Exhibition
Tartan
Opening Saturday 1 April 2023
A radical new look at one of the world’s best-known
textiles
https://www.vam.ac.uk/dundee/whatson/exhibitions/tartan
UPDATED 27-3-2023: Oldest tartan found to date back to 16th Century
The Glen Affric tartan will be exhibited for the first
time at V&A Dundee's Tartan exhibition from 1 April
A scrap of
fabric found in a Highland peat bog 40 years ago is likely to be the oldest
tartan ever discovered in Scotland, new tests have established.
The fabric
is believed to have been created in about the 16th Century, making it more than
400 years old.
It was
found in a Glen Affric peat bog, in the Highlands, in the early 1980s.
The
Scottish Tartans Authority (STA) commissioned dye analysis and radiocarbon
testing of the textile to prove its age.
Using high
resolution digital microscopy, four initial colours of green, brown and
possibly red and yellow were identified.
The dye
analysis confirmed the use of indigo or woad in the green but was inconclusive
for the other colours, probably due to the dyestuff having degraded.
No
artificial or semi-synthetic dyestuffs were involved in the making of the
tartan, leading researchers to believe it predates the 1750s.
Experts
have said the tartan was more than likely worn as an "outdoor working
garment" and would not have been worn by royalty.
The STA
said the textile was created somewhere between 1500 and 1655, but the period of
1500 to 1600 was most probable.
This makes
it the oldest known piece of true tartan discovered in Scotland.
Four
initial colours of green, brown and possibly red and yellow were identified in
the tartan
Peter
MacDonald, head of research and collections at the STA, said the testing
process took nearly six months but that the organisation was "thrilled
with the results".
"In
Scotland, surviving examples of old textiles are rare as the soil is not
conducive to their survival," he added.
"The
piece was buried in peat, meaning it had no exposure to air and it was
therefore preserved."
He said
that because the tartan contains several colours, with multiple stripes, it
corresponds to what would be considered a true tartan.
Mr
MacDonald said: "Although we can theorise about the Glen Affric tartan,
it's important that we don't construct history around it.
"Although
Clan Chisholm controlled that area, we cannot attribute the tartan to them as
we don't know who owned it."
Historical significance
He also
said that the potential presence of red, a colour that Gaels consider a status
symbol, is interesting because the cloth had a rustic background.
"This
piece is not something you would associate with a king or someone of high
status, it is more likely to be an outdoor working garment," he added.
John
McLeish, chair of the STA, said the tartan's "historical significance"
likely dates to the reigns of King James V, Mary Queen of Scots or King James
VI/I - between 1513 and 1625.
Due to
where it was found, the piece of fabric has been named the Glen Affric tartan
and measures about 55cm by 43cm (approximately 22 by 17 inches).
It will go
on public display at the V&A Dundee design museum from 1 April until 14
January next year.
James
Wylie, curator at V&A Dundee, said: "We knew the Scottish Tartans
Authority had a tremendous archive of material and we initially approached them
to ask if them if they knew of any examples of 'proto-tartans' that could be
loaned to the exhibition.
"I'm
delighted the exhibition has encouraged further exploration into this plaid
portion and very thankful for the Scottish Tartans Authority's backing and
support for uncovering such a historic find."
He added
that it was "immensely important" to be able to exhibit the Glen
Affric tartan and said he was sure visitors would appreciate seeing the textile
on public display for the first time.
What's On
Story of tartan through the centuries to unfold in
V&A Dundee exhibition
It has been woven into Scottish culture and identity
for centuries.
By Brian Ferguson
Published 6th Jul 2021, 23:59 BST
Now Scotland’s national museum of design is to stage
the biggest ever celebration of tartan and its global impact.
Billed as “a radical new look at one of the world’s
best-known fabrics,” the V&A Dundee show, which opens in April 2023, will
also “tell the story of Scotland through tartan.”
The five-month exhibition will explore how the
patterned fabric – famously embraced by designers like Vivienne Westwood and
Alexander McQueen, the author Walter Scott and musical acts like Rod Stewart
and the Bay City Rollers – has shaped, influenced and been reflected in
advertising, fashion, film and fine art.
However it will examine how tartan has been both
“adored and derided,” been seen as a symbol of being radical and rebellious for
centuries, and is still making its mark around the world in modern times.
The exhibition will also explore the “sometimes
painful” history of tartan, which was famously outlawed in Scotland following
the defeat of the Jacobites at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, but would go on
to become a symbol of the British Army and Empire, and embraced by the Royal
Family.
