At Edinburgh airport one almost expects to find the runways covered with the sequence of vertical and horizontal stripes called tartan, because the center of the city, with its tourist shops, has become the territory of tartanry, as a contemporary defined the fever for this fabric that broke out in British society in the second decade of the 19th century and continues: tartan dresses for people, for pets, tartan rugs, tartan suitcases, tartan stuffed animals, tartan Christmas decorations… The identity of Scotland has been dressed, for some, and disguised, for others, in this fabric of the Highlands and now planetary.
The colored squares are intertwined with contradictions, legends and fake traditions, as explained in a vast exhibition at the Victoria and Albert headquarters in Dundee, just over a hundred kilometers from Edinburgh. No, the different colors of the tartan do not come from clans, that is a modern invention that is more marketing than actual history.
No, the protagonists of Braveheart could never wear the kilt or kilt, because it did not become popular until centuries later; Yes, tartan is a rebellious fabric, at least it has been at different times, most recently when it was adopted by punk in the 1970s and the designer Vivienne Westwood called it a “comb to the establishment”, highlighting the political power it has had in certain eras. Tartan, she said, “is always worn to be seen and heard: it’s a loud print.”
So, if it’s so revolutionary, how come Queen Victoria was so into tartan that she had the walls of her Scottish residence in Balmoral decorated with it? History will have to be resorted to/recovered to understand Scotland’s complex and changing relationship with the fabric that has become its visual identity.
Tartan is defined as a grid structure, achieved by colored threads woven into crisscrossed vertical and horizontal stripes. A fabric made from the wool of sheep that graze in the Scottish Highlands as indolently now as their ancestors. It was in those lands that it became popular for its resistance among a Gaelic-speaking clan society. AND
also another resistance, against the English. To travel through the Highlands is to find the memory of the battles between the Scots and the English until the final one at Culloden in 1746, which changed the history of Scotland, and of the tartan. Skirmishes had occurred since the Act of Union of England and Scotland in 1707, but they broke out when the Highlands supported the candidate Carlos Eduardo, of the House of Stuarts, Catholic and of Scottish origin, against the House of Hanover, the future George II.
The Stuart pretender adopted the tartan, which from then on became a political fabric, a symbol of Scottish nationalism and opposition to the Union. The defeat of the Stuart brought a ban on traditional Highland dress, which included the feileadh mor (forerunner of the kilt) and trews (tartan trousers); thus, the lower classes were forced to adopt the clothing of the Lowlands, similar to that of the continent. When the ban was lifted, the almost sacred link of those lands with the tartan had been broken.
A sign of its domestication is that in 1822, on a visit to Edinburgh, King George IV wore a kilt. The tartanry was unleashed, the kitsch and omnipresent tartan, which the essayist (and independentista) Tom Nairn has accused of “drowning Scottish culture”. There was another parallel process: George IV wore the tartan recommended by the writer Sir Walter Scott. We are in the midst of romanticism, the period of national constructions, of “in many cases inventing historical traditions for peoples and places,” says the historian and curator of the exhibition, Jonathan Faiers.
A fertile ground for two merchants, English to be exact, establish the (false) relationship of the clans with the tartan around 1840. The Sobieski Stuart brothers claimed to be descendants of the defeated Stuart (Stuart) and, anticipating modernity, mixed real and other self-made elements to associate each print with a clan, giving rise to a flourishing industry thanks to the nostalgia of the descendants of Scots all over the world, thus linking themselves to their land. No, sorry, but if all the MacDonalds or Campbells wore patterns in blue, black and green, it is because in the lands where they lived, in the west, these were the most abundant dyes. From there to turn them into a business’ own media.
In 1995, punk had passed away, but the Sex Pistols with their tartan pants had remained in the collective imagination. Designer Alexander McQueen presented the Highland Rape show, with some of the tartan-clad models staggering down a heather catwalk to symbolize the destruction of Scottish culture after Culloden. The tartan was once again political, but also the means to launch the couturier to fame, reaffirming its quality as a contradictory fabric.
This report has been made with the texts of the exhibition catalogue, by Jonathan Faiers.
Tartan Commissioner J. Faiers. Victoria and Albert museum. Dundee. www.vam.ac.uk/Dundee. Until January 24
