more effectively.’
But the new appetite for tartan would lead to overkill and a stereotypical portrayal of Scottish culture, first by an emergent tourist industry in the 18th and 19th centuries, and later by Hollywood.
The nadir came with the release in 1955 of the much-lampooned musical, Brigadoon, before it was craftily reclaimed by a Seventies boy band from Edinburgh.
The Bay City Rollers unleashed ‘tartan-mania’ on an unsuspecting world and transformed Seventies Glam with a tinge of tartan cringe. Professor Faiers added: ‘It’s an expression of the fact it is such a powerful pattern and cloth that it can inspire absolute devotion and absolute revulsion in people.’
Yet the story of tartan does not end there. Just as the Rollers were sliding down the charts, punk arrived to subvert tartan’s ordered lines into messy chaos. Royal Stewart, the personal tartan of the late Queen Elizabeth II, was given an edgy re-edit by Ms Westwood to clothe the anti-establishment Sex Pistols.
It was a culture war, which both sides fought in the same colours.
Far from damaging tartan’s reputation, punk revivified it for a new generation. Its influence on Japanese subculture has helped attract the top young designers while, in the United States, the Bay City Rollers’ mantle has been taken up by rapper Andre 3000’s outlandish costumes.
Professor Faiers said: ‘Tartan can have this transcendent, almost supernatural quality. We have fragments of suits supposedly given to Bonnie Prince Charlie, which were treated really as religious relics by his supporters.’
The exhibition reveals how such devotion can inspire the everyday. The professor said: ‘We have items from a Bay City Rollers fan and a handsewn kilt made by a boy for Scout camp. We even have a Hillman Imp with a tartan interior.’
He added: ‘What unites them all is the pattern – intrinsically Scottish, but now genuinely global.’