It first major in-house exhibition, which has been
announced four months after the attraction secured national status and an extra
£6 million in funding from the Scottish Government, will be staged nearly five
years after the museum was unveiled.
V&A Dundee director Leonie Bell said: “Tartan is a
ubiquitous and universally recognised fabric of Scotland, which is loved and
loathed in equal measures, but lives on into new interpretation all the time.
It is seen as a cliche, but is also seen as a really interesting fabric for
contemporary designers.
“We're going to be telling its full design story for
the first time – we don’t think any other exhibition has done that before. We
will be looking at its history of attachment to tourism, tradition and the
clans, how it was used across the Empire, how it has been subverted by punks
and fashion designers, and how it has endured from quite simple beginnings to
be something that is recognised by everybody.
“We will be going back as far as we can. It’s an
ancient fabric that has not really changed very much but has continually been
adapted again and again by people in all kinds of different sectors.
“It’s really fascinating when you start to get under
the skin of it and you realise it’s something that we live with in Scotland all
the time but maybe don’t understand the true story of it and the potency it
still has – as a cloth that can be about being radical and rebellious, but also
about tradition.
"It’s really interesting that the Tartan Army can
own it at the same time as Vivienne Westood. It transcends ownership in a way
that no other fabric does.
"The exhibition will be deeply about Scotland and
our understanding of identity. But it will also be very much about V&A
Dundee opening up to the world again in a way that we’ll probably be a
tentative about this year and into 2022. It will tell the story of Scotland
through tartan, but it will have a real internationalism to it as well.”
EXHIBITION
My ancestor modelled our tartan when George IV
came to town
A show dedicated to tartan and its history opens next
month at the V&A Dundee. Ben Macintyre considers its social and political
significance and investigates his family’s relationship with the cloth
Saturday
March 25 2023, 12.01am GMT, The Times
Tartan is
tricky. It is the world’s most recognisable textile and pattern but also a
subject of intense and intractable dispute: a national dress and a symbol of
servitude, a fashion staple and a political statement, simultaneously
traditional and rebellious, uniquely Scottish but wholly international, a
fabric that unites and divides.
This
tangled legacy has been teased apart by the V&A Dundee in a new exhibition
devoted to tartan: the story behind the kilt.
Some insist
that tartans are the visual index of the ancient Scottish clan system. Others
argue, just as passionately, that the idea of clan tartans was a 19th-century
socio-political invention, and largely bogus. A generation ago, the kilt was
often seen as posh attire for sassenachs and foreign-born would-be Scots; today
it is practically de rigueur at Scotland rugby matches, the chosen uniform of
the Tartan Army football supporters’ club. In some Scottish nationalist circles
it is a reminder of colonial (English) oppression; for others, equally
nationalist, it represents independence itself.
Tartan was
banned in the 18th century as a symbol of Jacobite sympathies. Less than a
century later it came triumphantly back into vogue, partly thanks to one of my
Macintyre ancestors: the first, and last, fashion model in the family.
Tartan is
now ubiquitous and trans-national, inspiring architecture, graphic and product
design, photography, furniture, glass and ceramics, film and art. But above all
clothing: Chanel, Dior, Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood and Comme des
Garçons have all adopted and adapted tartan in various ways, along with contemporary
designers such as Grace Wales Bonner, Nicholas Daley and Olubiyi Thomas.
Tartan
wearers range from monarchs to the Sex Pistols, from the Doctor in Doctor Who
to the Bay City Rollers. Idi Amin, self-styled Last King of Scotland, went
through a tartan phase. Tartan has been deployed for political purposes by
Bonnie Prince Charlie, George IV, Sir Walter Scott, the Windsors, and on Nicola
Sturgeon’s Covid facemask. Hollywood dressed Mel Gibson in tartan as William
Wallace in Braveheart. A fragment of the MacBean tartan was carried aboard
Apollo 12 by the American astronaut Alan Bean.
I wear a
kilt to weddings, christenings and parties in Scotland. My children started
wearing kilts soon after they were born. The kilt-over-the-nappy look is
particularly endearing.
There are
three different Macintyre tartans: the dress tartan (a gaudy red); the ancient
tartan (which is no more ancient than any other invented tartan); and the
hunting tartan (in darker green, supposedly because prey was likely to spot the
brighter coloured kilt fabric and run away). My branch of the clan wears the
hunting tartan. I have no idea why.
Some clans
went a step further and invented a “mourning” tartan, using the existing
pattern of stripes and squares but in funereal black and white. Queen
Victoria’s long mourning for Prince Albert was largely responsible for this
craze.
