Rebels and romantics with a cause

The traditional costume of the Scottish clans and later synonymous with punk, tartan has had an extraordinary journey. Mary Miers explores the world's most famous pattern

- Mary Miers

IF you’d been strolling along the River Beauly in Inverness-shire on a Sunday in the 1840s, you might have witnessed a barge flying a royal standard, conveying two kilted gentlemen and their piper to Mass at Eskadale. They were the sons of an English naval officer, who had changed their name to Sobieski Stuart, converted to the old faith and were living as princes on Lord Lovat’s river isle of Eilean Aigas. Here, they had created a make-believe court, where they entertained in Gothic splendour, filling their twin-throned hall with Jacobite memorabilia, weapons, banners, hunting trophies, deerhounds and tartan. They were, they claimed, the grandsons of Charles Edward Stuart and they swept Victorian society along with the fantasy. Visiting in 1842, Pugin was entranced by the picturesque romance and imagined himself fighting for the handsome brothers: ‘There is a prophecy in the highlands that the stewarts are yet to be restored what a grand thing a Gothic king & a catholic would be.’

The Sobieski Stuarts encapsulate many of the colourful and clashing threads that are woven into the very fabric of tartan. Royalty, rebellion, antiquity, romance, fantasy and theatre: tartan carries a coded message for wearers of every stripe. In the 1970s, Vivienne Westwood made it synonymous with punk, selling tartan bondage wear from her Seditionaries boutique. She was not the first to embrace tartan as a cloth of dissent—or to create a new one. Taking her designs onto the catwalk in the 1990s, the grande dame of British fashion ironically mixed a range of historic references in finely tailored taffeta corsetry, pastiche military uniforms and ‘deconstructed kilts,’ parading traditional Royal and Dress Stewart, McBrick (inspired by London) and her own 1993-registered Westwood MacAndreas tartan.