Tartan is
produced with alternating bands of coloured thread woven at right angles, both
the warp and weft, producing a vast number of colour combinations and
symmetrical patterns. The identifying sequence of each individual tartan is
known as a “sett”. No one knows where tartan began, but since the earliest and
simplest form of weaving using two colours of wool produces a checked pattern,
it came from everywhere, and nowhere.
Even the
origin of the word is debated. It is probably derived from the French
tiretaine, and its Spanish equivalent tiritana, meaning a blend of linen and
wool. But it may equally derive from tartarin meaning “Tartar cloth”,
suggesting inspiration in central Asia, or the Gaelic word tarsainn, meaning
“across”.
“Tartan”
leggings were found on a 3,000-year-old mummy in the deserts of Xinjiang in
China; he didn’t buy them in Dundee. Today anyone can design their own sett,
and by applying to the Scottish Tartans Authority (and paying a fee) get it
registered in the record of officially approved tartans.
The
invading Romans appear to have encountered Highlanders wearing brightly
coloured cloth. In the 1690s Martin Martin of Skye wrote: “The plaid wore only
by the men is made of fine wool. It consists of divers colours: and there is a
great deal of ingenuity required in sorting colours so as to be agreeable to
the nicest fancy.”
The
earliest surviving Scottish example is the Falkirk Tartan, a fragment of cloth
dating from the 3rd century AD, used as the stopper for an earthenware vessel
containing a hoard of silver coins discovered in 1934. It is more checked than
tartan, two shades of natural wool, one light brown the other greenish, as warp
and weft.
Early
tartans did not denote clanship so much as geography, the colours reflecting
whatever natural dyes were available in the different regions of Scotland. The
early plaid, fhéilidh-Mor in Gaelic, was not a kilt as it would be recognised
today but a length of woven cloth, some six yards long and two wide, that was
wrapped around the body and belted at the waist, easily converted into a rustic
sleeping bag at night. Early depictions of tartan suggest these were worn in a
profusion of different patterns, some asymmetrical, often denoting fealty to a
particular overlord rather than kinship.
It was not
until the Act of Union of 1707, uniting Scotland and England and ensuring the
Hanoverian succession, that tartan turned political. Wearing the kilt became an
expression of Scottish nationalism, Jacobite sympathy and support for the
Stuart cause. The Jacobite rebellions of 1715, 1719 and 1745 were
metaphorically and often literally clad in plaid. The tartanised Bonnie Prince
Charlie still found on Scottish shortbread tins is wearing the clothes of
rebellion, a direct sartorial Stuart challenge to the Hanoverian dynasty.
After the
Jacobite defeat at Culloden, the Disarming Act of 1746 banned the wearing of
Highland dress, including tartan, as part of a systematic attempt to eradicate
remaining opposition to English rule. Some were exempt from the ban, notably
the Highland regiments of the British army raised by the Hanoverian crown.
Tartan went underground: Jacobite sympathisers still wore it, and secretly had
themselves painted wearing it. Confusingly, the fabric became a symbol of both
repression and rebellion, depending on the sympathies of the wearer.
But in
1822, less than 80 years after it was outlawed, tartan came back with a
flourish, with the help of Sir Walter Scott, George IV and, in a small but
significant way, my ancestor Peter Macintyre.
George IV’s
state visit to Edinburgh in 1822 marked the first time a Hanoverian monarch had
set foot in Scotland since the uprisings. A show of national unity was called
for, a demonstration that the Scots were snappy dressers and not mere savages;
the person chosen to stage-manage this display was Scott, bestselling novelist,
president of the Celtic Society, and the inventor of a romantic conception of
Scotland that persists today.
Aided by
his technical adviser, Colonel David Stewart of Garth, Scott put on a dazzling
tartan extravaganza. As Jonathan Faiers, professor of fashion thinking at
Southampton University and consultant to the exhibition, puts it in his book
Tartan, Scott “consciously used tartan as a primary visual component of a
series of spectacular tableaux that succeeded in expressing, via clothing, a
counterfeit connection between the Celtic Royal Houses of Scotland and the
English Hanoverian line”.
The chiefs
and their clansmen were encouraged to turn out in full Highland regalia, “all
plaided and plumed in their tartan array”. The king himself was upholstered in
what became known as Royal Stewart tartan. And the person deputed to greet His
Majesty formally on landing at Leith was the leader of the Drummond
Highlanders, Peter Macintyre.
For this
purpose Macintyre got himself kitted out head to foot in an outfit he had
surely never worn before: tartan kilt, jacket, socks, a bonnet with an eagle’s
feather, and armed to the teeth with sword, dirk, shield and pistol. Even his
sporran top and garter flashes are in matching, hi-vis scarlet. No subdued
hunting tartan for this Macintyre. You can see him in most paintings of the
event, a bright red figure in peacock plumage stationed immediately behind the
king.
Soon after
the event, Macintyre was painted in his finery by the portrait artist James
Ramsay, on a vast canvas some 15ft high and 6ft across: a poster boy for the
new tartan fashion.
Tartan
became trendy. By the mid-century, a vast assortment of tartans were being
created and artificially linked with Scottish clans, families, individuals or
institutions who were (or wished to be seen as) associated with a glorious and
colourful Scottish heritage.
The most
influential promoters of the supposed links between specific tartans and the
ancient clans were the Sobieski Stuart brothers, who arrived in Scotland in the
1830s and set up their own Jacobite court, claiming to be the grandsons of
Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender. In 1842 they published the
Vestiarium Scoticum based on an ancient manuscript and describing, in elaborate
detail, the historical antecedents of the various tartans dating back to 1571.
The
Sobieski Stuarts were fabulous frauds. They were Englishmen from Egham in
Surrey, the sons of a Royal Navy officer named Thomas Allen. Their book of
tartans was a strange mixture of make-believe, deliberate fakery and genuine
scholarship. They may not have been brothers but lovers, a pair of gay
Victorian fashionistas from Surrey who spotted in tartan a golden commercial
opportunity.
The claims
of the Sobieski Stuarts were comprehensively debunked during their lifetimes.
Even Walter Scott, while avid for all forms of an imaginary Scottish past,
pointed out that the “idea of distinguishing the clans by their tartans is but
a fashion of modern date”. With typical acidity, the historian Hugh
Trevor-Roper later described Vestiarium Scoticum as “shot through with pure
fantasy and bare faced forgery”.
But the
idea of clan-based tartans took permanent root. Demand for tartan exploded, and
ignited a tartan taxonomy craze among Victorians, with new chemical dyes,
romantic legends from Scottish history and a taste for social and familial
distinctions.
The German
Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha had a particularly acute case of
tartanophilia. Queen Victoria’s consort invented the Balmoral tartan, still
worn by the royal family, and decked out the castle in no fewer than three
(clashing) tartans: Royal Stewart and the green Hunting Stewart tartans for
carpets, and Dress Stewart for curtains and upholstery.
There is
still a certain sort of lip-curling Englishman, like Trevor-Roper, who cannot
resist pointing out that tartan kilt-wearing is an invented Victorian fad; but
that is to be blind to the power of myths, of which the Scots have many and the
English not enough. As Kirsty Hassard, the curator of the V&A exhibition,
points out: “The meaning of tartan is in the eye of the beholder.”
Peter
Macintyre rolled up his painting a few years after it was finished and departed
for Australia, never to return. I recently visited my cousins at their sheep
station in New South Wales, where the original portrait still hangs: a
long-forgotten 18th-century fashion plate to which every tartan-wearing punk
and tweed-clad royal owes a small debt.
Tartan is
at V&A Dundee from April 1 to January 14, 2024
Tartan: Revised and Updated - Textiles that Changed
the World
Professor Jonathan Faiers (author)
“An
outstanding and comprehensive contribution to the history of Tartan. -
Telegraph Featuring new insights and an additional chapter on masculinities,
this updated edition of Tartan revitalizes discussions about the fabric's
traditional, sentimental Highland origins and its deliberate subversion by
contemporary designers. Tartan's history has made it uniquely capable of
expressing both conformity and subversion, tradition and innovation. Through
positioning tartan within broader philosophical, political and cultural
contexts, from the tartan-clad Highland regiments and Queen Victoria's royal
endorsement, to the fabric's influence on Westwood and McQueen and a generation
of Japanese designers such as Watanabe and Takahashi, Jonathan Faiers traces
tartan's development from clanship to contemporary fashion and its enormous
domestic and global impact. Beautifully illustrated and weaving together a
story out of history, art, music, film and fashion, Tartan demonstrates that
this most traditional and radical fabric has become one of extraordinary
versatility and far-reaching appeal.”
Publisher:
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN:
9781350193772
Number of
pages: 360
Dimensions:
246 x 189 mm
Edition:
2nd Revised edition
MEDIA
REVIEWS
An
outstanding and comprehensive contribution to the history of Tartan. *
Telegraph *
Intriguing
study ... mixes the serious with the saucy. * International Herald Tribune *
A rare
treat; a readable, enjoyable academic text. * Selvedge *
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